KS Day 5 - Motorcycles, Modern Art, and Milestones
Today started with a nice cup o’ joe from a cute independent cafe called JItters Coffeehouse in Concordia. The place had a real cozy almost speakeasy-esque vibe, and the coffee was good and strong to get me through the first chunk of the day.
I ended up stopping about an hour away in the slightly less well known Manhattan, KS (affectionately called the Little Apple) for some brunch at a highly recommended spot called The Chef Cafe. The Chef was a breakfast staple in Manhattan from 1946 until the original owners wanted to close up shop in 1986. In 2008, three enterprising friends reopened the Chef to much acclaim seeing an opportunity to fill a gab in the town for a quality breakfast diner while also celebrating a beloved piece of local history. I ordered the Florentine Frittatta which featured spinach, mushrooms, Swiss and Parmesan cheese baked with three eggs and topped with creamy cheese sauce and green onions, and a heaping helping of home fries. Something with so many vegetables in it shouldn’t be that decadent, and yet it was light, creamy, and a hell of a brunch.
After brunchin’, I made my way to the state capital, Topeka, where obviously my first stop was a museum in the back of a historic Harley-Davidson Store dedicated to Evel Knievel. I honestly didn’t know much about Evel other than that he was a motorcycle stuntman, but I thought it would be too silly not to see. It was indeed very silly, but what I wasn’t expecting to take away from the museum was a greater understanding of the dueling values and contradictions that make up the American Dream. Because love him or hate him, I feel like Evel Knievel could only have existed in America, single-handedly embodying everything great and terrible about what the nation offers in one goofy white jump suit. He was a daredevil but also a con-man, a hard worker who didn’t want to work a day in his life, self-made and self-destructive, able to soar and so frequent to crash. Considering I still don’t really care about the man himself, it’s a testament to the curation and story-telling of the museum that I did really walk away thinking that was more thought-provoking than it had any right to be.
The first question you might have about the Evel Knievel museum is why is this here? While he almost certainly passed through at some point, Evel has no great association with Topeka. In fact the most likely reason the museum ended up there is really just because that’s where the founders where, and they had one of the largest collections of Evel Knievel memorabilia which is a very specific collection to have. The more tenuous albeit more fun connection that the museum posits though, is that Topeka is where Joie Chitwood, the race-car driver/motorcycle stuntman who inspired a young Evel, got his start. A small display about Chitwood opens the museum, and it’s a nice nod to the legacy of professional daredevils before Knievel even if it’s a little bit crazy that multiple people throughout history would think “That’s the career for me!” Comedy’s a pretty silly career move, but at least there’s almost never a chance I’ll explode.
From there the museum began in earnest with displays about the early life of Bobby Knievel, pre-stage name. He grew up in Butte, MT, and basically from the moment he born he was a live wire destined for mischief. He was always getting into trouble, but after his fateful visit to the Joie Chitwood Thrill Show that mischievous spirit now had an objective. As a teen, he tried to be a daredevil on his bicycle stealing his grandparents’ garage doors to make ramps, accidentally burning them when he tried to jump through a homemade ring of fire, and then returning them as if nothing had happened. On another outing, he tried to jump over a box of snakes, hit the box on the landing, and let loose dozens of snakes into a terrified crowd. His showmanships even then was always a lot grander than his actual abilities, especially when it came to those landings. He was not without talent, becoming a celebrated local athlete and thriving in the military, but he was basically allergic to working for other people and had no impulse control so whenever the opportunity to pull off a scam for easy money came he always seized it. He was really an incorrigible fuck-up for most of his early adulthood. He lost his first real job in a copper mine because he tried to do a wheelie with an earth mover, crashed into a power line, and lost the whole city electricity for hours. He got his nickname Evil from police officers after being locked up for drunk driving his motorcycle, but when he became famous he changed the spelling to Evel so people wouldn’t think he was such a bad guy which is a wonderful logical thread to try to untangle. His evel ways did not let up any once he became a husband and father, and his pre-daredevil careers are basically a laundry list of different cons. First, he worked selling security to local merchants around Butte, where conveniently any business that didn’t buy from him started to get broken into. Next, he had a stint playing for a minor league hockey team. He managed to convince the Czechoslovakian Olympic Men’s Hockey team to play them in a warm up game for 1960 Winter Olympics, but he got ejected from the game for bad behavior and when the team went back to their dressing room all the money from the box office was missing. The US Olympic Committee had to pay the Czechs back out of pocket to avoid an international incident. Rather than lying low after almost heating up the cold war, Evel became a guide for hunters, securing a reputation for always leading them to big kills until people found out that this was because he was taking them wildlife preserves in Yellowstone Park and that park rangers look down upon poaching. Slapped on the wrist by the parks department, Knievel went into the insurance game becoming very successful, possibly because he cornered the market on selling policies to institutionalized mental patients, but he quit after the company refused to make him Vice-President. He was there for less than 6 months. Each story was so zany, I couldn’t believe they just kept coming like that all before he even became a celebrity. On a positive spin, it’s a testament to the value of perseverance that Evel never gave up after all these (largely self-inflicted) set backs, but on a less positive note it’s a real testament to just how much a confident white guy is allowed to screw up time after time and still be given a chance when many other people would not be.
Evel’s fame as a daredevil began simply as a publicity stunt to help sell motorcycles for the Honda Dealership he was managing. The success of that show coupled with the fact that it provided a good outlet for his showboating tendencies stoked Evel’s imagination and he organized a group of other stunt performers and put together a whole revue. Evel Knievel and His Motorcycle Daredevils debuted at the National Date Festival in Indio, CA in 1966. The show was a smash success and the got more and more offers. Their second show got canceled due to rain, and then during their third ever show together Evel tried a never before done stunt, hit himself in the crotch with his motorcycle, flew 15 feet in the air, and ended up in the hospital causing that iteration of his show to disband and really setting the tone for his entire career. Each thrilling success followed by a debilitating crash. When I first heard about Evel, I thought in order to be a famous stuntman he would have had to land almost all of his stunts, and boy was I wrong about that. If he didn’t crash more than he landed, he was definitely hovering right around 50% of the time. That blew me away, because it was all so crazy preventable. If I broke all my bones half of the times I went on stage, I might reconsider doing comedy. Most of the time it was also because the runway was too short which seems like something that someone could have figured out before the show began. I guess there’s something brave about facing death in the face, but there was also more than a healthy dose of plum stupidity and arrogance mixed in. It’s telling then that he almost became more famous because he might crash more than in spite of it, like he was tapping into some kind of deep down bread and circuses urge in the public’s psyche for the equal potential of glory or blood. Maybe he knew he was always going to be a pop-cultural blip, but damn Evel did make the most of it, and it is fascinating to watch his agonizing climb to the top through photos, videos, and memorabilia from different notable jumps (with a list of which bones broke if it was a crash). My personal favorite stunt was when he jumped over the fountain at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, less because of the jump itself (which was a crash) but more because Evel convinced the casino to go through with it by calling the CEO and pretending to be multiple different lawyers and agents, from ABC, Sport’s Illustrated, and the fully made up Evel Knievel Enterprises. All those years of running little cons finally paid off.
If you were a motorcycle junkie, the museum would be heaven for you because they had bikes from every stage of Evel’s career. I was more amused by the accompanying jumpsuits which he modeled after those worn by Elvis Presley in an attempt to subconsciously tap into the King’s showmanship, appeal, and Americana. And even if, like me, you know nothing about motorcycles, it’s still cool to watch Evel’s bikes get more customized the more famous he gets, because he needed them to be super light weight but still powerful in order to maximize his chances of landing jumps. Despite all the effort to make the bike perfectly adapted, he still couldn’t be bothered to actually measure the runways and ramps though (presumably because physics is for nerds) which is just one more wild contradiction wrapped up in the Evel Knievel story.
The physical toll of Evel’s crashes was pretty powerfully illustrated with seats and parachutes (naturally with a corporate beer sponsorship written over it) from bikes that didn’t survive their moments in the limelight.
Throughout the exhibits there were quotes from Evel himself, most of which were amusingly arrogant (i.e. "Why I'm the only [daredevil] that made a couple million dollars at it is a good question. I know the answer, I've spent more money on motorcycles, equipment, diamond, women and booze then all of them have ever made”) but this one stopped me in my tracks for its chilling self-awareness regarding the more macabre aspects of his chosen profession. It’s pretty true and if he had died on national television, wouldn’t everyone watching be a little complicit?
On a lighter note, the next exhibit was one of the gem’s of the museum collection, the 24 ft long Mack Truck Evel lived in while he was on the road affectionately referred to as Big Red:
Big Red is a gloriously huge and shiny monument to 70s kitsch and excess, complete with wood paneling, shag carpets, American flag comforters, a full bar, and lots of photos and art celebrating Evel which could have been the museum’s choice but knowing his ego it might have actually been a part of the original decor. About Big Red, Evel had the wonderfully gross comment “it gets the attention of as many pretty girls as my Maserati and my Cadillac, and I can get ten times as many in there.” He was 100% married when he said that openly during a magazine interview. Yuck.
In a tonal shift from Evel bragging about how many girls he can fit in his big rig, the next section was a sweet collection of fan art, photos, and letters from kids that idolized Evel during his heyday. He couldn’t have been further from being the ideal role model (though he did advocate for wearing bike helmets and not doing drugs, despite only doing half of those things), but I guess if you saw him fly through the air or even crash and get back up it must have been pretty astonishing or even inspiring to a kid seeing it for the first time. That being said, I did get a big kick out of the sweetest quote about Evel also being from Evel.
Next up there was a big poster for Viva Knievel, Evel’s giddily stupid big screen debut that eschews reality to instead turn him into a sort of superhero who delivers toys to orphans and thwarts international drug smugglers with his best friend played by Gene Kelly. It seems like an honestly pretty fun movie, if only for how hilarious it must be to see Gene Kelly pretend to care about motorcycle stunts. The funniest things about the production of the movie to me, is that there was already another fictional movie about Evel’s life starring George Hamilton, but he didn’t want someone else getting all the credit for playing him so even though he had approved of the earlier movie at the time, his ego wouldn’t let it go and he had to go out and do one of his own. Ironically, despite wanting to get all the credit, the film studio’s insurance wouldn’t allow him to do his own stunts so they hired a different stunt guy to do all of movie-Evel’s stunts and then tried to keep it quiet from the press so nobody would catch on. It’s so much 70’s excess, but I’ll hand it to them the poster is a pretty snazzy piece of pop art that would look great on the side of a van.
Next up was a big wall of newspaper articles about Evel capturing his descent from superstardom and revealing a different side of him than he wanted his public persona to be. Here was all the sleaze, drugs, booze, divorces, and the time he assaulted a former show promoter with an aluminum baseball bat and had to serve six months in jail. This last one cost him all of his toy deals and corporate endorsements, and without that money coming in and getting too old to jump, he ended up declaring bankruptcy and falling into the lifestyle of a washed up celebrity, driving around the country doing progressively lamer press engagements and selling art he lied about making himself and occasionally popping back into relevance if he did something worthy of the tabloids. It’s a sad end to his life, but one he may have been able to avoid if he’d kept his temper in check and bought into his own myth a little bit less.
Last but not least on this floor was a cool bit of memorabilia that also gives you some insight into what Evel thought of himself: signed boxing gloves given to Evel from none other than Muhammed Ali:
The stairway up to the next floor of exhibits made use of the negative space in the stairwell for some dramatic highflying models:
The first exhibit on this floor was dedicated to Evel’s more flamboyant sartorial choices with a fine collection of Daredevil-Elvis jumpsuits, truly insane 70s leisure-ware, and glittering jewelry. It was a very fun and silly time capsule of another era.
And it wouldn’t be complete without his current uniform:
Next was a big display of the late 70s explosion of Evel merchandise. He was one of the first celebrities to license his image to an action figure and toy line, and it proved to be a hugely profitable venture until he went and publicly beat up a guy with an aluminum bat. Somehow that put some parents of their kids playing with him. On the plus side, Evel Knievel Pinball looks sick.
Next up was one of the museum’s last real big-ticket items: The Skycycle X-2, a steam-powered rocket bike Evel used to attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon when the US wouldn’t give him the rights to try to jump the Grand Canyon.. The first skycycle was originally a motorcycle with propane tanks attached to it and fake wings glued to the sides. Luckily, an aerospace engineer named Doug Malewicki took one look at the bike and said “There is no science involved in this” and “If he rides this, he will die.” Evel initially didn’t want to hear this, but he eventually let Malewicki and another engineer named Robert Traux make him something that was at least slightly less of a death trap.
Despite having a really cool improved skycycle, the jump was basically an utter disaster. Three days before the event, fans swarmed what little campground there was at the state park and turned it into a debaucherous party fueled by sex, booze, and hard drugs. They had to hire local cowboys with shotguns to come in and work security, and in news reports they said that one member of the high school band Evel had hired to play the even (the tuba player naturally) was “aghast by the items he removed from his instrument”. These hiccups proved to be portents of the jump to come. By all accounts the Skycycle should have cleared the canyon, and in fact it actually did pass the opposite rim, but the parachute deployed too early, caught the wind, and dragged Evel back down into the Canyon from the precipice of success. He crashed just meters away from the Snake River, sustaining mild injuries, but he actually always suspected that he would have been worse off had it been a water landing because he wouldn’t have been able to get out of the harness in time to not drown. Really just an insane, Icarus level spectacle all around.
The rest of the top floor was dedicated to Evel’s many non-motorcycle vehicles, including a snazzy red Cadillac, an Indy 500 race car he sponsored, and some boats he never did end up using to jump a shark.
Last but not least, was a sweet tribute to Evel’s son Robbie, who despite a rocky relationship with his occasionally jealous and ill-tempered father, eventually made peace with the old man and decided to carry on his legacy performing as a stunt driver today and making sure the Knievel name lives on in the hearts of thrill seekers everywhere.
Leaving the museum, you exit through the Historic Harley Davidson dealership (located here in Topeka since 1949!) so if you didn’t get your fix seeing cool motorcycles from throughout the company’s history than they’ve got you covered. I’m sure a more motor-minded person would have been extra excited by this, but for me personally I thought it was fun to see but largely lost on me.
After embracing the more unusual daredevil arts, I decided to go a bit more classical with a trip to the Mulvane Art Museum. The Mulvane is affiliated with the Washburn College, and you would never guess by looking at the beautifully grand, native limestone exterior that the whole building had been nearly destroyed by a tornado in 1966 and rebuilt to its former glory. Growing up in the Northeast, it’s so easy to just think of tornados as something that happens in movies, but they’re a very real thing for some many people and their destructive power can leaves traces for years to come.
The museum lived up to it’s impressive exterior with some excellent artwork. The main special exhibition was a retrospective of an artist named David Quick. Quick grew up in Topeka, but he had a rambling heart, and in the early 70s he and a buddy set out in a Volkswagen Beetle to see the country. He lived a real Forest Gump-like life, hanging out with major counterculture figures like Abbie Hoffman in Berkeley, taking classes with the great surrealists Max Ernst and Man Ray in Philadelphia, and getting brought into Andy Warhol’s factory after a chance encounter with Lou Reed in New York. It’s a crazy life story, and his artworks is as chameleon like as he is, varying stylistically from, realist to Pop Art-y to cubist to Native American inspired to cartoony and everywhere in between. I was glad the exhibit was a retrospective because I’m sure in real time no two exhibitions of his work would have been the same and you would have only had a small snapshot of his artistic abilities.
While his styles varied greatly, one subject kept popping up time and again: a scrappy little cartoon cat. I’m not sure if it was based on a beloved pet or if he saw a bit of himself in the cat’s admirably grumpy disposition, but I did love getting to see a constant figure mutate across the bound’s of the artist’s imagination. The cat work also showed off his abilities across a range of media with a few different kinds of prints including an excellent woodcut sneaking in amongst the drawings and paintings.
To add to the personal detail of the exhibition, the artist playfully recreated a corner of his own living room complete with a comfy chair and a big mess:
My favorite piece naturally was a big painting of a devil cat with the title 1 Pizzed Bull Kateen, with the Bull Kateen presumably being the subject and “pizzed” being his temperament.
Up next was the museum’s permanent collection which primarily featured lovely pastoral Early American artwork with a focus on art and artists of the West. I like that things have a real sumptuous natural quality to them, but also a hint of foreboding which shows a nice mix of both the promise and the challenge of a new frontier.
The big standout here for me was this towering Albert Bierstadt painting of Landers Peak in the Rocky Mountains. The painting manages to capture so much depth and grandeur in such a relatively small space, it was just unbelievable.
The next exhibit was an interesting sort of Meta- Exhibit entitle Endangered Art. Here the museum highlighted pieces that were fading, cracking, or improperly framed to show the value and difficulties in preserving art for future generations. Seeing how delicate artwork really is and how much can possibly go wrong, it does give you more of an appreciation for how miraculous it is that all across the world there are so many places that have managed to save such great works from the past two thousand years. It’s easy to take museums for granted if you either go a lot or hardly ever, but I think they really do impressive, important work that deserves to be recognized.
A cool thing about being affiliated with a university is that the professors in the arts departments tend to be very good artists and sometimes they’ll show off their work in your museum. That’s exactly what happened in the next exhibit which showed off some really fascinating contemporary works from current faculty. My favorites included: gorgeous photographs from recently developed lakes in Iceland annotated by the artist Marguerite Perret to evoke the chemical forms of salt and water and to highlight that despite their beauty these lakes are a sign of dangerously changing climate; a powerful, moving installation by Benjamin Willis called Airplanes made up of dozens of paper airplanes folded by incarcerated people from around the country and containing their words and artwork and the weight of their imprisonment; a cheeky interactive installation by Azyz Sharafy featuring elaborate 3-D printed structures with carefully printned and painted designs on them challenging you to question what’s real, what’s artificial, and what you can actually interact with; an impressive multimedia collage by Wonjae Lee called Cmmunication 101 which features several panels of cute, childlike artwork interrupted by the presence of a robotic 3-D printed face that juts out of the piece and actually moves around to create an unnerving effect as a critique of the way technology can ruin simple pleasures; a neat installation by Danielle Head about American myth-making featuring a stark photograph of Dr. Pepper and Fried Chicken which Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly had with him in his sniper’s perch combined with an antique type writer, and carefully redacted documents about the Kennedy Assination to evoke a monumental moment in history with just dreamlike associations between disparate items; a humorous homage to Andy Warhol by J.K. Meyers ( I don’t think Campbell’s makes Plankton Soup); and an abstract, weirdly mesmerizing piece called Totem by Michael Hager which features dark woodcut prints layered over a reflective salvaged sheet of steel.
After giving their impressive faculty their due, the last exhibit of the museum was all student artwork featuring photographs and collected writings about important moments and places to the Civil Rights Movement. It was a lovely way to end my visit.
Leaving the museum, I was impressed by how dapper the University Mascot is. He’s inspired by Ichabod Washburn, the university founder, and their football team is affectionately called the Ichabods, which is wonderfully goofy. I was a little disappointed to find out that they’re not called the Fighting Fancy Men but I’ll take it.
My last major stop in Topeka was also probably the most important culturally speaking: Monroe Elementary School, one of the historically all-Black schools whose children and parents helped end school segregation in the landmark case Brown vs. Board of Education.
The elementary school has now become a dedicated National Historic Site and museum dedicated to honoring the legacy of this major civil rights milestone, the social value of education, and the power of righteous dissent. The museum was really cleverly curated with different exhibits housed in different classrooms connected by one long hallway with powerful photos on each side showing different conditions between white and black schools throughout history. 9 times out of 10 across the country Black schools were either underfunded, under-resourced, far away from the children’s homes, or outright unsafe if the building was too old or poorly built, and usually more than one of these conditions was true. Maintaining segregated schools of disparate quality was a pretty unsubtle way for certain ruling powers to fight against Black Mobility. Interestingly, the Black schools in Topeka were none of those things. They had really quality Black teachers and a number of them had campaigned to be on local school boards and won, so they were able to make sure the Black schools had all the most current books and curricula. Why was Topeka picked to take this fight to supreme court then instead of a more drastically underprivileged school? Future supreme court justice Thurgood Marshall wanted to end school segregation, held up under Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” ruling, once and for all, and he knew that as long as the school conditions were obviously unequal, racist lawmakers would slow the process down by fighting to just slowly keep adding things to Black schools while still keeping them separate. By fighting on behalf of Black schools that were otherwise equal to white schools, Marshall would be able to argue that no matter what the separation itself was psychologically harmful to at the very least Black Children (if not all children) and thus segregated schools could never be truly equal. If they could fundamentally override Plessy v. Ferguson’s central tenet here, then it would be a huge step toward not just school segregation but total desegregation. It was some brilliant legal strategizing which demonstrates how hard Black Civil Rights lawyers had to work, how careful they had to be, and how much resistance they faced just to gain the bare minimum of human decency.
Seeing actual “White” and “Colored” signs placed at the end of the hallway, it really looks like something out of dystopian science fiction as opposed to our recent past. People talk about these events like ancient history, but the court ruling happened in 1954 which is so recent in the grand scheme of things. Both my parents were alive, so living memory of a world with fully segregated schools in this country is still not even more than one generation out. Progress is not done progressing, but it’s still insane just how bad things were.
The main museum exhibition highlighted the journey to get Brown V. Board of Education to the supreme court including notable fights for educational rights beforehand and the long fight after the Supreme Court’s decision to actually get states to enforce it. These photos of the fights against the decision were the most haunting showing how much bravery it took to just do something like take a bus or go to school, things that are so commonplace now, knowing that there was legitimate danger of being insulted, spat on, or even shot or bombed just because of how you looked. The road to Civil Rights is still so long and winding, it’s important to always remember just how hard fought every baby step along the way has been.
While the photos of bombed out greyhound buses were horrifying, some photos, particularly of the youngest Civil Rights activists were incredibly heart-warming and cute.
Lastly, they had little photo tributes and biographies of all the original plaintiffs from the case. Each of these kids entered the national stage at such young age, which must have been so harrowing, but their lives and fights for equality did not end after their victory and many of them continued to be educators, activists, and advocates long into adulthood.
After all that museum-ing, I went to get some coffee at a place PT’s Coffee, which was a great college coffee shop with tasty brews, and fantastically strange art on the walls. I sat and did some writing for a while and I got to watch two strangers bond at a table over their recent divorces. The younger of the two guys had just gotten out of prison and deals with his anger through rapping, and the older guy asked to hear his rap, so the other one just started rapping in the coffee shop and when it was over the old guy said “Thank you for sharing”. it was incredible.
After coffee, I went to get some good local fast food at a retro diner called Bobo’s Drive In which came highly recommended. I got some tasty fried chicken and gravy, and had some fun conversations with my waitress while I waited. There were no frills, but everything was really great (and insanely cheap).
After dinner, I drove from Topeka to Lawrence, which is the largest college town in the state because of KU. I had a free Friday night, so I decided to get a ticket to see the (at the time) new movie Hereditary, because it was getting rave reviews and hailed as a new horror classic.
I had some time before the movie so I went to the Lawrence Beer Company for a pint. i got a baltic porter, and ended up really hitting it off with another bar patron in town from Australia for work. We hit it off talking about comedy and being from out of town, and he ended up buying my drinks. I didn’t want to leave him hanging, so I also tried a lighter copper ale called the Oz Maibock.
Having the second beer set me back a little time wise, but you gotta take pleasant human connection on the road wherever you can, but I still made the movie just a few minutes in. I didn’t think it was scary so much as emotionally devastating, but I loved it even if it made me cry. The direction and performances were fantastic , especially for a debut film. It may have kept me up a bit, but eventually made it to sleep.
Favorite Random Sightings: Me and Ma Bakery (folksy); The Moody Hues (punny); Baby Bedding co. (odd phrasing); Grandma's Trunk (not super enticing); a casino ad that said “Those crazy Beatles fans love our casino” (absolutely insane); an casual car on fire by the side of the road;; Large and Small Cats and All; an ad proclaiming “We will put steak on anything” (bold)
Regional Observations: The Oz references really are everywhere in the state.
Albums Listened To: Volume One Live: Europe by Vic Ruggiero (he might take up the biggest chunk of my iPod); Voodoo by D’Angelo (so funky); Vs. The Floating Eye of Death by the Aquabats! (a strange one but one of my personal favorites); The Wait by Zox (this one made me a little sleepy to be honest)
Joke of the Day: from the web:
Farmer Joe decided his injuries from the accident were serious enough to take the trucking company, responsible for the accident, to court. In court, the trucking company's fancy lawyer was questioning Farmer Joe. "Didn't you say, 'I'm fine', at the scene of the accident?" asked the lawyer.
Farmer Joe responded, "Well, I'll tell you what happened. I had just loaded my favorite mule Bessie into the..."
"I didn't ask for a long, drawn-out story," the lawyer interrupted, "just answer the question. Did you not say, at the scene of the accident, 'I'm fine'!"
Farmer Joe said, "Well, I had just got Bessie into the trailer and I was driving down the road..."
The lawyer interrupted again and said, "Judge, I am trying to establish the fact that, at the scene of the accident, this man told the HighwayPatrolman on the scene that he was just fine. Now, several weeks after the accident, he is trying to sue my client. I believe he is a fraud.Please tell him to simply answer the question."
By this time the Judge was fairly interested in Farmer Joe's answer and said to the lawyer, "I'd like to hear what he has to say about his favorite mule Bessie."
Joe thanked the Judge and proceeded, "Well, as I was saying, I had just loaded Bessie, my favorite mule, into the trailer and was driving her down the highway when this huge semi-truck and trailer ran the stop sign and smacked my truck right in the side."
He continued, "I was thrown into one ditch and Bessie was thrown into the other. I was hurting real bad and didn't want to move. However, I could hear ole Bessie moaning and groaning. I knew she was in terrible shape just by her groans.
Shortly after the accident a Highway Patrolman came on the scene. He could hear Bessie moaning and groaning so he went over to her. After he looked at her, he took out his gun and shot her between the eyes. Then, he came across the road with his gun in his hand, looked at me and said, 'Your mule was in such bad shape I had to shoot her. How are you feeling?'
Songs of the Day:
a wonderful transition from storytelling to singing
this is sick
so goofy