Turn South at the Second Bridge

I loved this book. A lot. I grew up in a small town a lot like the ones the author describes in these pages, and I feel the deep nostalgia for the characters he introduces us to. They’re real.

This book was written in 1965, and some of the vocabulary hasn’t aged well. I read the second edition from 1980, and the author admits as much in a new introduction. I ordered the third edition while reading this to see if there was another introduction to go further down that path, but it was the same 1980 intro. I suspect he had changed even more by 2020 when he passed. He left a lot of pages behind for me to explore that. Even in 1965, the author seemed to tiptoe around some things I had expected to cringe at, both acknowledging them while not contributing to them.

He does well to paint a picture of the friends he made on his travels. He was after their stories, and he got them. Some harder to coax out than others. I recommend this book for anyone wanting a portrait of the time. I’ve already made a list of locations I want to visit to see what might remain almost 60 years later.

I love Leon Hale. I do. I really do. He knows people. In fact, he knows my people. That's who he interviews. People I wish I had met in my life. These are real people, too. Not namby-pamby folks, but people who have definite ideas about the world and people who live. Not stick figures, but real blood-and-guts people. This is a whole book of his interviews with such people.