Tales From Southern Indiana

To ask someone you liked to go out on a date might require you to engage in witty repartee, a skill in short supply in Southern Indiana. However, if you were of Welsh descent, all you needed was a pocketknife and the ability to whittle a spoon. This episode is about spooning, a gentle activity back in the day, that could nevertheless get folks in trouble.

Advice for new parents, babies switched at birth, dangers of jazz music and organized religion, and another visitation from the hair rat, all part of en episode devoted to babies and the brave folks who have then.

We didn't have alligators to chase us in Southern Indiana, but we did have snakes, who preferred to be let alone but sometimes had to be emphatic about it. Here's a few snake encounters, plus an early example of the old saying, spare the tooth and spoil the child.

What a tipsy cat will lead you to, the benefits of holding a live skunk in each hand to resist arrest, and an Octogenarian's tips on a long, if inebriated, life.

If being a Mother in Law was a career choice, it would come with hazard pay. Listen and you'll understand. Finally, some advice for travelers who need to spit.

Back in the day in Southern Indiana, if you stabbed someone a few times, stole their car, or killed them in a "sudden heat", well that was just considered misbehaving, and if you stayed on the straight and narrow thereafter, you'd stay out of the Big House and be forgiven. But what about being squished to death by an elephant's butt?

We were pretty low key folks in small town Indiana, because getting irritated could get you arrested and even killed. Join our latest adventures in the Hoosier Hill Country back in the day.

And other stories of modest and kind-hearted thievery back in the day in Southern Indiana, when even missing wash from the clothesline could come back with a bonus.

In the days before videos, we had to rely on the sketchy accounts of kicking mishaps from the local papers to learn what happens when pigs fly. Also a new old word, "charivari".

Life could be risky in the small towns in Southern Indiana where I grew up in the 1960's, but going back in time, based on the old newspaper articles, things weren't much safer in the old days. From shooting at hats to teaching butchers how to kill cattle, there were lots of unusual ways folks met their demise back in the days.