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Ed McClanahan 369 Ed McClanahan from The Natural Man To secure his fame for all time, Ed McClanahan probably didn’t need to write any other books after his first. The Natural Man (1983) is the sort of story that most writers dream about: a short novel that will surely be around when we, and most of the books of our times, will have turned to dust. It’s the natural, honest story of a boy named Harry Eastep trying to grow up in the fictional town of Needmore, in the fictional county of Burdock, a boy very like McClanahan himself, who was born somewhere up there in northern Kentucky at Brooksville in Bracken County—such a natural, honest story that you would swear it was autobiographical . Harry longs for excitement and adventure that he is sure lies beyond the horizon. He never expects that it will come in the shape of an iconoclastic young stranger named Monk. Thirteen years later McClanahan wrote another work of fiction, and he called it A Congress of Wonders (1996), which it is. Between those two books, he wrote a work of nonfiction called Famous People I Have Known (1985), which is something of a misnomer because most of the people therein are unfamous—but they are much more interesting than the famous ones. McClanahan completed a master’s degree at the University of Kentucky in 1958 and has taught writing at Oregon State, Stanford, Montana, and Kentucky. h In the days of his youth, in the summertime, when school didn’t interfere, Harry Eastep liked to spend a certain portion of his afternoons hanging around Marvin Conklin’s drugstore, to catch the arrival of the Cincinnati–Lexington Greyhound. It wasn’t that he was meeting anyone or going anywhere— scarcely anyone who needed meeting ever came to Needmore, and Harry scarcely ever went away. But the drugstore was the drop station for Needmore’s daily supply of the Cincinnati Morning Enquirer, so the bus, which delivered the paper to the provinces, always stopped there. Nor was Harry more than most boys interested in the Enquirer’s already half-stale accounts of the affairs of whatever great world it was that lay beyond the narrow confines of Burdock County. The fact is, it was the bus driver himself that Harry came to see. There were always two or three loafers sitting around in Conklin’s, drinking fountain Cokes, when the bus roared up and stopped in the middle of the street between the drugstore and the Burdock County courthouse across 369 370 The Kentucky Anthology the way. As if to inform the local yokels that he didn’t intend to stay any longer than he damn well had to, the driver never bothered to cut off his engine; the bus sat there throbbing and muttering in flatulent impatience while the driver alighted through the fold-back door and came striding smartly across the street, a smallish banty rooster of a fellow, slim-hipped and natty in his tailored uniform, his cap cocked low and rakish on his brow, his nifty little Mandrake the Magician mustache already twitching in pleasurable anticipation , the thick log of newspapers balanced one-handed on his epauletted shoulder. Then, flinging open Marvin Conklin’s screen door, he’d cry, in perfect rubbernecker tour-guide lookit-the-funny-natives-folks singsong, complete with an Ohio accent, “State of Kentucky, County of Burdock, City of Needmore, population 6 7 /8 when they’re all at home! Where prosperity is a-a-always just around the corner! Heads up, hayseeds!” With that, he’d heave the roll of papers end over end into the store, where it landed at the feet of the foremost loafer with a dreadful thud that shook the Coke glasses and patent-medicine bottles on the shelves; and the bus driver’s scornful, mustachioed grin would hang there in the doorway till the screen door clapped shut after him and dispelled it. Moments later, as the Greyhound thundered off in a fulsome cloud of blue exhaust, the dumb-struck loafers would turn at last to one another, grousing bitterly about that high-handed little wisenheimer’s latest effrontery. “Why, that smart-aleck snot!” they’d remind each other. “That cocky little s’rimp! That wise guy, that twerp, that . . .” But to young Harry Eastep, lurking about the magazine rack in the drugstore’s dimly lighted recesses, the bus driver was the hero, not the villain, of this brief yet...

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