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FOLKLORE SOCIETY MEMORIES by Archie P. McDonald  My dilemma is that I have never known precisely what folklore is. I have attended a bunch of meetings of the Texas Folklore Society, and its program chairs have been kind enough to allow me to make presentations on a number of occasions. Even the American Folklore Society let me come to Philadelphia to talk about the contemporary Citizens Band radio phenomenon and to Los Angeles to speak on the “B” Western movie heroes of my youth. But I was never sure any of it was actually folklore, and my association with F. E. Abernethy only exacerbated my dilemma. The reason for that is that in a bitter dispute over the acting ability of my all-time favorite movie hero John Wayne, Ab told me that my taste was all in my mouth. So maybe if I don’t have good taste in movie heroes, I don’t know what folklore is, either. That’s all right, though, because I do know something about the folk. I grew up in Beaumont, Texas, the child of refugees who fled southwest Louisiana’s Depression-era poverty for the glittering, bigcity prospects of Beaumont, that Baghdad of the Neches, with its oil fields, refineries, chemical plants, Crockett Street attractions, and nouveau riche pretence. In those days before television, with only Mr. Roosevelt on the radio to tell us that everything would come out alright in the end—of the Depression, then World War II—the grown folk visited of an evening and we little folk listened to their stories and tall tales and learned about life in their rural world before four-cent cotton, possum stew, and Pearl Harbor. The Opportunity of Education let me wiggle out of a life much like these grown folk in those same oil fields and refineries, a life that I hope would have been industrious and fruitful and noble anyway, in exchange for one in academe that has been easier on the muscles and sweat, and, on the whole, still gratifying. And one of its principal consequences and rewards has been knowing Frances Edward Abernethy. 331 Our paths crossed in Beaumont, probably in 1957 or 1958, my last year as an undergraduate at Lamar College and I reckon Ab’s second year there as a teacher of English. I didn’t take his class, but I saw him in the halls of the Administration Building, home to the English and history departments, and where, as was apparent from subsequent conversations, we both fell in love with one of the best actresses we ever knew, Camille Alexander, forever our Ado Annie from Oklahoma. This infatuation did not interfere with Ab’s marriage to Hazel or mine to Judy, two tolerant helpmates who understood , in their Lorena Bobbitt fashion, that looking was okay, but touching forbidden. Then I went away to the Rice Institute and after that to LSU, where Ab had been before me, and ended up with a brand new Ph.D. and an assistant professorship at Stephen F. Austin State College in Nacogdoches in the fall of 1964. Ab showed up the following year, coming home. Nacogdoches and SFA became a home for us, too—anyway we’ve been here nearly half a century—but it was always home for Ab, even though he never saw the place until Talbot Abernethy moved his family there the summer before Ab’s senior year in high school. It wasn’t love at first sight on either part—for Ab or Nacogdoches—but the two grew on each other and learned to love each other to the point that the town’s Chamber of Commerce named him their Citizen of the Year in 2008, despite his curmudgeonly letters to the editor of The Daily Sentinel , the town’s newspaper. The City Commission even named a trail for him beside Lanana Creek that he required me, Carol Schoenwolf, John Anderson, and sometimes Fred Rodewald (and many more) to help him build. That was before Ab convinced the City of Nacogdoches to help him maintain his trail. Anyway, by 1971, we both had sinecures at SFA, he to serve the Texas Folkore Society as secretary-editor of its annual publication and me to work for the East Texas Historical Association as editor of its Journal and director of its affairs: same jobs, different titles. Over the years many people came to confuse us, despite the great and obvious difference in our ages, especially with...

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