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Kathie Farnell’s wry, laconic memoir Duck and Cover: A Nuclear Family, available from The University of South Carolina Press, is told from her perspective as a smart-mouthed, unreasonably optimistic white girl growing up
in Cloverdale, a genteel and neatly landscaped neighborhood of Montgomery, Alabama, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. During those decades Montgomery's social order was slowly—very slowly—changing. The bus boycott was over if not forgotten, Normandale Shopping Center had a display
of the latest fallout shelters, and integration was on the horizon, though most people still thought the water in the white and colored drinking fountains came from separate tanks.
Farnell’s household, more like the Addams family than the Cleavers of Leave it to Beaver, included socially ambitious parents (both lawyers), two younger brothers, a live-in grandmother, and Libby, the disgruntled family maid. |
Her father was a one-armed rageaholic given to strange business deals such as the one that left the family unintentionally owning a bakery. Mama, the quintessential attorney, could strike a jury but was hopeless at making Jell-O. Granny, a curmudgeon who kept a chamber pot under her bed, was always at odds with Libby, who had been in a bad mood since the bus boycott began.
Farnell deftly recounts tales of aluminum Christmas trees, the Hula-Hoop craze, road trips in the family’s un-air-conditioned black Bel Air, show-and-tell involving a human skeleton, belatedly learning to swear, and even the pet chicken she didn’t know she had. Her well-crafted prose reveals quirky and compelling characters in stories that don’t ignore the dark side of the Silent Fifties.
The sequel, Tie Dyed: Avoiding Aquarius, in which Kathie discovers to her consternation that the Moon is in the Seventh House, is due out in Fall, 2021.
Kathie was featured at the Southern Festival of Books in October, 2017. You can see a clip of the panel she appeared on BookTV here.
To order a copy of Duck and Cover, contact Kathie at farnell@centurytel.net
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