Booktalking Colorado - Full Booktalk Record

Booktalking Colorado Full Record:

	Title:	A Long Way from Chicago: A Novel in Stories
	Author:	Peck, Richard
	Date Published:	1998
	Genre:	Humor
	Grade Level:	5 - 8
	Booktalker:	Marilyn Bunker
	Awards:	Newbery Honor Book

Booktalk:
Let me tell you about my Grandma Dowdel. She was a big woman and she had the kind of personality that filled a room, filled a house. In fact, Grandma Dowdel was so big that for years I hardly noticed the little town she lived in. My name is Joey and every summer my sister Mary Alice and I would board the train and go from Chicago to Grandma’s town in rural Illinois to visit. You’d think, coming from Chicago, we’d have seen it all. Well, not with Grandma Dowdel around, huh uh. Our first summer at Grandma’s Mary Alice and I strolled uptown to the Coffee Pot Café and there we caught the news that Shotgun Cheatham had died. That might not have been big news, but because of his unusual name, some big city newspaper man was said to be in town, snooping out a human interest story on this character, Shotgun Cheatham. Mary Alice and I carried that tale home to grandma. Her jaw clenched when she heard the big city newspaper reporters were in town, “They want to get the horse laugh on us, thinking we’re nothing but a bunch of hayseeds and no-count country people. We are, but what business is it of theirs?” Mary Alice asked who Shotgun Cheatham was anyway and Grandma said, “He was just an old reprobate who lived poor and died broke. Nobody went near him because he smelled like a polecat. He lived in a chicken coop.” Then I proceeded to tell Grandma the stories I’d heard about Shotgun at the Coffee Pot Café, how he’d ridden with Jesse James, had killed a man and been sent to the penitentiary. Grandma snorted and asked if the one doing the talking was humped over with buck teeth and cross-eyed. “That’d be Effie Wilcox. Her tongue’s attached in the middle and flaps at both ends. Never trust an ugly woman. She’s got a grudge against the world.” Course Grandma was no oil painting herself! “I’ll tell you how Shotgun got his name. He wasn’t but about 10 years old, and he wanted to go out and shoot quail with a bunch of older boys. He couldn’t hit a barn wall from the inside, and he had a sty in one eye. They were out there in a pasture without a quail in sight, but Shotgun got all excited being with the big boys. He squeezed off a round and killed a cow. Down she went. If he’d been aiming at her, she’d have died of old age eventually. That’s how he got the name, and it stuck to him like fly-paper. Then she noticed that we had company. It was the reporter, making inquiries about Shotgun Cheatham." “I’m going door to door ma’am. You know how you ladies love to talk. Bless your hearts, you’d all talk the hind leg off a mule.” We both stared, figuring Grandma’d swat him off the porch with her broom, but she invited him in. “Ma’am, I got a good story by the tail: ‘Last of the Old Owlhoot Gunslingers Goes to a Pauper’s Grave!’ That kind of angle. I wonder if you could flesh out the story some?” “Well, I got flesh to spare. Who’s been talking to you?” When he said it was mainly an elderly lady, she said, “Ugly as sin, calls herself Wilcox? She’s been in the state hospital for the insane just here lately, but as a reporter I guess you nosed that out.” Then Grandma proceeded with her version of how Shotgun got his name. “He got it in the Civil War. Grant gave it to him in fact. Shotgun didn’t hold with government issue firearms. He shot rebels with his old Remington pump-action that he’d used to kill quail back here at home.” Well, Mary Alice was pulling on my shirttail. We knew kids tell lies, but Grandma was no kid. And she made ol’ Shotgun look like a saint and left Effie Wilcox’s story in the dust. The reporter commented how Shotgun, Civil War hero, would go to a pauper’s grave. Grandma shot back, “They tell you that? You tell them Shotgun’s being buried from my house with full honors. He’ll spend his last night above ground in my front room, and you’re invited.” Well, that reporter wasn’t thinking of us as any hayseeds right now, no sir! Well Mary Alice and I looked at each other. What little we knew of grown-ups sure didn’t cover Grandma! And that’s how it happened that ol’ Shotgun Cheatham, smelling not exactly fresh, ended up in Grandma’s front room, with a veil of gauze hanging from the open lid and over the front of the coffin. People came and went to pay their last respects. Finally it was just the reporter, Effie Wilcox and us. It was the custom in those days to sit up all night with the corpse the night before burial. Effie was humming “Rock of Ages,” and we were all just beginning to nod off when something happened, something happened inside the coffin, that caused Grandma to fire her 12 guage Winchester, Effie Wilcox to fly out the door, and the reporter to throw himself out the window head first in… A Long Way From Chicago, by Richard Peck