Three or four years after the War I played piano very very fast for a preacher named Baxter Sawyer. Later, in the 1950s, Time Magazine, I think, printed a picture of him prostrate before a nudist colony. I don't find him on Google. Did I make him up? Did I make up playing the piano at all?
Later: I got the first name wrong..
16 August 1954. But I can't get the photograph.
The Rev. Braxton Bragg Sawyer stepped into an Oklahoma City bookstore one day and came out with a crusade. Inside he had found a group of teen-agers giggling over nudist magazines. Baptist Sawyer was alarmed to see Satan in this unexpected quarter. "Nudists!" he said. "I had preached for 20 years without ever using the word nudist."
Dr. Sawyer hurried home to Fort Smith, Ark. (pop. 47,942) and went to work, getting bills drawn up to outlaw this "national menace," thundering against it over his radio program. To get his point across, he played a tape-recorded "confession of a 13-year-old nudist...
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,820020,00.html#ixzz23CVBeJ00
Later: I got the first name wrong..
16 August 1954. But I can't get the photograph.
The Rev. Braxton Bragg Sawyer stepped into an Oklahoma City bookstore one day and came out with a crusade. Inside he had found a group of teen-agers giggling over nudist magazines. Baptist Sawyer was alarmed to see Satan in this unexpected quarter. "Nudists!" he said. "I had preached for 20 years without ever using the word nudist."
Dr. Sawyer hurried home to Fort Smith, Ark. (pop. 47,942) and went to work, getting bills drawn up to outlaw this "national menace," thundering against it over his radio program. To get his point across, he played a tape-recorded "confession of a 13-year-old nudist...
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,820020,00.html#ixzz23CVBeJ00
He was my grandfather. He abandoned my father and grandmother in Arkadelphia, Alabama in 1935.
ReplyDeleteHis Ft. Smith family was his second family. He never told them about my dad or grandmother.
There was a minor reckoning in the early 60s. He was a jerk.
Michael Dennis Sawyer