The Last Radio Baby

In this lively memoir, award-winning novelist Raymond Andrews vividly recalls the pleasures and pains of growing up black in rural Georgia in 1930s and 1940s-a time when families gathered together around the radio to listen to mysteries and sports events, when couty fairs and revivals provided riotous relief from the daily routine of country living, and when double features cost a dime.

With incomparable humor, Andrews describes his preoccupations as a child, such as perfecting the art of running-board jumping, avoiding the local bully, Minnie Pearl Massey, and sneaking peeks into the county jail and the notorious "DeMo's" caf, famous for fried fish, fights, and "sin." Along the way, he also supplies a lost segment of American history, describing the manners, mores, and daily lives of rural blacks-not only the prejudice they encountered but also the sports figures who inspired them, the teachers who educated them, the church that bonded them together, and the local characters who both amused and scandalized them, including guitar-picking, fast-driving, hard-drinking "Tampa Red" and "Old Mrs. Hill," who had been born a slave and inher nineties ran around with a "set of fast girls in their sixties." These and many other intriguing figures people the pages of THE LAST RADIO BABY, an entertaining, informative, and important view of a time and place in our history filtered through the gentle and generous vision of one of its most loveable characters.