I pronounced it that way the other day in front of a lady who has family there. She looked at me quizzically and said, "Where?" :)

Broccoli *does* taste good, if it's cooked correctly. Most people screw it up (they cook it way too long). It only needs to be cooked until it's hot, keeping its crispness.

Same here. I didn't get to hear much of it back then (we lived too far away for the signal) and I wasn't all that interested anyway. Like those folks who grow up in New York City and have never visited the Statue of Liberty, I grew up bathed in old country and old-time music (Bob promoted the DeBusk-Weaver Family pretty well) and didn't really find anything compelling about it. It was only when I "discovered" bluegrbutt, in my teens, that I woke the heck up to what's good.

You're welcome.

You'd probably have enjoyed the look on his face when...

See, I'd known him since I was a little boy, and one day in my late teens I was watching an old re-run of Hee-Haw. Out of nowhere (which that show tended to cultivate) this guy comes out on camera and starts playing "John Henry" on an electric dobro. (He'd mounted a lap steel into a guitar body. That sucker was way heavy.) Then two guys come out on either side of him and lifted him up by his ankles and he never missed a beat. He kept playing. As a Dobro player yourself, I'm sure you can appreciate how tough that would have been.

I realized for the first time that, hey, I knew someone famous. Sure, not as famous as Ronald Reagan (who was President at the time), but famous enough for me. So the next time I visited his restaurant, I went to the window where he pbutted the plates to the servers and asked for him. When he came to the window, I asked, "Can I have your autograph?"

The look on his face was hilarious and went by way too quickly. He recovered himself almost instantly and gave me his autograph. I still have it here somewhere. :)

My sister has a bunch of old photographs of him which she'd bought at his estate sale or a yard sale or something. She has his Dobro mandolin as well; I haven't seen that one yet. If I'm not mistaken, she has a bunch of ancient reel-to-reel tapes of his radio shows, and age has taken its toll on them; those she's tried to play have broken, and some of them stick together. Sad. They could probably be restored, but a financial sponsor would be needed.

-- Michael DeBusk, Co-Conspirator to Make the World a Better Place