The Redneck Guide to Raisin' Children

by Annie Smith

  Ivory. Camay. Dial. Irish Spring. Tide. Levi’s thirty-four-length leather belt.

  Huntin’ and Fishin’

  There’s an old country saying: “Women do the cookin’, men do the hookin’.” A man’s place ain’t in the kitchen, it’s on the riverbank.

  As soon as your boys get old enough to toddle, take them fishing. It’s not just entertainment, it’s a survival skill. One of these days they might be out of work and need to fish to feed their families.

  Hank Williams Jr. says in one song: “We can skin a buck, and we can run a trot line. / Country folk can survive.” That’s why every daddy needs to take his kids fishing—even when his wife gets mad because the roof’s still not patched and it’s about to rain.

  Take your children deer and rabbit hunting, too, especially the boys. You don’t actually have to shoot the animals. Just getting out in the woods amongst all the wildlife and trees is healthy for kids.

  Rufus McKinney goes hunting all the time, and the only thing he’s ever killed in his life is a six-pack. He ain’t even taken along any ammunition since the drunken day he shot at a buck and bagged his left foot.

  Even more shocking, Rufus woke up to find Wiley Watkins trying to mount his foot on the den wall—with Rufus still attached to it.

  When Nature Calls Collect

  Unlike Rufus, most rednecks figure the best thing about hunting is that they can drink all the beer they want and the ol’ lady ain’t there to complain.

  They also can take a much-needed leak in the woods and nobody says a word. But be forewarned that peeing outdoors can get dangerous.

  Wiley Watkins stopped to relieve himself near the edge of a forest—and peed right on a farmer’s electrified fence. Wiley got knocked ten feet and woke up feeling like Ted Bundy that day Florida fried the creep.

  * * *

  Rednecks’ Five Favorite Sports

  1. Wrestlemania

  2. Demolition derbies

  3. Stock car racin’

  4. Honky-tonk free-for-alls

  5. Cockroach stompin’

  * * *

  Guns and Gun Racks

  No redneck truck is complete without a gun rack in the rear window and a red, white, and blue bumper sticker that says: GOD, GUNS, GUTS, AND OLD GLORY MADE AMERICA GREAT—LET’S KEEP ALL THREE.

  Rednecks love guns, especially hunting rifles. And we don’t see anything wrong with letting your young’uns use cap pistols and BB guns to practice shooting. One of these days they might need their skills to defend our nation.

  The greatest soldier in World War I was a redneck, Sgt. Alvin York of Tennessee. And the most decorated soldier in World War II was a redneck, Audie Murphy of Texas. That wasn’t no accident—it was because redneck boys practice shooting until they can knock the contact lenses out of a gnat’s eyes at two hundred yards.

  But don’t let your kids get hold of your real guns until they’re teenagers and can learn how to safely use them. If you catch your little children fooling around with your gun collection, tan their behinds.

  Every redneck family’s pickup truck ought to have a gun rack in the rear window. However, don’t get one if you don’t have a truck. Nothing looks tackier than a big gun rack on a Chevy Chevette. Or a bicycle. Or a horse.

  A word of warning: Always chain and lock the rifles and shotguns onto your truck’s gun rack. Young’uns are naturally curious, and the most curious among them in our neck of the woods are missing a few fingers and toes. We’ve got nearly grown kids in Mayhew County who can’t count past thirteen.

  In-laws and Other Household Pests

  It’s too bad they don’t have a pest control service that comes once a month and sprays your house for unwanted relatives.

  Someday these nuisances probably will include your own grown kids.

  Once your boys and girls get hitched, don’t sell their beds or turn their bedroom into a display area for your prized beer can collection. Most of them are gonna be back faster than you can spell D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

  And when your brother-in-law loses his job, he’s bound to pile his whole family—including his six dogs—in on you.

  Even worse, one day you’re sure to have your know-it-all mother-in-law sharing your house after her husband kicks off. Women always outlive men, sometimes because they shoot ’em for foolin’ around.

  How are you gonna deal with all these extra mouths to feed?

  The best way is to secretly change your mealtimes. Get up at three o’clock in the morning, eat all the eggs and bacon in the house, and let your sponging relatives find the refrigerator empty when they drag their lazy butts out of bed later that day.

  For supper, bring home a big bag of White Castle cheeseburgers. But leave them in your truck. Have your spouse and younger kids sneak out to the truck, one at a time, to chow down in privacy.

  Once your good-for-nothin’ “guests” realize you ain’t no meal ticket, they’ll start looking elsewhere for their grub—and probably move in with some other sucker relative who’ll support them.

  Debugging Your Home

  It’s a little harder to get rid of roaches than relatives. Especially when the bugs are so big that they just laugh at the Orkin man and throw him headfirst out the door.

  We’ve found that Roach Motels work pretty good, but it gets mighty tiresome making up all them little beds every morning.

  To get rid of ants, spread boric acid around the house. We don’t know exactly why this works. Professor Harland K. Sampson’s theory is that that the ants take “acid trips,” flee in terror from hallucinations, and bash their little brains out against the wall.

  Junkyards as Vacation Sites

  Most young’uns want to go to Disney World—which is fine if you and the family are willing to live on green beans the rest of the year.

  Instead of taking out a second mortgage on your trailer to buy Disney tickets, not to mention wearing yourself out with a long drive, consider taking the kids to your own town’s most fascinating attraction.

  Pack some baloney and tomato sandwiches, pick up enough RC colas for everybody, load the whole family in the car—and head on down to the junkyard!

  Car junkyards are a trip back in history. You can show your kids rusting Nashes and crumbling Henry Js, let ’em climb all through humongous Hudsons, and explore the dashboards of DeSotos.

  They’ll be amazed to see that pickup trucks ain’t the only vehicle ever put out by Detroit.

  Your brood can play soldiers in old broken-down army jeeps. In a junkyard they’ll find loads more places to play hide ’n’ seek—in the trunks of cars, under the hood if the motor’s been yanked, and in the back of old ice-delivery trucks.

  And there’s no end to the exciting things that kids can find in a junkyard to take home.

  Our boy Lonnie is pleased as punch with the Edsel floor mats on each side of his bed, and our daughter Betty Jean put up a big Chrysler rearview mirror so she can see to tease the back of her hair. It adjusts from daylight to night vision so she can primp even when the power company cuts off our lights.

  Redneck WRECK-reation park

  Wiley Watkins claims that during his visits to junkyards, he’s collected every dashboard cigarette lighter ever made. He says he got a phone call from the Smithsonian Institute begging him to sell his collection to them for over a hundred dollars. Of course, Wiley’s prone to stretching the truth until it hollers in pain.

  During junkyard junkets, your brood will make memories that will last forever.

  Our son Wimpy still talks about the time he stepped on a rusty nail and nearly lost his leg.

  His youngest brother, Lonnie, once had to climb a barbwire fence to keep a junkyard dog from ripping him to pieces.

  And Earlene Perkins still has a crooked finger from where her brother Junior playfully slammed a ’57 Imperial’s door on her hand.

  How can a dinky little picture of your kids with Minnie Mouse ever compare to unforgettable experiences like that?

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br />   Rednecks’ Five Favorite Vacation Spots

  1. Six Flags over Georgia

  2. South of the Border

  3. Junkyards with no guard

  4. Any fishin’ hole

  5. Home of out-of-state relative, living or dead

  * * *

  Other Family Outings

  When your kids are good, they deserve to get out of the house every couple of weeks.

  But you can’t always take them for tacos and Cokes, then to an Elvis film festival. This “eat, drink, and B movie” routine gets stale after a while.

  So try a night at the Holiday Inn, which is a big treat for most redneck families. The young’uns will play in the below-ground pool all night, and the parents will finally be able to catch up on their sleep.

  Country music concerts are also good family entertainment. Only problem is, big-name singers hardly ever come to our little town.

  Little Jimmy Dickens is the only superstar who’s been in this area over the past five years, and we had to drive our brood all the way over to Potato Ridge to catch his show.

  Come to think of it, the last good concert we saw in Chicken Neck was “Chuck Barris Presents Gene, Gene the Dancing Machine.”

  We pretty much have to limit our family outings to what’s already available in town—and we advise you to do likewise.

  • Go around looking at cemetery plots for sale. Tell your kids it’s never too early to start planning for the future.

  • Take your children to the dog show at the county fair. (And hope your oldest girl doesn’t win Best of Show.)

  • Drive out by the main highway and watch the kudzu swallow up a tree.

  • Take your family to a tractor pull and pull for the smallest tractor.

  Don’t feel guilty about neglecting housework to take your kids on an outing. As Aunt Alma says, “Sometimes you’ve got to take time to stop and smell the urinals.”

  * * *

  Rednecks’ Five Favorite Actors

  1. Chuck Norris (action)

  2. Willie Nelson (singin’ movies)

  3. Fess Parker (historical)

  4. John Wayne (war movies)

  5. Ned Beatty (romance)

  * * *

  Keeping Your Kids Safe

  We live in a dangerous world these days, and you’ve got to watch your kids every minute or you’ll start losing them right and left.

  Here are some precautions you should take:

  • Install safety belts in the bed of your pickup truck. They’ll keep the young’uns from flying off into the bushes every time you hit a pothole.

  Nothing’s more aggravating than having to turn around and go back looking for your kids. And the ones you don’t find will bug you even more late that night by banging on the door for you to let ’em in.

  Why can’t kids be like dogs? You put a dog in the back of a pickup and he’ll never fall out. You can swerve around a curve at ninety miles per hour, and when you look in the rearview mirror your dog will still be there—peeking around the side of the cab with his tongue flapping in the wind and holding up a little sign that says Faster! Faster!

  We’ve never figured out how dogs can hang on when they ain’t even got fingers. They must have some magical powers that scientists still don’t know about.

  That, or else dogs are a whole lot smarter than kids but hide it from you so they can get a free ride through life.

  • Before your offspring start riding in your truck, show them how to open and close the bed gate without cutting their hands on the rusted spots.

  And don’t let them sit close to the brown primer—it’ll rub off on their good clothes.

  Learning to open the bed gate is extremely important. Over in Potato Ridge a truck plunged into a river and three men riding in the back drowned, Nobody’d ever taught them how to open the gate and they couldn’t get out.

  • Teach each child how to dial 911 on your rotary phone. If you don’t know how to do it yourself, flag down the county constable and get him to show you.

  If you ain’t got a phone, tell the kids just to holler at the top of their lungs in case of an emergency. A neighbor will think somebody’s being murdered at your house and will call the police for them.

  • Buy all your girls a big purse so they can carry a tire tool inside at all times.

  A heavy iron tire tool is the only handheld weapon that’s got more stopping power than a .44 magnum pistol. And it leaves a distinctive head dent that makes it easy for the cops to identify an attacker.

  But your girls should be careful about carrying their protection to class, because they could get in trouble. In some redneck areas across the United States, schools have installed sophisticated tire-tool/lug-wrench detectors.

  • Make your kids memorize your street address. If they get lost, they’ll know exactly where they live.

  And when you move, take the house numbers with you so you’ll have the same address.

  • Drive your son a ways out in the country, dump him off, and see if he can find his way home. If he makes it back, you’ll never have to worry about losing him. If he doesn’t … well, the boy must not have been too bright to begin with. (Rufus calls this the “process of natural selection.”)

  That might sound a little cruel. But mama birds throw their babies out of treetops onto the hard ground—which has got to hurt a lot more than a little walk.

  And don’t worry. Somebody will take in your stray kid and give him a good home. Maybe even a better one than the one he was born into.

  * * *

  Rednecks’ Four Favorite Actresses

  1. Sally Field (Smokey movies)

  2. Polly Holliday (Flo on Alice)

  3. Roma Downey (Touched by an Angel)

  4. Dolly Parton (Best Little Whorehouse in Texas)

  * * *

  Lip-Smackin’ Snacks for Kids

  It’s outrageous, but true: These days, cookies and candy cost more than a box of snuff. Moon Pies and Little Debbie cakes are about the only bargains left in stores.

  Instead of wasting all that money on store-bought treats, make your own snacks at home using Annie’s simple recipes:

  • Dip chunks of Spam in candy-apple sauce, stick a toothpick in each chunk, and put a plateful in the refrigerator. They’ll go faster than fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches at a convention of Elvis impersonators.

  • Whip up homemade carrot candy faster than your kids can say “Bugs Bunny.” Just slice some carrots and fry them in butter. Then mix in a batch of brown maple sugar and a little water to make a syrup.

  Take the candy out of the skillet and let the sticky coat harden. If your young’uns don’t lose all their teeth from eating carrot candy, they’ll love it and won’t ever ask for Gummi Possums again.

  • In the winter, treat your kids to “snow cream”—which is merely ice cream made with snow. Fill bowls with new-fallen snow, pour on some Carnation canned evaporated milk and some sugar, and mix the stuff up real good with a spoon.

  One word of warning: Steer clear of scooping snow from anywhere close to the outhouse. You might end up carrying that “all-natural ingredients” craze a bit too far.

  • Make your own yummy cookies using graham crackers—which was one of Reverend Billy’s greatest inventions ever.

  Get a box of cheap store-brand graham crackers and smear some potted meat on them. The crackers will satisfy your kids’ sweet tooth. And the potted meat will provide their Recommended Daily Allowances of cooked pork fatty tissue, beef tripe, and vinegar.

  * * *

  Rednecks’ Five Favorite Restaurants

  1. Denny’s (cheap Grand Slams)

  2. Shoney’s (all-you-can-eat breakfast bar)

  3. Stuckey’s (yummy pecan desserts)

  4. Waffle House (great cheese ’n’ onion hashbrowns)

  5. Mom’s Kitchen, Lake Worth, Florida (try Mike’s ribeye steak omelet!)

  * * *

  The Real Dirt on Eatin’ Right

  Li
ttle redneck young’uns also like to eat dirt, and there’s plenty of it in the nursery. Go ahead and let ’em chow down—dirt is packed with nutrition!

  Rufus McKinney’s old lady, Aldie, says she read somewhere that all the minerals a body needs are found in plain old dirt. So why waste money on store-bought “supplement” pills?

  But if you live in Georgia, don’t let your kids eat too much red clay. It’ll clog up their innards and give them such a god-awful case of constipation that you’ll have to call Roto-Rooter.

  Supplement their dirt intake every now and then with some milk and blackberries to keep ’em in real good shape. Buttermilk’s good, too.

  One of the healthiest country dishes is “killed” greens. Pick some kale or lettuce, fry a few strips of bacon, and pour the hot grease over the greens. When they wither up like worms on hot concrete, they’re ready to eat.

  This Is Your Brain on Fried Eggs

  Kids need more than snacks and dirt to keep ’em going after they get past three. And the saying at our house is “Give a damn—give ’em Spam.”

  To rednecks, Spam is nature’s most perfect food. We figure nine out of ten cans of Spam are sold in the South (the other can gets shoplifted in New York City).

  There’s a good reason Spam is so popular among rednecks. You can fix it more ways than Forrest Gump can fix shrimp, with the comforting knowledge that Spam never wriggled around like them creepy little shrimps do.

  The label on a Spam can won’t tell you exactly what’s inside, but that’s only because the makers are afraid their tasty secret recipe will get out and cheap foreign imitations will come pouring into the country.