Otto Winterset was born back before dirt had sufficient nutrient to sustain plant life.  I mean he was really old and he knew everything there was to know about Crooked Springs, Indiana where I grew up.  Otto said the town got its name, not because the cold-water spring that gushed from the limestone outcropping behind the old sawmill was bent out of shape, but because early on just about every manjack in town was a crook of some sort or another.

Us kids, we used to laugh at old Otto–called him the backwards man because you could turn his name around and it still spelled the same.   Our teacher said it was a pal-o-something or other.  We never laughed in his face though because, truth be told, we were half way skeert of that old man.

For one thing, he lived in a one room house.  That always bothered me.  I mean nobody around had nice houses, but one room?  That means the kitchen, the parlor and the bedroom were all lumped up in a bunch.  What happened if he got company?  What happened if the preacher and his wife stopped by?  I mean everybody else had a separate parlor.  They could hurry up and fetch the bible from the hall closet, dust it off a bit and put it on the coffee table.  Snatch up the True Romance magazines and hide them somewhere.  How could old Otto do that with just one room?

Ott, that’s what the townsfolk called him, Ott didn’t seem to do much–just hung around the card parlor and told stories to anyone who’d listen–mostly us kids.  We weren’t allowed inside till we turned 16.  The owner, Chippy, kept gettin’ arrested for allowing kids to gamble so he finally just made us stay outside.   He’d peek out ever so often to see if we didn’t want a Coke or an Eskimo Pie or something.  Most of us rarely had a nickel to spend on such as that.

Older kids used the stone quarry as a lovers lane–been doing it for years.  They could drive their car down deep into the bowels of Reefer County and nobody would even know they were there.  Anyway, Ott said the only time he saw a whole bunch of growed men cry was one day on the steps of the First Church of the Assigned Brotherhood.  There they all stood just a-bawlin’ their eyes out.  Growed men.  Seems Preacher Morgan, a 72 year old gray-haired feller, got caught down in the quarry with a young red-haired divorcee gal.