Thank God for the Country Boy

By Cletus Bianchi

His typewriter keys fell silent last week. God bless him, he has joined with Doris now, although sooner than many of us would have liked. I doubt he would have wrapped up his own story quite this way. I believe he preferred happy endings.

I’ll admit that’s selfish of me to say. I truly believe he is now eternally happy, but I can’t yet shake the feeling of sadness and loss. I can’t help wishing I had just one more visit with him at the Runge opry or on the front bench at Wal-Mart.

We never know when our last issue will go to press, so we often fail to take the opportunity to tell someone they are important and special. Standing beside a hero’s coffin, it’s a little too late to say how much you admired his service to his country, his family, and his community.

Oh, I believe he hears you, but it doesn’t have the same effect as if he were standing there, still shaking your hand.

W.C. ‘Bill’ Reader, the Country Boy, was a sure ‘nough hero for me. He volunteered for two wars. He brought his world experience back to his home and was superintendent of Runge schools. He loved his wife like you read about in all of the good books.

He always tipped his hat to my wife and daughters, always had a smile to share no matter how he felt that day. He always and I mean always, listened with interest. His listening may have been his most endearing quality and good listeners seem pretty hard to come by these days.

Perhaps he was such a big man so there was enough room to hold all of his kindness. I never heard him speak ill of anyone.

He was always the consummate gentleman.

Now he has become a part of something he loved dearly and chronicled so well in these pages…Karnes County’s history.

From his monthly Odds-n-Ends account of local goings-on to his fabulous treatise on the outhouse, Bill’s writing always made you feel at home. It certainly made you long for home if you had been gone a while.

I do all of my work on an ergonomic keyboard with a flat-screen LCD monitor. In contrast, I remember the intense searching we had to do for Bill when his old typewriter finally cratered. We found him a manual typewriter, but for Bill, it just wasn’t the same.

He didn’t like electric typewriters because he struck the keys with such force, more than one letter would print. I once told him that was the power of his words and the new technology could not handle them. He smiled his ‘aw shucks’ smile and said no, he didn’t think his stories were all that important, but he sure liked doing them.

Bill, your words bridged generations. Every civilization must have its storytellers to keep the past alive for future generations. I know that some of my sadness is because one of our greatest chroniclers of everyday life from the Great Depression to last Tuesday will write no more.

I am envious of how he mastered Time. Considering the changes in technology and society he witnessed in his eighty-five years, he always remained grounded in his humble upbringing and the country living he loved so much. He made time stand still as he listened and wrote.

Several folks have asked us, "Who’ll be the Country Boy now?"

No one.

He has moved on to the big coffee shop in the sky and there will never be another like him.

His words will live on in these pages as we republish his work. Sadly, we will no longer hear the tchick-tchick-tchick-ding of his old typewriter.

The challenge for the rest of us, especially the parents, is to keep the past alive for our children as Bill did for us.

(click here to read archived columns by Cletus Bianchi)