{"id":24346,"date":"2015-04-22T14:50:03","date_gmt":"2015-04-22T19:50:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=24346"},"modified":"2015-04-23T19:29:21","modified_gmt":"2015-04-24T00:29:21","slug":"the-great-magnolia-vagabond-no-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/the-great-magnolia-vagabond-no-4\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Magnolia Vagabond – No. 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cadillacs For Literacy: Chunky Blues Festival 1988<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In July of 1988, I put my wife and our three very young children on a plane to Disneyworld. Moments later, I jumped in the family station wagon with a couple of knuckle-headed friends and drove from Baltimore<\/strong> to Mississippi<\/strong> for blues and shenanigans. It was the summer that the tabloids were screaming that Elvis was alive.<\/span><\/p>\n

[He was and he is and, oddly, the marriage did not survive.]<\/span><\/p>\n

We landed in Chunky<\/strong>, a town of about 300 people due west of Meridian<\/strong>, for an annual blues festival. At the time, Ray Mabus<\/strong> – Secretary of the Navy under Obama<\/strong> since 2009 – was the governor of Mississippi. The favored cause of his wife at the time – the former Julie Hines<\/strong> – was literacy.<\/span><\/p>\n

There, on a hill in front of the outdoor Chunky stage, was a brand new, candy apple red\"Cadillac\"<\/a> Cadillac to be raffled off to raise money for literacy, forever a critical issue in Mississippi. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We passed the Jim Beam, passed the reefer, and bought tickets for the ride.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

How cool to have left home in a gray Chevy Celebrity wagon and roared back into Crabtown<\/strong> in a bad-ass Daddy-O ride with Left Hand Frank<\/strong> on the radio?<\/span><\/p>\n

It might just have saved the marriage.\u00a0\"The<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cadillacs For Literacy: Chunky Blues Festival 1988 In July of 1988, I put my wife and our three<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":249,"featured_media":24435,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[3113,6417,6410,6418,6413,6411,6419,6412,6416,6420,2837,5,6415,3819,6414,5216],"class_list":["post-24346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-writing","tag-baltimore","tag-cadillac","tag-cadillacs-for-literacy","tag-chevy-celebrity-wagon","tag-chunky","tag-chunky-blues-festival","tag-crabtown","tag-disneyworld","tag-julie-hines","tag-left-hand-frank","tag-meridian","tag-mississippi","tag-obama","tag-rafael-alvarez","tag-ray-mabus","tag-the-great-magnolia-vagabond"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Magnolia-FEAT.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/249"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}