Yocona Puff Adder

This piece of historical fiction is a coming of age story and more-than-memoir that bridges the early 1950s through today . . . sharing little known facts and demonstrating that life is more interesting than plain fiction. With one boy white and the other black in segregated Mississippi, backwoods and riverbottom adventures are too exciting to allow these motherless seven-year-olds to consider the normal bigotry of the times. Childhood is grounded in mischief around Oxford's Baily Woods and in the rural community of Taylor. The Yocona and Little Tallahatchie Rivers help shape the area's youth, and their teen years find Scott and C.B. interacting with Weekend Warriors and the Klan. Summer jobs and outdoor experiences roughhew the boys into men. Adult complications in Sin City Memphis precede diverging paths with college forestry versus the logging woods, grad school versus a tour in Vietnam, and professional versus technical careers in the workplace. All the while, challenges and opportunities stretch from the commonplace to the controversial. During retirement, the two men volunteer and grow old. The book finishes with a twist the reader won't be expecting.

After a 101st Airborne Division tour in Vietnam, a BS in Forestry, and a MS in Wildlife Management from Mississippi State University, and a distinguished career as a federal forester and wildlife biologist, Gerald Inmom has now retired to his hometown of Oxford, MS. After gaining experience as a Forest Service spokesman, conservation group leader, state-level officer of the Society of American Foresters, university-level board member and representative, court witness, and former contributing editor to several newspapers, Gerald has now broken ground in the unique genre of faction.