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in pencil in top margin July 21, 1968

Jack I: Thanks for sending Chicago literary paper and your "Home to Moberly" - if you can spare another copy I will place it in our Alexandria Library - I note they now have your paperback "The Disinherited" altho they refused to accept a copy of "Folksay IV" with my "radical" literature in it. circled with arrow to top margin: Folksay IV [[top margin: glad to report underlined: FOLK-SAY IV is now on library shelf and properly indexed - I suppose someone had to read all of it first?]] just disappeared - no one on staff seems to know what happened - I think somebody just swiped it and took it home.

Hope I am sending back all the stuff you asked for - my mind is old and gray now and I disremember mor [sic] than I remember.

I suppose, as a professor at the University of Virginia told me, writing letters to the editors is a waste of time - the people who read them are unimportant and such letter writers could do better working on a novel or a book of nonfiction, but I do it anyway. My life seems a waste, so why not waste a letter, besides, some of them infuriate people who need to be infuriated.

I drank some old Kentucky bourbon the other evening and put my bifocals down where I cant find them - my son Jeff can always find them, like a houn [sic] dog sniffing rabbits, but I cant find them, luckily I have another pair of glasses that will let me get-by, but barely - cant afford $40 for another pair of bifocals - I think the cats swiped them under something - ah me, this life in storm tossed world.

I agree with you that present-day protesters seem to be off their cotton-pickin rockers - I dont know what they are bout either, from Columbia University to the Poor Marchers. The poor folks march was a lot of sham I think - 50 percent good people and 50 percent professional bums who wouldnt work if you shook a job in fron [sic] of their faces - you and I LIVED thru a depression, even worse than the present depression, which they dont call a depression, only a partial inflation - I served in theCCC because I couldnt get a job and then worked on WPA, but these poor folks largely wont work, altho I read in local press that 15 of them are now camped in Alexandria and want to make it permanent because they like Alexandria?! They have not tangled with the Alexandria cops as yet - who shoot first and ask questions afterwards. Oh well, I guess they will find jobs and settle down, but I always said a sharecropper in the Deep South is better off than a black in a Northern urban slum. And I still say they dont know who killed President Kennedy and they dont know who killed Martin Luther King - old Judy Rayford of the bayou claims King was killed by a black to make a martyr. You can bet this guy Ray will never burn for the job.

Man in market says in about 4 weeks he will have some banana musk melons - they grow them in Missouri? - long and yellow-like, smell like bananas - good eating. Grow them in Blue Ridge also. Jack II July 21, 1968

in left margin Still no reply from Don West! guess he's afeard of REAL democrats?!

[[in right margin] Read "Ramparts" article re B. Traven - they were hardly convincing - altho I find B. Traven a good writer - adventure-wise.