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He won many awards including the National Headliners Club award for writing the best local interest column in the country in 1962. In 1977 his fellow Tri-State Journalists honored him with with the first Distinguished Service Award. He is the author of five book: A Pig In The Gray Panel Truck, A Dandelion in Winter, Day of a President, Just a 100 Miles From Home, and The Journey in the Red Jalopy. He worked for newspapers in Santa Fe, N.M., Monett, MO, Beckley WV, and Memphis, TN. He began working for the Evansville Courier in 1957. Aaron was born in Cone, Texas and reared on a farm in Portales, NM. He
attented the University of New Mexico where he graduated with honors with a
degree in journalism.
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by Joe Aaron His name was King Neptune and he was a war hero in those times when
Iwo Jima and Bastogne entered our vocabulary, but he lies largely forgotten
now in a grave alongside the highway, a faded plastic bouquet, graying and
grimy, decorating his tombstone.
No tourists stopped this autumn day to read the brief inscription and
to wonder about the days that are gone, and only the hum of speeding tires
and the more appealing music of songbirds in the trees break the silence.
And he shares the tiny park where he lies sleeping with a bronze marker
that reminds us of the Cherokees who died near here in freezing agony as
they were driven like cattle along the infamous Trail of Tears that robbed
them simultaneously of their lands and their human dignity.
King Neptune has become but a memory, and one recalled only with the
greatest of difficulty and in random tatters.
I spent half a day, in newspaper offices and libraries along the
highway where he is buried, trying to find someone who could tell me the
details of his brief but illustrious career in the noble cause of human
freedom, but none could tell me. None could tell me at all.
Some - but older ones - had heard of him, and they creased their brows
in concentration, trying to remember just what it was they had heard.
But the younger ones, reared on moonwalks and Vietnam, had never heard
of him at all, and they tried hard to conceal their amusement over my concern
for an ordinary pig.
For that, you see, was what King Neptune was. He was a gentleman pig,
in the beginning unnotable in any respect, that was raised on a Southern
Illinois farm.
If things had gone a bit differently for him, he would have wound up as
fine country sausage in somebody's smokehouse, as those of his kind are
generally destined.
But something - some quirk of fate that sometimes singles out even
human beings for great things - got into the stars that controlled his
destiny.
And he became, in those years of World War II, as much of a war hero as
a GI on the front lines with an M-1 in his hands, and there is no accurate
way of telling how many thousands of inches of newspaper space was devoted
to him.
In those times, without much doubt, he was the best-known pig in
America, and people would crowd around for a closer look at him.
King Neptune, you see, was a salesman of war bonds, in the days when
war bonds were a vital means of paying for the terrible war.
How it all started I do not know. Whose idea it was I was unable to
learn from those I questioned. Whey he was so fantastically successful in
the unlikely role he was asked to play I can only wonder.
Maybe it was a part of the national spirit at the time. Maybe those
who intended to buy war bonds anyway decided to buy them on King Neptune's
behalf, just because the idea of a pig selling war bonds appealed to their
sense of the ridiculous.
I can't say.
But I can tell you - for it is inscribed briefly on his tombstone as a
measure of his effectiveness - that he was responsible, in the years 1942 to
1946, for the sale $19 million in war bonds.
Writing from a memory that, as I say, is somewhat lacking in
dependability, I believe I am correct in telling you that he was taken from
rally to rally in Southern Illinois where war bonds were being sold.
And I believe, though I state this timidly, being unsure of my facts,
that he traveled under the auspices of the United States Navy.
He would be auctioned off, and the highest bid was then invested in
bonds.
The to the next rally he would go, and he often shared the stage on a
footing of equality with high government officials - once with the secretary
of the treasury, if I'm not mistaken - and even with movie stars.
And when King Neptune was in town, it was always a festive occasion,
with MovieTone photographers jostling for space and excitable members of the
local press hurrying back to the newsroom with scribbled notes for their
stories, as if only the Second Coming of Christ himself would be of any
greater importance.
But wars come, as you know, and wars go, and pretty soon there was
Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the battleship Missouri.
And King Neptune's unusual role had been played.
There were no more rallies to attend, no more bonds to sell, and he was
retired from the stage to live out his life in relative anonymity.
Then, in 1950 at the age of 9, he died, and was buried along Illinois
Highway 146 a short distance east of Anna where tourists, if they were of a
mind to, could stop and stretch their legs and read of the pig that became a
king.
But now he is all but forgotten, even in the land of Little Egypt where
once he reigned, and young people react only with amusement when you ask
about him.
Oh, I know, I know. Old heroes must make room for new ones; that's the
way of life. I know that.
But King Neptune was something special.
And when the public library at Anna, and the ones at nearby Vienna and
Harrisburg too, are unable to give a clue to his existence - well, it makes
me kind of sad, that's all.
