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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 Of all the people I’ve talked to in, oh, 20 years, I’d judge, Ray Clayton comes closest to being my kind of man.
I understand him, you know what I mean? We are kindred souls.
And I admire him a great deal for what he once did – for he once beat a lawn mower to death, reducing it to an ugly pile of whimpering, twisted metal that begged for mercy and got none.
How close – oh, how close! – I have come to such a satisfying deed myself, and only those who have never been similarly afflicted can consider it other than normal.
It was the reaction of a man who had taken just about all he cared to take.
Well, it came about some years ago, you see, that Clayton, who lives out my way in Warrick County, Ind., had this miserable old lawn mower that was not worth more than a dime, even when times were good.
And he found himself unable at the time, because of a severe attack of the monetary shorts, to buy another.
On top of that, rain for days on end had encouraged his lawn to stand shank-high, lush and coarse and green.
But one day the sun burst forth, warm and clear as ever you please, and Clayton decided to dash home from his job at dinnertime and mow the lawn.
Finally, after jerking painful knots in his biceps from yanking on the starter cord, he got the mower going.
He nosed it into the tall grass – where it promptly coughed and died.
Again he yanked on the cord. About 183 times, with sweat practically blinding him.
Finally it started again.
More carefully this time, he eased it into the grass.
Within 10 feet it was dead again.
Clayton glanced momentarily at the heavens, presumably to see if he could find an angel laughing at him. But angels don’t laugh at people with lawn mower trouble. They’ve found it doesn’t pay.
He gripped the starter cord again, and pulled and pulled and pulled, and eventually dropped from exhaustion to his knees, and breathed with a sound that easily could be mistaken for a rasp being drawn loosely over a tin can.
The mower started and, in far less time than that, it died again.
Well, Clayton was grim of visage by this time, and grimmer yet of mood.
He grabbed the starter cord and, with the fury of a man about to explode with a 10-megaton force, he YAAANKED.
The cord somehow came loose from the flywheel, and the knot at the far end of it hit him with an echoing THWACK smack in the forehead.
It raised such a welt that anyone coming upon him at the moment, without knowledge of what already had transpired, would have assumed that he was simply a unicorn about to sprout his horn.
And if you thought Clayton was mad before, you hadn’t seen anything yet.
Not only was the damnable mower being bullheaded, now it was fighting back.
Clayton burst into a gibberish of crying and cussing and painting and raving. He admits it sheepishly, but it happended just the same.
Now there was, nearby in the yard, a tree of some considerable girth, standing almost as if it had been planted there decades back by a considerate Providence who knew it would one day be needed by a desperate man.
Clayton seized the mower by its handle and, circling round and round and round the tree, he proceeded to bach the mower – WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! – against the trunk.
The sparkplug shattered and flew in 100 unrelated directions.
A mutilated wheel spun through the air.
The air cleaner, and the gas tank, and the miserable, cussed flywheel – everything – went hurtling about the yard.
Finally, only the handle remained.
Clayton threw it to the ground and stood there over it, studying it triumphantly for a moment.
The he turned and walked calmly into the house.
