ABSTRACT
One day in the late 1920s a group of musicians pulled their old car up to a dusty country store in Virginia. The leader of the group was a brownhaired, jug-eared man in his mid-thirties who looked like he could handle himself in a fight. As his mates wandered around the store, he walked over to a row of watermelons. “Say, fella,” he said to the storekeeper. “How much are those cucumbers?” The old storekeeper snorted back that those things were watermelons. “Sorry,” said the jug-eared man. “My mistake. I’m from down in North Carolina, and we usually have cucumbers that are bigger than these things.” The joker then had the temerity to ask where in blazes he could get a drink of good liquor. That was enough for this Prohibition-era storekeeper; he ordered the whole gang out of his store. As he turned to leave, the jug-eared man quipped, “Well, being as I’m Charlie Poole, I thought I might get a drink around here.” “Yeah?” shot back the storeman. “If you’re Charlie Poole, I’m Henry Ford!”
