Foley resident to sign copies of “Duck and Cover’’ April 19

Book’s quirky characters don’t ignore the dark side of the segregated South
Kathie Farnell, a 15 year Foley resident, will give readings and sign copies of her book, Duck and Cover: A Nuclear Family, at the Foley Library at 2 p.m. on April 19 and the Fairhope Library at 10 a.m. on April 28.
Described as a wry and laconic, the memoir is based on Farnell’s perspective as a smart-mouthed, unreasonably optimistic white girl growing up in Cloverdale, a genteel and neatly landscaped neighborhood of Montgomery in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
During those decades Montgomery’s social order was slowly—very slowly—changing. The bus boycott was over if not forgotten, Normandale Shopping Center had a display of the latest fallout shelters, and integration was on the horizon, though many still thought the water in the white and colored drinking fountains came from separate tanks.
Farnell’s household, more like the Addams family than the Cleavers of Leave it to Beaver, included socially ambitious parents who were lawyers, two younger brothers, a live-in grandmother, and Libby, the family maid. Her father was a one-armed rageaholic given to strange business deals such as the one that left the family unintentionally owning a bakery.
Mama, the quintessential attorney, could strike a jury but was hopeless at making Jello. Granny, a curmudgeon who kept a chamber pot under her bed, was always at odds with Libby, who had been in a bad mood since the bus boycott began.
Farnell deftly recounts tales of aluminum Christmas trees, the Hula-Hoop craze, road trips in the family’s un-air-conditioned black Bel Air, show-and-tell involving a human skeleton, belatedly learning to swear, and even the pet chicken she didn’t know she had.
Her well-crafted prose reveals quirky and compelling characters in stories that don’t ignore the dark side of the segregated South, as told from the wide-eyed perspective of a girl who is sometimes oblivious to and often mystified by its byzantine rules. Little did she know that the Age of Aquarius was just around the corner.
“Not since Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid have I enjoyed a book about growing up in the decades after World War II as much as Kathie Farnell’s Duck and Cover,’’ said Wayne Flynt, Professor Emeritus at Auburn University. “All the wry wit, zany pranks, childhood mischief and precociousness, everything that sends us into gales of laughter and moments of serious reflection about childhood, fill the pages of this Dixie version of Bryson’s famous Iowa childhood. It is a treasure!”
Farnell earned a B.A. from the University of Montevallo and a J.D. from the University of Alabama School of Law. She left law in 1995 to launch Artemis Media Project, a nonprofit organization that produces radio and television programs. She collaborated with Smithsonian Productions in 1998 on her first radio project, “Remembering Slavery,” which won the Gabriel Award. She lives in Foley with her husband, Jack Purser, and an assortment of cats. This is Farnell’s first book.
For more info, visit artemismedia.org.