Short Fiction Cobb, Irvin S.: My Old Kentucky Home (collected shorts). v1. 12 Jul 2017

[GrannyGrump]

My Old Kentucky Home.
Stories concerning Old Judge Priest and his people
by Irvin S. Cobb (1876–1944)

The contents of this book were first published 1911 ~ 1936. Text is in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life + 70” or less, and in the USA.

This compilation is comprised of the stories of Back Home (1912) and Old Judge Priest (1916), in toto; with additional tales taken from Those Times and These (1917), From Place to Place (1920), Sundry Accounts (1922), The Saturday Evening Post magazine, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.


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Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb (23 June, 1876 – 11 March, 1944) was an American author, humorist, editor and columnist from Paducah, Kentucky who relocated to New York in 1904, living there for the remainder of his life, writing for the New York World, Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, and other newspapers and magazines. Cobb wrote more than 300 short stories and 60 books (most of these being collections of his stories and articles). Some of his works were adapted for film.

Cobb is remembered best for his humorous stories of Kentucky. “Cobb created a South peopled with honorable citizens, charming eccentrics, and loyal, subservient blacks; but at their best the Judge Priest stories are dramatic and compelling, using a wealth of precisely rendered detail to evoke a powerful mood.” [Contemporary review, attributed to Joel Chandler Harris.]
(—Wikipedia)

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These stories are set in Kentucky, from the 1880’s to the 1910’s. Dialogue is rendered in the Southern vernacular, and, as might be expected, conversation is sometimes about the American Civil War. But more often, we eavesdrop on the daily life of a country town. Cobb runs the emotional gamut — from comedy to drama to pathos to tragedy and back again — and entertains all along the way. (Caveat: text contains racially derogatory terms.)

AN EXCERPT:

Spoiler:

Summertime would have revealed him clad in linen, or alpaca, or ample garments of homespun hemp, but this particular day, being a day in the latter part of October, Judge Priest’s limbs and body were clothed in woolen coverings. The first grate fire of the season burned in his grate. There was a local superstition current, to the effect that our courthouse was heated with steam. Years before, a bond issue to provide the requisite funds for this purpose had been voted after much public discussion pro and con. Thereafter, for a space, contractors and journeymen artisans made free of the building, to the great discomfort of certain families of resident rats, old settler rats really, that had come to look upon their cozy habitats behind the wainscoting as homes for life. Anon, iron pipes emerged at unexpected and jutting angles from the baseboards here and there, to coil in the corners or else to climb the walls, joint upon joint, and festoon themselves kinkily against the ceilings.

Physically the result was satisfying to the eye of the taxpayer; but if the main function of a heating plant be to provide heat, then the innovation might hardly be termed an unqualified success. Official dwellers of the premises maintained that the pipes never got really hot to the touch before along toward the Fourth of July, remaining so until September, when they began perceptibly to cool off again. Down in the cellar the darky janitor might feed the fire box until his spine cracked and the boilers seethed and simmered, but the steam somehow seemed to get lost in transit, manifesting itself on the floors above only in a metallic clanking and clacking, which had been known to seriously annoy lawyers in the act of offering argument to judge and jurors. When warmth was needed to dispel the chill in his own quarters, Judge Priest always had a fire kindled in the fireplace.

If you read these as period pieces, you will find a lot to enjoy.
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