If Granny’s Notes is full of grammatical errors, it’s probably because Mrs. Virginia Simms took four of us out of our University High School English class and had us write journals. She taught us to write when we were too busy, to write while emotionally excited about the subject and, above all, ...“do write.” One of the half-page entries in the my journal notebook was about the difference between fiddles and violins.

No one told me that they were different, and I can’t even prove it today, but I had taken 18 violin lessons before my uncle Charlie asked me to play “Golden Slippers.”

Uncle Charlie was very important to me, and I soon could play the tune. But there was more to fiddling “Golden Slippers.” I never saw notes for this tune, but there were words, and the tune was familiar. When a fiddler played it, he slid his fingers on the strings in a special way, and his bow jiggled on the strings, using only the middle part of the horse hair.

I liked that, and I wrote about that for Mrs. Simms. When I was a freshman at MU, I expanded the journal entry into one of the Monday morning themes we had to turn in to Miss Lura Lewis. She marked it “E minus.” The minus was because of structural mistakes, but, like the high school teacher, she felt that writing was the important thing and that punctuation would come eventually.

In the School of Journalism, two years later, Roscoe Ellard said, “Get an idea! Research it; put it on paper. Some cheap $35 a week copy reader will put in the commas.” However, he gave me a minus on an “A” paper because I misspelled the word “candidate” through all 18 pages about socialism. But the idea was there!

When I expanded the piece on violin and fiddle differences in Miss Louise Grindsted’s Special Article class, she said, “Let’s work on ‘Fiddles’ and enter it in the Atlantic Monthly essay contest for college students.” We added several incidents that happened when I was fiddling for square dances.

I told about fiddling for a group west of Columbia -- the Smiths, the McMickles and friends -- who held dances in a vacant house about twice a week.

Chummy Turner played the guitar, and we earned about $2 each for a 4-hour dance. Between square dance sets one night, I was limbering up my bow hand, which almost cramped. A fellow was picking at some loose wall paper near us, and he discovered a small thing crawling on a scrap that he pulled off. He pulled a bigger scrap, and that wall behind us was black with bed bugs! We came out of that corner in a hurry! The dance ended, the people disappeared, and the vacant house closed up in short order.

Miss Grindsted also liked the part about how I kept on playing until the set was completed, even when “a cramp crawled up my back to my shoulders and neck like a snake.” I think she and I both felt that this entry was at the edge of the definition of an essay.

However, it won first honorable mention. That was second place, competing with entries from many colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada.

This made headlines on the Tribune’s front page. That same week, more people read about my winning 5 free tickets to the Uptown Theater than about the Atlantic Monthly contest. I received the tickets for winning the Tribune’s weekly liar’s contest!