Cadillacs For Literacy: Chunky Blues Festival 1988
In July of 1988, I put my wife and our three very young children on a plane to Disneyworld. Moments later, I jumped in the family station wagon with a couple of knuckle-headed friends and drove from Baltimore to Mississippi for blues and shenanigans. It was the summer that the tabloids were screaming that Elvis was alive.
[He was and he is and, oddly, the marriage did not survive.]
We landed in Chunky, a town of about 300 people due west of Meridian, for an annual blues festival. At the time, Ray Mabus – Secretary of the Navy under Obama since 2009 – was the governor of Mississippi. The favored cause of his wife at the time – the former Julie Hines – was literacy.
There, on a hill in front of the outdoor Chunky stage, was a brand new, candy apple red
Cadillac to be raffled off to raise money for literacy, forever a critical issue in Mississippi.
We passed the Jim Beam, passed the reefer, and bought tickets for the ride.
How cool to have left home in a gray Chevy Celebrity wagon and roared back into Crabtown in a bad-ass Daddy-O ride with Left Hand Frank on the radio?
It might just have saved the marriage. 
