Showing results by author "Donald A. Davis" in All Categories

The best friend of our youth has no replacement, ever. Though we may start out as "two peas in a pod", we often lose touch with one another. In this affecting tale of two adults who reclaim their childhood bond after 30 years apart, the comforts of friendship are affirmed with humor and wit.

Donald Davis was born into a southern Appalachian mountain world rich in stories. He grew up listening to his father and his Uncle Frank tell stories of their boyhood, all the while taking in the details of his own childhood experience.

Sibling rivalry. Sometimes, a kid just isn't ready for some little squirt to come along and invade his space, his own room. So what if there's an extra bed in the room; isn't that where the stuffed animals are supposed to sleep? How could a couple of otherwise sensible parents just bring a new kid home without even consulting their very own son? Still, a younger sibling can be in need of a big brother's guidance.

"Years later," Donald Davis remember of his childhood," I came to realize that when you come from a long-dammed-up Scots-Irish gene pool it is an okay thing to wish for something, but it is not an OK thing to get it."

If you have never ridden a mule along a 48-inch wide trail whose ledge drops off, in places, 700 feet to the Colorado River, straight down, you may have difficulty picturing the temporary insanity that leads otherwise responsible adults to sign away the remainder of their natural life expectancy just for the chance to see the Grand Canyon's natural beauty close-up.

Growing up in North Carolina, Donald Davis heard stories that came to America through Scots-Irish immigrants about a fellow named Jack who was so real that young Davis thought he was a distant relative or otherside-of-the-mountain neighbor. Now Davis knows that Jack is a universal legendary figure who, by various names, is found in nearly every culture.

Two new Appalachian stories from the author of the award winning Listening for the Crack of Dawn; an ideal introduction to contemporary storytelling for adults. Both stories are based upon real people. In the first, a disastrous birthday enables a child to learn more than an adult possibly could. In the second, two unusual people live their conviction that people are more important than things.

There was a time during Donald Davis's college freshman year when he wasn't really sure he wanted to claim his hometown of Sulpher Springs, North Carolina. But a boy by the name of Stanley Easter changed Davis's mind.

We all know someone like them: women whose lives revolve around their cats. Here Donald Davis paints verbal portraits of two very different women in his life who shared a fiercely unshakable sense of priorities. It was simply understood that the cats came first, and once you accepted that, everything else made perfect sense. Employing his trademark Carolina drawl, droll wit, and sharp observations, Davis is in top form here as he pays homage to these two remarkable women and their devotion to their feline families.

Screen Drive-In Theater hired a young Donald Davis to work his high school summers there. Employment at the Sulpher Springs Big-Screen Drive-In Theater consisted of working the concession stand, catching "slip-ins", and patrolling the back row to learn about love and life. The theater survives Davis and his friends' summer hijinks until Labor Day.

In this follow-up to the highly successful Kill Zone, former Marine sniper Kyle Swanson faces his most deadly enemy yet, a legendary enemy sniper working with a fringe Islamic organization that has created a terrifying new weapon of mass destruction In Baghdad's Green Zone, an Iraqi scientist is...

In the hills of Appalachia, humor and wisdom are mixed up forever in funny, wise stories that seem to grow more lustrous with each telling. Here are two of the best: "Uncle Frank Invents the Electron Microphone", Appalachian folk wisdom rolled into one of Davis' funniest stories; "Uncle Frank and the Crown Feed Boys", Davis' legendary Uncle Frank teaches a couple of traveling salesmen the lesson of their lives.

From the heart of the Appalachian Mountains come these folktales and folk rhymes for young children. In this recording of timeless children's tales, Davis, one of our most gifted storytellers, weaves for a new generation the same tales his grandmother told him as he sat in her lap so many years ago.

Traditional values abound in these hilarious stories from Appalachia: friendship, family, orderliness, humor, and delight in an especially inventive practical joke. In "Rainy Weather", a hound dog with more heart than sense wins everyone's admiration. "Uncle Frank Learns to Speak Polish" finds Davis' famous Uncle Frank making the most of a little foreign language. And, in "Uncle Frank Clean Up the Post Office", cleanliness is next to godliness, and it's also next to hilarity.

In rural North Carolina, in 1951, despite parental reassurances, a typhoid shot hurt. It hurt even more when the children saw who would be administering the shot: Miss Winnie, a large, dictatorial nurse who had been "especially built by the nursing school so she would never blow away in a hard wind".

*This program is abridged* An American general is captured in the Middle East. They threaten to behead him within days. But moments before he is rendered unconscious during the attack, the General realizes that his unseen captors are American. Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson, a top level Marine...

Old Man Hawkins was a larger-than-life character among deer hunters, or, more precisely, among tellers and hearers of tall tales. His self-proclaimed method of hunting deer by holding a mirror in one hand and his rifle in the other, pointing backward over a shoulder, was, he said, "to be fair to the deer". It was a story, Davis tells us, that would occupy his father on the drive to Grandma's house.

Grandma's house was a magical place, and in this vivid memoir, Donald Davis makes it possible for each of us to go back to our own grandma's kitchen, clutter room, living room, and to that immeasurable bed that seemed to swallow us whole. This selection also contains a traditional story Davis learned from his grandmother, one handed down through his family from generations who once lived in Scotland before coming to the Appalachian mountains, about the time that fortune-seeker named Jack made the king mad.

An eccentric schoolteacher and a widow-lady babysitter are the heroines in these new digital studio recordings of Donald Davis' two all-time most-requested stories. "It was the 42nd year she had taught fourth grade", yet there was nothing routine about Miss Daisy or her methods. Rather than settle for textbook work (Miss Daisy left textbooks in the big closet) she took her class on a year-long imaginary world tour.

There was a time during Donald Davis's college freshman year when he wasn't really sure if he wanted to claim his hometown of Sulpher Springs, North Carolina. But a boy by the name of Stanley Easter changed his mind. "The year after that," he recalls, "I did go home from college for Thanksgiving. In fact, I had now become so proud of where I was from that I could hardly wait to get home. I no longer had to lie about where I was from. The world of childhood was quickly becoming a dear place to visit."