Road Apples by Tim Sanders
April 25, 2011

The Hyperbolist

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DeWayne Hooks had always been an incorrigible liar. When he was caught varnishing the truth, he never surrendered to factual evidence, but only forged stubbornly ahead with his load of horsefeathers. Truth was a valuable commodity to DeWayne, and he took every opportunity not to waste it.

Some people said that he must have spent a lot of time crafting and memorizing his lies so that they’d flow naturally into his conversation. Others argued that someone who’d worked on his lies would most certainly have come up with material more believable. This second group felt that DeWayne had a condition not unlike Tourette’s Syndrome, except that instead of involuntarily blurting out obscenities at random intervals, DeWayne simply blurted falsehoods.

I’d heard of DeWayne for years, but never met him until last week. I am a journalist, after all, and there is nothing so fascinating to a journalist as an individual just chock full of tall tales. We think that perhaps we can borrow one or two.

Mr. Hooks lives in a mobile home in the Slackland community. He is a balding man in his early 70s, and to look at him you’d think he was as honest as a fence post. I’d made an appointment to talk to him about a guitar he’d advertised for sale in the paper.

It was a Yamaha acoustic guitar, and looked as though it had seen better days. But since I knew nothing about stringed instruments at all, it might as well have been a Stradivarius. I was not really interested in purchasing a guitar, only in eliciting a few of Mr. Hooks’ tall tales. As it turned out, that wasn’t difficult.

He was asking $49.95 for his guitar, but it was worth much more, due to the fact that it was the very first guitar ever owned by Chet Atkins. He got it from Chet when they were touring together back in the ‘50s. “We were very dear friends,” he said, “until Chet went into the worm business. That was when I lost all respect for him.”

“Worm business?” I said.

“He had a worm farm in north Alabama, and he supplied worms to Wendy’s for their hamburgers until 2008, when the FDA found out about it and shut him down.”

I told him I thought Atkins had died several years earlier, but he didn’t miss a beat. “It wasn’t Chet personally who they shut down, because like you said he’d already passed. But his son Trace had took over, and he was the one who they nailed. I’ve known plenty of famous people. When I was a Baptist deacon, Merle Haggard used to help me get my Sunday School lessons together. He was a very spiritual man.
And speaking of spiritual men, back in 1966 I talked to Dr. Martin Luther King for two hours on an airplane trip from Huntsville to Los Angeles. Did you know that God had revealed to him in a dream that something bad would happen in Memphis. I told him, ‘Martin, when you have a dream like that you ought to include it in one of your speeches.’ He said that was a first rate idea, and jotted ‘I have a dream’ on the back of an envelope. I don’t want to brag or anything, but that’s where that line came from.”

I told DeWayne I was sure that King made the “I have a dream” speech much earlier than 1966, and he said he wasn’t very good with dates, so maybe that plane trip was earlier. He added that Dr. King and his whole family, including his brother B.B. King, were very musical. “We sang all four verses of ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ as that plane landed. Everybody on the plane sang along. I wish I had a recording of that–it was beautiful.”

The music topic inspired another tale, this one about how the Bellamy Brothers had performed at DeWayne’s farewell party when he joined the Army back in 1978. He’d been introduced to them by Johnny Cash, who often helped him in his church youth work. “I kept Johnny sober for three months back then, and June always said that if it wasn’t for DeWayne Hooks, there weren’t no telling where poor old Johnny would of wound up.”

The subject of youth ministries just naturally reminded him of his years as a high school teacher, which had led to his selection to accompany the other astronauts on the Challenger space mission, but he’d had to turn the offer down due to a dream he’d had in which George C. Scott told him not to go. “Being an ex-serviceman, and an officer at that, I was way more qualified than any of the other candidates, but I’m glad now that I turned them down.”

Then he launched into a fine story about how he’d been raised next door to Roy Acuff. “There’ve been lots of great singers,” he said, “like Elvis and Tom Jones, but old Tom certainly weren’t no Roy Acuff.” I told him he had a point there, and he added that “If you ever heard Roy Acuff, then you know he never needed no women throwing their nasty panties up on stage while he was singing ‘Great Speckled Bird.’” By the time I’d regained my equilibrium and rid myself of the image of a pair of panties the size of a large, frilly tarpaulin covering both Roy and the stage at the Grand Ole Opry, he’d shifted gears again. He was recalling the time he helped the Statler Brothers sew Minnie Pearl’s finger back on, when his brother Euclid walked in.

When Euclid heard “Statler Brothers” he saw his chance. “I’ll see your Statler Brothers, and raise you a Cornelius Brothers and throw in a Sister Rose,” he said. DeWayne came right back with a very touching reminiscence about the late Dale Earnhardt Sr., and Euclid raised again, this time with a duet he and Richard Petty once had in a bar in Talladega.

DeWayne saw the Petty duet and raised with a lively Bear Bryant banjo duel. At that point Euclid said “Too rich for my blood, you weasel! I fold!” In a moment they were both on the floor, kicking and twisting noses. I decided it was time to go.

As I headed for my car, Euclid Hooks limped after me and asked if I’d heard the one about his brother and “his two stinking university degrees.” I told him I hadn’t, and he said it was just as well, since DeWayne hadn’t even gotten his GED until 2007. “I like to play with him, but sometimes he gets his back up and that’s when the fight usually breaks out.”

I’d hoped to get some good material for a column, but it turned out to be a wasted afternoon.