Hometown authors

You might say Jim Buford and Cleveland Harrison just like to talk. The South boasts a rich legacy of storytelling, and Auburn is no exception. Two of those storytellers are Buford and Harrison, and each has recently published a book.

Both are former Auburn University professors, but that's strictly coincidental. These fellows like to gab, and these books aren't academic tomes. Buford and Harrison are the sort who will call you up on the front porch and ask you to sit a spell, then fill you on all the latest gossip. You can tell that from their books.

Buford's book is "The House Across the Road and Other Stories," and his gossip is all about the fictional inhabitants of Tucker's Mill, population around 350, located in the Piedmont of East Alabama in the 1950s. Buford admits he draws upon his experiences growing up in Milltown, a tiny rural community in Chambers County, in writing the book.

"There were 22 students in my class," he notes.

The book is a collection of short stories, several of them involving a young boy named Ashley. Buford describes Ashley as an improved version of himself, one who "isn't afraid of heights."

"People generally displayed the traditional virtues of family loyalty, a strong work ethic, reverence and patriotism," he says. "But they also held to certain beliefs and practices that people today would find unacceptable. My objective was to be true to the period. That's the way we were, including me."

Harrison's book, "A Little Rock Boyhood: Growing Up in the Great Depression," is unabashedly a memoir, recalling his years in Arkansas' capital city. Harrison eventually became a professor of theatre at Auburn, and in the book he paints a picture of a boy who went to movies, rode streetcars, camped with the Boy Scouts and made friends across lines of age, race, gender and class.

At the same time, he describes how he discovered his true calling through elocution lessons, writing plays, singing on the radio, performing in glee clubs and choirs and acting.

At Little Rock Senior High School, Harrison was elected president of the student body, met the girl he would marry and established friendships that would last a lifetime. All is recalled with what one reviewer calls an "eidetic memory" coupled with lucid, graceful prose.

Buford's book is equally readable, tinged with Buford's wry humor. He says he made the characters up, but had role models for characters readers will find appealing.

"As Garrison Keillor might have put it, all the women were strong, all the men were good looking, and all the children were above average," he says. "So for characters that people won't like, I had to make them up."

When asked if there weren't any mean-spirited types in Milltown, Buford hesitates.

"Maybe so, but you won't read about them in these stories," he says. "I don't want to get sued."

For his part, Harrison says that as he grows older he meditates more often about the past and finds it important to write those memories down.

"My memories bubble up every day when some event reminds me of the past," he says. "I am not alone in this habit, but my unusually strong visual and auditory memory works overtime to bring back events from my past…Images of people, places and events from my early life are even better than some I have from more recent times."

Harrison says as a professor, he really didn't have time to do this kind of writing.

"When I came to Auburn, there were only three people on the theatre faculty, and we did six plays in two semesters," he says. "Everybody kept pretty darn busy. We were building the new Telfair Theatre, and I made trips looking at other theaters. It pretty well used up my time."

In the evenings, Harrison says, he was always at the theater. He left home at 6:40 p.m. and was there till 10 p.m.

"We always quit at 10 p.m., even if we were in the middle of a word," he says. "And when I wasn't directing, I was usually reading plays to see what we wanted to do next. It was a 24-hour-a-day job."

When he retired, Harrison says, he had to get his first book out of his system. That was a recreation of his Army days, recounted in "Unsung Valor: A GI's Story of World War II." The critically acclaimed memoir won the 2001 Forrest C. Pogue Prize of the Eisenhower Center of American Studies.

Like Harrison, Buford's "real" writing career was on hold when he taught at Auburn. He says he instructed students about how to put numbers in a computer and come up with tables and graphs.

Did Buford do any writing at Auburn?

"Yes. I wrote textbooks and articles that had tables and graphs," he says.

Buford admits the textbooks and articles were "pretty boring," so he took early retirement and established a consulting practice. His first book of creative writing was published a short time later. Buford's works include the essay collections "The Kindness of Strangers," "The Best of Times," "Pie in the Sky" and a social history, "When the Lights Came On."

"All my books express my belief that while answers to the really big questions continue to elude us, ordinary life experiences may contain a hint of truth and a glimmer of meaning, typically overlooked by people who have all the answers," Buford says.

Harrison is somewhat less prolific than Buford. He spent eight years writing "A Little Rock Boyhood," which was not created in chronological order. He wrote in the morning after he and his wife, Tumpy, took their daily walk. Harrison's not sure he's got another book in him, and Tumpy is the reason why.

"After ‘Unsung Valor was published,' I said I thought I'd like to put down memories of my childhood," he recalls. "Tumpy didn't think much of that because it would keep me chained to a computer. You're gonna get me in trouble by even asking me to think about it."

"The House Across the Road" was published by Mindbridge Press and is available for $14.95 at amazon.com and locally at the Gnu's Room and Image House. More information is available at bufordbooks.com.

"A Little Rock Boyhood" was published by the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies in Little Rock. The book can be purchased for $29.95 from local and national booksellers and through the University of Arkansas Press in Fayetteville, which is the distributor for Butler Center Books. For more information go to www.butlercenter.org.