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Heartwarming, humorous, and entertaining memories of a boy from the Missouri Ozarks in the early 1900s. Every member of the family will enjoy reading about the exploits of young Otto: the country medicine of Grandma Benton; horse trading techniques; the "moonshine" stills back in the woods; and the Revenue man who never came back! Even if you aren't a descendant from these early families, you will love the stories of the Missouri Ozarks and the early years in Idaho. Stunning photos of the Missouri countryside draw you into the stories.

Time is the Great Depression.1930’s.Unmarried teen-ager chooses life for her unborn son despite many difficulties. .Cross-eyed and pudgy, he is teased a lot (hence book’s title) .Mother must give him up, elderly grandparents are only choice. They proceed to raise him through trials and errors, some serious, some humorous. Conservative farm folks from the Ozarks, they apply old fashioned rules of character which shape his life, while others in the little Ozark town keep him on the proper path. At the end of the story he is on his way to college, first person in his family to do so and is reunited with his mother in the night of her death.

The Ozarks of the mid-1800s was a land of divisions. The uplands and its people inhabited a geographic and cultural borderland straddling Midwest and west, North and South, frontier and civilization, and secessionist and Unionist. As civil war raged across the region, neighbor turned against neighbor, unleashing a generation of animus and violence that lasted long after 1865. The second volume of Brooks Blevins's history begins with the region's distinctive relationship to slavery. Largely unsuitable for plantation farming, the Ozarks used enslaved persons on a smaller scale or, in some places, not at all. Blevins moves on to the devastating Civil War years where the dehumanizing, personal nature of Ozark conflict was made uglier by the predations of marching armies and criminal gangs. Blending personal stories with a wide narrative scope, he examines how civilians and soldiers alike experienced the war, from brutal partisan warfare to ill-advised refugee policies to women's struggles to safeguard farms and stay alive in an atmosphere of constant danger. The war stunted the region's growth, delaying the development of Ozarks society and the processes of physical, economic, and social reconstruction. More and more, striving uplanders dedicated to modernization fought an image of the Ozarks as a land of mountaineers and hillbillies hostile to the idea of progress. Yet the dawn of the twentieth century saw the uplands emerge as an increasingly uniform culture forged, for better and worse, in the tumult of a conflicted era.