Slippery Rock Gazette

Truth IS Stranger than Fiction 

Boomer Winfrey 

It seems like only yesterday, but it’s been over two decades since I first began sharing tales from Varmint County with the readers of the Slippery Rock Gazette.

The first editor of the Gazette, Benita O’Dell, had worked for me as a reporter for a small weekly newspaper and called me up one day to see if I would contribute a column to add a little variety to the trade news and advertising in the Slippery Rock.

I submitted a piece talking about some of the colorful characters I had encountered in two decades of small town journalism, but Benita decided some of the descriptions were a bit too colorful. She changed all the real names I had used to fictitious names such as “Judge Hugh Jass” and Sheriff “Smoky T. Bandit.” 

I decided to just go with the flow, invented colorful explanations for how these characters came by their unusual monikers and decided, since the names were all fiction, why not the stories?

That wasn’t hard to do. Since truth can often be stranger than fiction, I had plenty of good material at my fingertips, just needing a little stretching of the truth to spin a good yarn. In the next couple of months, I will give Gazette readers a look at the real Varmint County and some of the colorful characters and strange goings-on that inspired my tales.

First, there really is a place called Varmint County. It is a local nickname for an isolated, lawless area up in the mountains where Campbell and Claiborne counties, Tennessee and Bell County, Kentucky meet. Law enforcement has always considered the region no-man’s land since you can never be sure exactly where one sheriff’s responsibility ends and another begins. 

The old Claiborne Co. Jail

As a result, Varmint County has long been a haven for moonshiners and more recently, pot growers. One large marijuana patch was discovered by a highway patrol helicopter a few years back, planted on an old roadbed that straddled the Tennessee-Kentucky state line. It took ’em two weeks to figure out which state had the authority to seize the contraband plants.

Smack in the middle of Varmint County is the one vestige of civilization – the old mining and logging camp of Primroy. Once a bustling community, Primroy today consists of a handful of scattered homesteads, liberally festooned with “Keep Out” and “Trespassers will be shot” signs. A natural choice for the fictional Varmint County’s main town.

There are other Varmint County icons that are borrowed from reality. The infamous Dead Rat Tavern? It really existed over in Fentress County, Tennessee. The place wasn’t nearly as colorful as the name, being a pretty traditional watering hole owned by a fellow who belonged to a community organization that was working to regulate the strip mining of coal, called Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM).

He offered the back room of the tavern for local SOCM chapter meetings, causing no lack of soul searching among some of the more church-going members of the group before they could bring themselves to enter the building.

No small number of the fictional tales I have shared with readers over the years likewise had their roots in truth. An example would be the story of loopy Vietnam vet Cooter McBean.

Back in the 1980s, a Campbell County realtor named Paul Fields decided to create an upscale residential development on Norris Lake, complete with golf course, private airstrip, rental condos, a marina and of course, private lots for sale for upscale vacation homes.

When he surveyed his newly acquired real estate, Paul was inspired by the amount of wildlife he saw on the property, including numerous whitetail deer. He named the development Deerfield Resorts and commenced to break ground for all the improvements and roads. Only problem was, all that construction chased away the deer and other wildlife.

Paul, wishing to give potential customers the same sense of communing with nature he had experienced, simply went down to Georgia, purchased a herd of semi-tame deer from a game farm and relocated them to Deerfield, where visitors could practically walk up and hand-feed the does and fawns.

Enter the real life Cooter McBean, who lived alone in a run-down rental flat in nearby LaFollette. Somebody told this old Vietnam veteran about the tame deer out on the lake and the old boy decided a bit of fresh venison would make a tasty change in his diet.

“Cooter” called up the only cab company in LaFollette, Tennessee and got the driver to pick him up, all dressed in camo and lugging a 30.6 deer rifle, and deliver him to the front gate of Deerfield. He then slipped down into the woods, spotted one of Paul Fields’ pet deer, field dressed it on the spot and lugged the carcass back to a pay phone at the gate where he called the cabbie to come and pick him up.

“Cooter” and cabbie were in the process of arguing over whether the cab driver would allow the deer to be tied to the roof of the cab when the sheriff pulled up, called by one of Deerfield’s security guards. In the end, considering the old vet’s admirable war record and mental health issues, Paul Fields dropped charges against the hunter, the meat was donated to a food pantry, the rifle was seized and poor old Cooter went free with a warning.

Some of the other characters in Varmint County were modeled, more or less, after real people I’ve encountered. Doc Filstrup and his hapless son, Clyde Junior, were roughly inspired by my old family doctor when I grew up in Lake City, Tennessee. Doc Cox was a pill pusher of the old school, operating out of a little house with a nurse who was even older that he was.

Doc had also dabbled in local politics, serving as Lake City’s mayor for a while back in the 1930s and ’40s, and also on the county school board.

His son Clyde, the local mortician in town, also dabbled in politics on the county commission, or county court, as it was called in those days. Some wags in town ungraciously referred to the father and son as “Stab ’Em” Cox and “Slab ’Em” Cox.

The similarities mostly end there. Doc wasn’t always sipping bourbon like the fictional Doc Filstrup, although he frequently had to put down his smelly cigar before beginning to examine a patient.

There are many stories that I’ve related through the years that have their roots in real life events. Next month we’ll relate a few of the more humorous “truth is stranger than fiction” stories that inspired the Varmint County Chronicles.