I have a personal library with hundreds of books, magazines, and newspaper clippings, plus a few video tapes, CDs, and DVDs of material about the Ozarks and Missouri and Arkansas history. I use the material for background and research for the freelance articles I write for regional periodicals. While cleaning the shelves and moving books around the other day, I came across a book printed in 1978 that I had forgotten about. It's called "Bittersweet Country," and features about 25 percent of the material published between 1973 and 1978 in the regional periodical called "Bittersweet" that was produced by students at Lebannon High School. Noted Ozarkian educator, historian, and writer Ellen Gray Massey was the teacher at Lebannon High School that guided the students as they produced the magazine for an Ozarks history course. The magazine was published until about the early to mid 80s. This magazine and the book have long been considered valuable source material about Ozarks folkways. I think in just the last few years someone sold their collection of the entire Bittersweet magazines produced for about $300 on ebay. Pretty dang cheap if you ask me...I wish I could have got that one! So, what I guess I'm saying here is that if you come across an old Bittersweet magazine or the Bittersweet Country book, take a good look! I've been looking through the book over the last week or so and had forgotten how great it really is. Anyone else here familiar with Bittersweet? What memories do you have of the publication, and what else can you add to this discussion?
I do remember the Bittersweet magazine. I thumbed through a few issues when I was growing up as a teenager in the 70's. Seemed like our school had a subscription to the magazine and maybe saw a few issues around the house. I wish I would have paid more attention to them back in the day, but the old way of life didn't concern me much then. Today, it would literally be a whole new story.
I bought about 20 of them from that era, and after I had read them, I passed them along to my Dad, he must still have them, or just some intruiging articles from them somewhere.
I got them in a lot on eBay for around $1.00 a piece if I remember correctly.
I bought one after reading this on Amazon for $0.99 that was the 1978 edition that Junior spoke of. I have it in my stack of things to read...under a few others. To see where my other interests lie, or what my other Ozark/ non-Ozark reading is see:
http://sdcfans.com/forums/index.php?topic=1802.0 (http://sdcfans.com/forums/index.php?topic=1802.0)