Description

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Donald Davis was a young United Methodist minister when the telephone rang one morning. "It's your daddy," the caller said, "Mama just couldn't get him awake this morning. He is gone."

"A million questions about him began to line themselves up in my mind." Davis writes. "Where did he go to high school? I did not know." Did he get any education behind that? What were his early jobs, and where did he live then? I was now only twenty-eight, my father was dead, and I had been to young and immature to know to ask t=for the stories that would have filled out his life for me."

The surprise of a lifetime came when he called home and his recently departed father picked up the phone: "Hello! This is Joe Davis. What can I do for you today?"

That case of mistaken identity changed Donald Davis's outlook on the value of family and the need for story gathering. In the twenty-two years until his father's second death, he rarely let an opportunity pass to collect and cherish the stories of his life.

Cripple Joe is the happy result.

Davis tells how his father and an African-American hospital orderly quietly broke down racial barriers in their small mountain town.

He tells how his father employed his humane brand of justice on an eager young chemist whose experiments veered into manufacturing gunpowder, on sons who nearly burned a barn, and on teenagers who organized a disastrous coed camping trip.

And best of all, he tells how Joe Davis--a man known as "Banker Joe" for his work in the loan department but to a select few as "Cripple Joe"--turned a gruesome accident into an opportunity that broadened his world and that of his son.

About the Author

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Donald Davis grew up near Paynesville, North Carolina, and attended Davidson College and Duke Divinity School. He became a full-time storyteller in 1989 and is now onstage roughly three hundred times per year, headlining such gatherings as the National Storyteller Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival in Orem, Utah. He lives on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina.

Praise For…

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"From the photo on the cover ... to the strings of hilarious and touching stories, Donald Davis takes us on a journey. This is not just his story, however; as a master storyteller, he not only tells you about himself, but also strikes familiar notes that reach into each listener's memory bank."
— New York Journal of Books

"A well-told story is comfort food for the soul, and Davis's book is nourishing."
— Foreword Reviews

"Davis's nostalgic tales are filled with the stuff of fondly remembered boyhood....There's a little drama here but lots that is sweetly good-natured and often quite funny. Davis operates in the tradition of the late Jean Shepherd (A Christmas Story), though without Shepherd's occasional saltiness.... which would be inconsistent with the warm-hearted tone that works well for this homespun raconteur."
— Booklist

"Every time Donald Davis shares a story, he creates a miracle--a miracle of laughter, pure joy, and love."
— Jimmy Neil Smith, founder and past president of the International Storytelling Center, Jonesborough, TN