Moody, Ralph. Shaking the Nickel Bush. 1962. archive.org.

“Warm, funny, touching, pleasant, picaresque, on-the-road Americana, chock-full of charm.”

-Virginia Kirkus

Ralph Moody’s recollections of his pre-teen years began with Little Britches - a book so well beloved by the American reading public that since its publication in 1950 it has gone through 18 printings. In this new book Mr. Moody recalls his experiences when, at the age of nineteen, he was told he had only six months to live. In order to seize a faint chance for health, and in any case to relive his widowed mother of a burden and to have a last taste of what he enjoyed most, Ralph went to Arizona looking for work as a cowhand. But times were hard (it was during the recession following World War I) and Ralph and a buddy he met in the Tucson stockyards never did land the kind of jobs they were looking for. Yet Ralph - as readers of his several books of reminiscence have come to know - always seemed to grow tougher and bigger and more determined as challenges and obstacles became more difficult. On the point of starvation he made a grubstake by doing horse-falls for a low-budget movie outfit. Then, exploiting a native artistic talent, he set himself up as an itinerant sculptor and earned far more than he could have earned as a cowhand. At the end, in quite unforeseen circumstances, he is on this way back to his old home in Colorado. This is Moody at his best - humorous, wholesome, nostalgic, heartwarming.

I had a hankering to read The Dry Divide, but it wasn’t available and I was put on the waiting list for it, so I thought I would read the book right before it. Ralph Moody lived an interesting life, and he was an extremely talented writer.