THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, November 29, 1995 TAG: 9511290547
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
Here is a book, ``Memoirs of a Farm Boy'' by William H. Turner, to move the heart.
A one-time dentist on the Eastern Shore, he has become a sculptor of international renown, working in bronze and other material to catch the look and the spirit of wildlife he has absorbed from childhood.
Whether you're farmer, hunter, fisherman, environmentalist, or one who can take or leave nature, passages in Turner's book will make you smile, laugh and want to cry.
He will sign books Saturday from noon to 2 p.m. at Turn the Page in Norfolk on Colley Avenue. A handsome publication with drawings by the author, it costs $25.
You learn things from Turner who taught a while in York County and earned a degree in anthropology at the University of Virginia and in dentistry from the Medical College of Virginia. Along the way he was an insurance adjuster in Virginia Beach.
Did you know Bantam hens make grand foster parents? ``I think they would hatch alligator eggs and raise the offspring if they were given the chance,'' Turner writes.
Once he put two Canada geese eggs under a broody Bantam. She turned the eggs dutifully though they were four times the size of her own and took longer to incubate.
After they hatched, all went well until the busy goslings found a pond on which they embarked while their flustered mother stood at the edge and clucked frantically trying to entice them back to dry land.
Escapades of his boyhood will remind you of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. His book is worthy of a place on the shelf with them.
In one yarn, Turner and three friends tame a bully, a newcomer much older and larger than they. He takes them singly and makes their lives miserable until the four join to teach him a lesson.
The fourth try, they bind him belly up to the railroad tracks just before a train is due to come through and watch from cover while the train roars by on the opposite track. It aged if it did not mature him. No longer was he a bully.
Robert Rockwell, famed taxidermist from the American Museum of Natural History, retired to the Shore and taught teenage Turner how to skin and stuff animals and birds and fired his resolve to become a sculptor.
The book opens: ``To be truthful, Buzzards' Glory, later known as Persimmon Tree, was not a town or even a village. It was merely a vague ill-defined area where one dirt road intercepted another.
``These dirt roads were formerly just wagon tracks and, before that, Indian trails. There were two grocery stores in this area, a parttime barber, a church, and about ten houses within a five hundred yard radius of the meeting of the two roads. That was it.''
That will give you a taste of his style and the pleasure to be derived from reading it. ILLUSTRATION: Drawing
Illustration by WILLIAM H. TURNER
A determined Bantam hen will keep her brood under wing no matter how
large - or even too large - they get.
by CNB