If the city of Greenwood ever needs a new name, a suggestion is "Fred, Mississippi."
That's the recommendation of "CBS Sunday Morning" correspondent and author Bill Geist in his new book "Way Off the Road," now available at Turnrow Book Co.
Geist serves up hilarious and intriguing tales of small-town America garnered from a 5,600-mile road trip across the nation.
Experiences include a visit to a rural Kansas town - "I asked our motel desk clerk for the name of the best restaurant in the area. After mulling it over, he answered: 'I'd have to say the Texaco, 'cuz the Shell don't have no microwave'" - and also to a little place called Greenwood.
Geist writes that the former "Cotton Capital of the World … had been in steady decline for the better part of half a century when Fred (Carl), a local builder, came up with the preposterous notion that we the people wanted big, hulking, fire-breathing restaurant ranges in our home kitchens."
Carl's Viking Range Corp. now employs 1,300 local folks and sells his "stainless steel behemoths" for around $300 million a year, he says.
Geist also mentions downtown renewal projects funded by Viking and tourism created by pilgrimages to the Alluvian hotel and Viking Cooking School by stove groupies.
He even talks about Fred's determination to date his wife, Margaret, in high school. Since her parents said Carl was too old to date her, "he paid a younger boy a six-pack of beer to pick her up for him - for two years."
