John Ferguson

In the late 1980s, John Ferguson came up from Sonora, Kentucky in his white truck Snowflake to deliver something or other to the Seymour Canning Company.

He was in the office signing paperwork, when the clerk said, “I know one of them.”

He didn't know what she meant until she pointed at the side of his truck with its sign that read, “John Ferguson, Storytelling Truck Driver.” Mary knew that her choir director was also a storyteller.

A few minutes later, John was on the phone with me, introducing himself. We met for coffee the next time he came through Seymour. That was the beginning of a long friendship.

John told me about Lee and Joy Pennington who ran the Louisville Storytellers and organized the Corn Island Storytelling Festival in Louisville each summer. Would I like to go? I explained that I never had much money and driving that far, staying in a motel and paying to get into the festival was just more than I could afford. 

No problem. John was coming up through Seymour, delivering goods there, then going up to the potato growing area around Antigo, Wisconsin to get a load of potatoes that he would then take down to Nashville, Tennessee to the Frito-Lay plant. He would pick me up on his way to get the potatoes. I got to see the potato business first hand, how the potatoes were picked, cleaned and bagged. I also got to see the trucking business from the inside of his semi.  We went south and for the first time, I got to see Kentucky.

John took me to his house to meet his family. But “house” is not a good description of where they lived. It seems years before his wife Carol complained about raising her three children in a crowded house trailer. She told him that if he didn't do something about it she was going to move into the big grain bin on their property.

So John, being John, looked at the grain bin and began to take measurements. It took a long, long time, but that grain bin became a round house, with four bedrooms and three bathrooms, a stone fireplace, a modern kitchen and not a square or rectangular room in the whole place. It is a marvel. The exterior walls are limestone rock, the stones carefully chosen for the fossils embedded in them.

What I loved the most was what was once the vent on the top of the grain bin. John raised it and created his study, a round room on the top floor with round windows that looked out on the surrounding countryside. His Amish neighbors often drove past in their buggies. 

Carol and John were both involved in the Corn Island Festival. Carol ran the concessions, John worked on parking and wherever he was needed. I helped out where I could.

The festival began on the Louisville Belle, a paddle-wheel steamer. We got a cruise on the Ohio River and saw the sights of Louisville. The storytelling was in the salon. It was on the steamer that I began to hear the professionals storytellers. By the end of the week, I would hear tellers from around the United States and the world and make friends with some of them.

The next day the festival moved to Tom Sawyer Park where we could wander from one area to another looking for more and more stories. My mind was filled with the tales and their craft. It was an education for this still novice teller. 

The last night of the festival we were at Long Run Park. People by the thousands filled the hillsides with blankets where they spread with fine foods and wines. They came with flashlights, too. When the program began, Lee Pennington asked them to shine them to make a light-show in this natural amphitheater.. Then the ghost telling began. John, who had been parking cars, led me to the very front of the audience where we sat on a blanket and listened as one by one, the tellers did their best to scare us witless. The best teller by far was Roberta Brown, a little woman with the sweet soft voice who to this day can send shivers up my spine whenever I think about her stories.

Before and after the festival, John and I went to the schools in the area. The money I earned paid for all the expenses of the trip.

So it went for years. I went down the Corn Island Festival, stayed with the Fergusons, ate Carol's southern cooking, became more and more proficient in my telling and enjoyed thee friendship of the tellers. I found out that John kept his eye out for storytellers around the country, connecting with them wherever he drove his truck. He was the goodwill ambassador for storytelling. His work with schools, telling the children stories and teaching them about trucking by letting them climb all over Snowflake got him the coveted title of USA Trucker of the Year.

 He and Carol raised three children, had grandchildren. In time, Snowflake grew old and refused to run. John started a new career as a hypnotist and wrote a book, but then his kidneys gave out. In the end he was on dialysis, waiting for a kidney.

I hadn't seen John and Carol for some years, but thought I would this winter when I go south to Mississippi on another tour. It was not to be.

John Ferguson, the man who picked me up with a load of potatoes and showed me the world, died two nights ago.