The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 91: A Potty Mouth With a Secret

Episode Date: February 13, 2018

Do you want to know the bleeping secret or not!

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Matt Stewart was 20 feet in the air, paintbrush in hand, when a pickup truck skidded to a stop behind his rickety ladder. Out of the driver's side left a foul-mouthed man named David, apoplectic with rage and filled with secrets. Who the bleep do you think you are, you son of a bleep, bleepin up my mother bleep and billboard? Matt Stewart climbed down the ladder and told David to get back in his truck and keep driving if he knew what was good for him.

David told Matt to bleep himself and the horse he rode in on. Bob Gibson climbed out of David's truck with a big smile and a shotgun, hoping perhaps to diffuse the situation with a show of superior force, at which point Matt Stewart dropped his paintbrush, pulled a 45-calibber handgun from his belt, and shot Bob Gibson straight through the heart. Holy bleep, said David. Have you lost your mother bleep in mind? Matt Stewart responded by pointing his pistol at David,

head. Any last words, Mr. Big Shot? To which David replied, I wouldn't waste my last words on a cowardly chicken bleep like you. Not the wisest tone, perhaps, to take with an armed man who just murdered your boss, but David had never been one to mince words or back away from a fight. He did, however, have the good sense to duck as Matt Stewart pulled the trigger again. The 45 roared, and the heavy slug knocked his hat from his head, lodging in the engine block of his pickup truck with a resounding thunk. The entire situation was absurd, but typical of life in hell's half acre. David and Matt ran competitive gas stations on opposite ends of town. David had erected some billboards on the highway that read, gas and food this way. Matt had altered the arrows on

David's billboards to direct motorists away from David's gas station and towards his own. Now, Bob Gibson was dead, and David was diving for cover behind his pickup truck as Matt Stewart tried to complete two murders in one afternoon. Not so tough now, are you, Mr. Big Shot? David replied with something unseemly about Matt Stewart's affection for goats and peered underneath the truck, watching his rival's boots move slowly toward him. When the 45 roared again, the front tire exploded, and David scrambled toward the rear. When the rear tire exploded, David scrambled back toward the front, calculating his odds of survival.

Not great. But, then again, not bad either, because David knew something that Matt Stewart did not. David had a secret. After his father's death, the seven-year-old David hunted and foraged for food while his mother worked full-time. time. Then he'd fry it up and serve it to his siblings, usually with enough creative seasoning to make it taste like something it wasn't. By the time he was 13, David's rabbit stew was first class. His squirrel surprise was delectable, and his cornbread was to die for. But David knew his skill in the kitchen made his mother feel inadequate. So David had always kept his culinary

talents a secret. When the windshield shattered above his head, David called Matt Stewart a gutless bleep sucker and a pusillimonious bleephole. But when the next round sailed into his radiator, sending a column of white steam spewing high into the air, David remained silent, focusing on Matt Stewart's boots and reflecting upon a few other secrets he'd kept over the years. On the bloody battlefields of Cuba, David had fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt. Afterwards, when he applied for a job on the railroad, he didn't mention the army, threw him out for lying about his age. He was only 15. After that, when he applied for a job selling life insurance, he didn't mention he'd been fired from the railroad for beating up an engineer. After that,

when he applied to law school, he didn't mention the fact that the life insurance company had fired him for beating up a claims adjuster. And when David moved across the border to run ferry boats up and down the Mississippi River, he failed to mention he'd been disbarred for beating up his own client in a court of law. From under the chassis, David watched Matt Stewart's boots, step over Bob Gibson's dead body, and creep back toward the front of the truck. What a bleep and shame, thought David. Bob Gibson had believed David was perfectly suited to run a shell station in a place like hell's half acre, and he was right. Not only could David handle the rowdy crowd of late-night troublemakers that liked to drink and loiter in the parking lot, he began to

cook for them. In the service station's tiny kitchen, David had recreated the secret recipes he had concocted as a young boy. And when his customers asked what made everything on his menu so doggone delicious, David just smiled and shrugged. That was a secret, a secret that turned out to be very bad for Matt Stewart's business. That's why Matt was vandalizing David's billboards. That's why he was now determined to kill his rival. And that's exactly what would have happened, if not for David's other secret, a 38 caliber secret, fully loaded, cocked, and currently pointed at the space Matt Stewart would occupy the moment he stepped around the front of the truck. According to the local paper, the confrontation was cinematic. David and Matt fired at the same time, but Matt missed, while David,

quote, unloaded hot lead into Matt Stewart's shoulder with true aim, knocking his assailant to the ground. In the end, Matt Stewart survived the shootout, but was convicted of Bob Gibson's murder. Bob Gibson was ultimately avenged by his own family who paid off the local deputy to murder Matt Stewart in jail. That was justice in hell's half acre. As for David, he went back to cursing and cooking

at what soon would become the most popular service station in Corbyn County. In time, his food would become more popular than his gasoline, and his name more popular than the billion-dollar empire he started. Why? Because David knew how to keep his secret recipe a secret. It's interesting, though. In the hundreds of commercials in which he ultimately appeared, there was never any mention of David's other secret, the one he kept concealed under his jacket, nor was there any trace of the filthy language he loved to employ with such artistic relish. Pity, if there were any truth in advertising, America would today recall the courtly gentleman in the white suit who like to fire off a few rounds while inviting customers to come on down and see what makes my mother bleepin' chicken so finger-licking

mother-bleeping good. The point is, without his 38 caliber secret, there would be no secret recipe, no mysterious 11 herbs and spices, because the man who made Kentucky proud would have never lived long enough to receive the honorary rank for which he's best remembered today, the rank that made Harland David Sanders, the colonel. Anyway, that's the way I heard it. If you're a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility and your machinery isn't working right, Granger knows you need to understand what's wrong as soon as possible. So when a conveyor motor falters,

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