Read Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman for Free Online Page A

and my scalp felt tight and drawn.
    What could I do to escape my fate, the electric chair at dawn?
    I seized the bars, and shrieked, and wailed, like a soul who is lost in hell.
    But the only voice that answered me was the mid-night toll of a bell.

    Photos from
The Spectator,
1954.
(C OURTESY OF HST C OLLECTION )

    Airman Thompson at Eglin Air Force Base.
(P HOTO BY G EORGE T HOMPSON; COURTESY OF HST C OLLECTION )

    Thompson (shown here with Air Force buddies) became a legend at Eglin for both his journalistic skills and his nonconformist attitude.
(C OURTESY OF HST C OLLECTION )

1956
    YEAR OF THE MONKEY … UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU … BIRTH OF A SPORTSWRITER … A NEGRO VISION OF HELL … WELCOME TO FAT CITY … DOOMED LOVE IN TALLAHASSEE …
    The story of Joe Louis is an old one; the story of the star which has out-lived its light; the soaring meteor which failed to explode in mid-air at the height of its climb, but plummeted down to the same earth with the millions who, moments before, had stared wide-eyed at its beauty.
    The world likes to look up at its stars. A meteor which falls out of the skies not only is dead when it hits, but digs its own grave by the force of its fall. Just as the crowd stares curiously at a fallen meteor and then wanders off, the crowd is beginning to thin around Joe Louis. He stands painfully bewildered in a world which he never took the trouble to understand. The applause of the worshipping thousands has died into the whispering of the curious few. The end is inevitable.
    â€”Hunter S. Thompson, “Fame Is a One-Way Ticket,”
Command Courier, December 17, 1956
    TO GERALD “CHING” TYRRELL :
    Tyrrell was a childhood friend of Thompson’s, dubbed “Ching” when he joined the HAWKS Athletic Club after returning from China, where his father had been British consul general until the fall of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in 1949. Ching had attended the same three schools as Thompson: I. N. Bloom, Highland Junior High, and Louisville Male High School. They shared a deep interest in American literature forged through the Athenaeum Literary Association. At this time, Ching was an undergraduate at Yale University. Thompson had graduated from Scott Air Force Base’s electronics program in June 1956 and was assigned to Eglin Air Proving Ground in Pensacola, Florida.
    September 22, 1956
Eglin AFB [Air Force Base]
Fort Walton Beach, Florida
    AALLLLLLOOOOOOOOO……!
    From out of the most deserted and god-forsaken spot in the Continental United States, winding its lonely way over the sand dune and through the swamp grass; comes the mournful cry of a man in the throes of mortal agony. With the return of the football season, come memories of people, parties and far-off places: the cold and clammy feel of a beer can clutched in my hand, the witless screech of the crowd at a football game, the memory of soft brown eyes and bubbling laughter, the sight of a young and palpitating breast; all these and many more race through my mind as I sit at my desk and pound out this missive which will bridge the gap from me to the mythical world of gay laughter and tinkling glasses. Ah me … when the winter is over … I can no longer repress a desperate cry of thirst and need.
    With this opening, I offer a capsule of my first feelings of this wretched Saturday afternoon. This is the first weekend I haven’t made the trip to Tallahassee and I feel like an opium-eater undergoing the “cure.” Each weekend since late July has been spent in the company of a young and passionatelass 1 and, as Saturday night approaches, my palms begin to sweat profusely and my imagination runs amuck, causing me to leer at some of these fabulously beautiful WAFs. However, with an iron self-control, born of recent necessity, I will get a steel grip on myself and begin thinking about next week’s sports page.
    Perhaps I’d