Always be a bobwhite

Long live Mr. Bobwhite. Nothing has stimulated the 70 years of this old man’s memory as much as the great editorial on July 24. Bobwhite has been the name of this particular quail for as long as I can remember.

One of the most precious of my memories is sitting on the porch of my grandparents’ home located way out on Highway 10, late in the evening, while my grandfather tried to teach us young’uns how to call up Mr. Bobwhite. With cupped hands, blowing into the space formed by his thumbs, he would call the quail close enough to the porch so we could actually see them. They didn’t stay long with rowdy kids on the porch, but we did see them.

So now these highly educated fellers want to tell us there is no such thing as a bobwhite quail. That’s as bad as telling us a snake-doctor is really a dragonfly or that a mosquito-hawk is a crane-fly! Makes a man wonder if some of these educated folks have a real life as they go about spending their lives trying to make us all Latin-speaking entomologists.

I own several topographic maps that identify the place where all the radio and television towers are located west of Little Rock as “Shinall” Mountain. Now they’ve gone and changed the name of the nearby rich-folks community to something that sounds like a cheap French perfume. What’s next, changing the name of our fair city to La Petit Roche?

Thank you, Mr. Editor, for sticking to your guns. We are what we are. Proud to be an “Arkansawyer” who knows the actual names of wildlife and not what a Latin scholar with a whole alphabet behind his name wants them to be.

DANNY DRAPER Little Rock