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Show all 1 Sales As told to: I T Q FRANK E. t!d SCOTT KAGAN jj WATSON The Absent-Minded Carpenter XTTUE-V Charles G. Grant, for- mer Ohio newspaper man, was a boy in Columbus he knew a carpenter car-penter Danied J. Elmer Putterbaugh who was just about the best in the business. No job was ever too big for him to tackle, according to Mr. . Grant. When J. Eimer took the contract con-tract to build a big church over near Washington Court House, he got so interested in his work that he forgot to stop. So the main aisle was so ions that they had to have two preachers one to stand at the altar and marry folks and the other to stand at the front door and christen their first baby as they came out. Another time J. Elmer's absent-mindedness absent-mindedness got him in trouble. He was shingling the roof on a barn when a thick fog came sweeping up the valley from the Ohio river. J. Elmer kept right on shingling and without noticing what he was doing shingled 26 feet of fog before be-fore he noticed his mistake. This turned out to be pretty serious se-rious because he fell and broke one of his legs off clean when he tried to get down. As a result be had to have a wooden leg, but when Elmer reached down to scratch his knee cap he'd get a splinter in his finger. That made him so angry that he'd grab his saw and saw his wooden leg right off. It broke him up buying new wooden legs. At last he went to a pauper's grave. "But they had a hard time keeping keep-ing him in it," declares Mr. Grant. "You see, J. Elmer was something of a crossroads philosopher just full of wise saws. His ghost used ne of these to saw his way out of the pine box in which they buried him. Folks got pretty tired of having his ghost chasing around at night. So they finally captured It, enclosed It in a box of chilled steel, and from that time on there has been nothing but frozen silence out of J. Elmer Putterbaugh." Western Newspaper Union. |