George Jones and his rider-mowers.
Retrospective find of the month:
I’ve found a number of “alkie antics” news stories involving DUIs and rider-mowers, but none involving a rider-mower without a DUI—until reading up on country icon George Jones (see “Sometimes, it takes an addict,” below). His second wife, Shirley Corley (to whom he was married from 1954 to 1968) thought she made it impossible for him to drive to the nearest town, eight miles away, to buy liquor—whenever she left, she took the keys to all their cars. In his autobiography, I Lived to Tell it All, Jones recalls being unable to find any keys, until he looked out the window. The way he describes it: “There, gleaming in the glow, was that ten-horsepower rotary engine under a seat. A key glistening in the ignition. I imagine the top speed for that old mower was five miles per hour. It might have taken an hour and a half or more for me to get to the liquor store, but get there I did.” Incredibly, that wasn’t the only time he rode his mower over a long distance in his quest for booze. In her 1979 autobiography, country idol Tammy Wynette, his wife from 1968 to 1975, recalled waking at 1 AM to find her husband gone: “I got into the car and drove to the nearest bar 10 miles away. When I pulled into the parking lot there sat our rider-mower right by the entrance. He’d driven that mower right down a main highway. He looked up and saw me and said, ‘Well, fellas, here she is now. My little wife, I told you she’d come after me.’”