Alligators Under My Bed and Other Nebraska Tales

Alligators Under My Bed and Other Nebraska Tales is the true story of growing up in mid 20th Century rural Nebraska. Jim Hager weaves humorous, evocative, and educational stories from his childhood for generations of modern city folk, school children, and others like him who lived to tell their tales. Jim grew up on a farm before the Rural Electrification Project changed the face of Midwestern life. On the Hager farm, they milked their cows by hand and stored perishables in a kerosene refrigerator. As a child, Jim rode an oversized bike to his one-room school house for elementary school. Later, his family moved to charming Red Cloud, where Jim was by turns a paper boy, farm hand, film projectionist and painter. Like all 1950s teenagers, he played on the football team and cruised around in his hot rod. He even encountered the history of a place which was once author Willa Cather's hometown. Filled with dangerous, mischievous boyhood escapades and life-changing events, Hager shares the experiences that grew him into a man amongst the fields of South Eastern Nebraska. He gets caught hanging by his fingers out of a window ? buck naked. He teaches his mother to drive before he has a license. He drives to Kansas with his high school buddies to buy beer, and ends a cross-country road trip by scaling the side of Crater Lake. And he always watches out for the alligators hiding under his bed.