Let me bend your ears about something for a minute. Or more to the point, let some of the elder Nickle men do so.
Scroll down, and you'll see three video links, to a three-part home doc I put together about a month back. It's based on long conversation with my dad, Lawrence Nickle, and uncle, Graham Nickle, about the scandalous history of a branch of the Nickles I'd only learned about a month earlier. That's when I heard from Joe Nickle, a photographer shooting out of Louisiana, who'd been googling his name and found the Yard. Funny old world, he wrote. There aren't too many of us Nickles around.
Truer words were never spoken. Turns out that we were cousins, separated after the Second World War, when my cousin Wallace and great-uncle Oliver left Harriston, Ontario for points south in Texas, to sire a sprawling brood of Nickles there.
So we got to emailing back and forth, and putting together a family story as near as we could figure. It wasn't nearly enough - but it was enough to arm me with questions to throw at Lawrence and Graham when I got them in front of the camera over Thanksgiving.
And taken together, it was enough to fill me with a kind of horrified admiration for my preacher cousin Wallace Nickle - who, based on all the stories, was the closest thing to a bona fide literary character my family has ever coughed up. Hopefully, faithful readers will see what I mean when the story I'm working on right now sees publication.
In the meantime, watch these videos. They tell the story of Wallace, the Webley and the Fearsome Hound; Wallace and the Pram-Full of Furs; How the Nickles Got Their Name; and Fantastical Stories of the Nickles' Adventures In A First World War In Which Apparently No Actual Combat Occurred.