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Hilary Jones finally lost his fight with the government. It took a lot out of him, but it never killed his passion for politics; he moved into a new house and carried on. He spent a memorable night with Hillary and me in the White House. He almost cried when Hillary took him into the map room to show him the war UGG boots outlet uk map FDR was using when he died in Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1945. He worshipped FDR. Unlike Bo Forney, he spent the night in the Lincoln Bedroom. When he visited us in the White House, I kidded him about sleeping in Lincolns bed, which Bo Forney had turned down. Hilary said at least he had UGG Boots uk slept on the side of the bed that was under Andrew Jacksons picture.
From the day I met him until the day I flew home from the White House to speak at his funeral, Hilary Jones UGG Boots uk sale was my man in Newton County. He embodied the wild, beautiful spirit of a special place I had loved since I first saw it at sixteen.
The county seat, Jasper, was a town of fewer than four hundred people. There were two cafs, one frequented by Republicans, the other by Democrats. The man I wanted to see, Walter Brasel, lived beneath the Democratic caf, UGG Boots uk on sale which his wife ran. I got there on a Sunday morning and he was still in bed. As I sat in the little living room, he got up and began to put his pants on with the door from the living room to the bedroom open. He wasnt fully awake, slipped, and was rotund enough to literally roll UGG Boots uk outlet over a couple of times until he was ten or fifteen feet out into the living room. I wanted his support, so I couldnt laugh. But he did. He said hed once been young, thin, and fast, the starting guard on the Coal Hill High School basketball team, which he had led to the state championship over Little Rock Central High in the 1930s; hed gained all his weight in the years when he was the county bootlegger, and never lost it. After a while, he said hed be for me, maybe just so he could go back to bed.
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