Featured Interview With Robert R Randall
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
As the title of my memoir attests, I was born and raised in the deep South. After a stint in the Air Force (ours), I got just enough education to be dangerous (an MS in Mass Communications from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette) and took my show on the road–literally. For ten years I was an itinerant disc jockey and sometimes TV sports anchor. When I came to my senses, I became an advertising copywriter (okay, scratch coming to my senses).
I live with my lovely wife, two cats (Nicky and Zeus), and a Sheba Inu dog named Lucki in an Antonio.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I discovered reading for pleasure in high school and became a daily reader in my 20s. But I did not begin to write seriously until I was in my 40s.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Mostly, I read novels. I still love Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Robert Penn Warren. More recently, I’ve been reading Richard Russo, Kate Atkinson, Donna Tartt, Richard Ford, Annie Proulx and many others.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Lost in the 50s: In Meridian, Mississippi is a memoir about growing up in The Fabulous 50s: It was the era that gave us Brando and Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and Fats Domino, Grace Kelly and James Dean. Not to mention the Cold War and hula hoops, the exciting new medium of television, and a new kind of music called ‘rock ‘n roll.’ As if that weren’t enough, the 1950s also brought us fallout shelters, the Korean War, sack dresses and ducktail haircuts.
For a kid like ‘BobbyRandall,’ (in the South, they liked to tie your first and last name together) coming of age in the deep South of the mid-twentieth-century meant colorful characters, charming venues, and an unforgettable way of life. From the legendary black bottom pie at Weidmann’s Restaurant to ‘making out’ at the Royal Drive-In–from a pool shark named Lenard to the mad dentist, ‘Doctor Death,’ Lost in the 50s is a fun book to read.
It was also a fun book to write–my first memoir, and it practically wrote itself in about a year.
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