hootenanny finds billy batest

this is a video of the billy batest band "detour" performing in helena, montana


As most of you know, Billy Batest grew up in the house behind the post office in Quinn, SD.
No one knew his parents. They were clandestine.
Billy sat in the desk in front of me in 6th Grade. He was always irritable. He always wore stiff cowboy clothes to school - heavy starched button snap shirts, usually black; worn pointy toed boots and a Copenhagen-can-lid belt buckle. He kept his hair short in a Wilburn cut well above the ears - 'whitewalls' as they were called back then.
At the time, I was afraid of Billy Batest and his fearsome western personna. Who knew what he was capable of?
So, like most of us would in a similar situation, I began a small war of intellectual attrition.
He demanded a pencil. I gave him one. Unsharpened. He demanded a sharpened pencil and I balked. "Billy", I said, "I can get you a sharpened pencil but I'll need some time. Pencils are easy to come by in the 6th Grade but sharpeners are not. I'll have to talk to the Newtons.This won't be easy."
Without his knowledge, Billy had just met his first lawyer. He was outdone. Outfoxed. Outsmarted. It took him so long to figure what had just happened that I don't recall he ever bothered me again. After pounding Arlys Klundt in the sand over by the monkey bars, Billy and his family just disappeared.
Over the years, my friends and I wondered what happened to Billy.
It seems he's no longer a starched shirt cowboy.