Book excerpt: Rocky Roads and Bare Feet is about the times of a young boy growing up in rural Alabama in the decade of the 1950s. It is learning the hard way and how children thought and passed the time. The stories tell of a new generation who began life and grew into a time when there were no astronauts, no interstate highways and television was the newest rave. The stories and tall tales of Rocky Roads and Bare Feet are about the author and his brothers and sister as they grew up in the 1950s. These stories are the ones I told to my children. They were told as we sat on the porch in a swing or a rocking chair. In the evenings when there was nothing else to do, Jennifer, would say Daddy, tell me about when you were a little boy. The stories in the book were written to be passed on to my grandchildren. Many of the stories are true; the seven tall tales have fictional characters but are true more-or-less. The stories are interesting if you want to know how it was back then. Jeff Harper