The Road to Pickletown A Southerner Confronts Cowbells, Clowns, Cuba, Christmas, and Mississippi

"The Road to Pickletown" is a collection of newspaper columns by William Jeanes, a former editor-in-chief and publisher of Car and Driver magazine who lives in Mississippi. The pieces include an eclectic selection of recent columns from William's weekly newspaper, the Northside Sun. The Sun is headquartered in Jackson, Mississippi. The columns range in tone from warmly humorous to serious outrage and cover subjects that veer from progressive politics to prohibition and from cowbells to Cuba. Most but by no means all have a connection to Mississippi and the south—as seen by a native son who spent more than half his life in New York City and in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
Other columns were written for a national audience and were published in Playboy, Sports Illustrated, the Saturday Evening Post, Car and Driver, and Automobile. Their subjects include the joys of driving at night, wartime baseball, the woman who struck out Babe Ruth, the Safari Rally in Kenya, shooting sporting clays, and Elvis as a film critic.
In addition to the publications cited, William's work has appeared in American Heritage, Air & Space Smithsonian, the New York Times, Consumer Digest, New Times, Advertising Age, and more automotive publications than he cares to count.
William left Mississippi twice, once to serve as an officer in the US Navy, and once to work for magazines and advertising agencies. He was gone for almost forty years. Long enough to gain perspective on a country that delivers endless fuel for a writer who can spot the fools, frauds, and feeble thinkers from a considerable distance.
The author of "The Road to Pickletown" lives in Ridgeland, Mississippi. He has been a board member of the Eudora Welty Foundation, writer-in-residence at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and is a Life Trustee of Millsaps College, his alma mater.

WILLIAM JEANES

For more than three decades, William Jeanes was a major figure in automotive journalism. He began as a freelancer in the 1970s, became a staff writer at Car and Driver, and after a ten-year career in the advertising agency business, he accepted the position of editor-in-chief at Car and Driver. Under his leadership, the magazine became the world's largest automotive publication, with annual revenues of $100 million.

In 1993, he became a senior vice president and group publisher at Hachette Magazines and was made publisher of both Car and Driver and Road & Track as well as a group of smaller magazines. The two large magazines' annual revenue was $160 million.

His ten-year advertising career included service as a senior vice president at two major agencies, SSC&B:Lintas and J. Walter Thompson. At JWT he was director of the Ford Division account, in which capacity he oversaw $150 million in advertising expenditures (1985 dollars).

A 1959 graduate of Millsaps College, his undergraduate activities included membership in Pi Kappa Alpha, work with the Millsaps Players, and one season of varsity baseball. In 1992, he was named the Millsaps College Alumnus of the Year and was named to the Board of Trustees two years later. In 2008, he became a Life Trustee. In 2010, he received the Livesay Award for service to Millsaps College.

He served as an adjunct professor of English at Millsaps in 1983, and in 2005 was writer-in-residence at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. He has lectured at the University of Tennessee School of Business, the University of Michigan Engineering School, the University of Mississippi, and the University of Texas.

In 2008, he presented a lecture "Mississippi's Combat Airmen of World War I" as a part of the Millsaps Arts & Lecture series.

His writing has been published in a score of the world's automotive publications as well as in Sports Illustrated, Parade, Playboy, American Heritage, Consumer Digest, the New York Times, and AARP The Magazine. His scholarly writing and reviews have been published in the Journal of Mississippi History; War, Literature and the Arts; The Journal of World War I Aviation Historians, and others.

He served forty-three months on active duty with the United States Navy, mostly aboard the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid. He became Senior Watch Officer on the Intrepid and left the service with the rank of lieutenant.

He lives in Ridgeland with his wife, Susan. He is retired but writes occasionally for the Northside Sun and served until 2017 on the board of the Eudora Welty Foundation.