Tales from county roads guide author's work By Ken Newton of the St. Joseph News-Press The world exists where boys make money picking up roadside bottles and older guys race their pickup trucks to the city limits to see who buys the first beer. Or at least the world did exist. It's not exactly Mayberry, rustic and unhurried, with a moral available at each turn of mischief and silliness. But consider it small-town life all the same, where a couple of good ol' boys think hunting coyotes from a plane might be a good idea and later have the broken bones do disprove it. The long-time St. Joseph resident grew up in north-central Kansas, a place of prairie-dog safaris and where town marshals explain that the town jail is actually a shed with a leg manacle.