Hopping Around S.C. Like a Jackrabbit
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. -- "There were a couple of boys from New York City and they decided they were tired of the rabbit race and all the going on of the steel jungle of the city," Huckabee told the crowd of 75 who had waited for his arrival in a jet hanger.
In spite of the stormy weather, Huckabee is puddle - jumping all around the state today and dragging a tattered troop of reporters with him. He spoke only about 15 minutes in Myrtle Beach, but told a long story about those two city boys. Behind him: a large yellow helicopter, wrestler Ric Flair, actor Chuck Norris, and Huckabee's wife Janet among others.
"[The boys] thought maybe buying a farm down south would be good for 'em. So these ol' boys looked in the ad and found an old farm that was for sale down South. Scraped some money together, bought the farm, came down to look at the farm, start farming. Neither one had ever worked on a farm, never knew how to do it, but they figured, couldn't be all that hard."
Huckabee said the two went to the only general store in the little town, and "the fellow running the store, he looked around, and thought, 'Boy, these are some city slickers...We'll have some fun."
The owner told the boys they would need seed, a plow, some fertilizer, and mules.
"'We got everything but we're fresh out of mules, we don't have mules to pull that plow,' he said, 'but I'll tell you what I got." The store owner pointed to watermelons and told the boys they were "mule eggs."
The boys bought the mule eggs, not knowing what they were, and loaded them on the back of their truck. When they hit the bump, one of the watermelons "jumped up and fell off the truck and just splattered all over."
Before the boys could turn their truck around, Huckabee said, a jackrabbit ran and started eating away at the watermelon.
"'Well don't look now, that mule egg is busted and that little mule is right out there,'' Huckabee described one of the boys saying. "'We better get our mule.'"
"So one of them reached down to grab it, and you know what happened. That jack rabbit took off and started darting all around."
After several minutes, Huckabee said they both fell down out of exhaustion.
"Man, this has not been a good day. We done lost our money, bought this farm, and now our mule egg is busted and our mule has run off. This is a bad day."
The other guy said, "Well, I guess so, but I'm not all that unhappy about it...cause quite frankly, I wasn't sure I wanted to plow that fast anyway."
To bring the story back to his main point - the fact that he has seven events over the course of 13 hours today - Huckabee said, "ladies and gentlemen, today, we're going all over South Carolina and we are plowing that fast...if anybody doesn't think we aren't serious about winning South Carolina ought to look at our schedule today."