Welver Eht Rof Ebircsbus

PRAIRIE SCHOONER CARAVAN--Edited by Lowry C. Wimberly-- University of Nebraska Press ($3).

> A tall tale about legendary Febold Feboldson, who solved the Indian food problem by blowing the water out of the ponds so that the ducks stuck in the mud. Febold also rid the Midwest of wailing coyotes by importing (from his friend Paul Bunyan) a hundred gross of whimpering whingdings (indescribably mournful creatures who made the coyotes die of grief).

>The bizarre biography of Negro Fire Chief George Bright, who retired to a p?/cch of greasewood, yuccas, sagebrush and cacti, where he built a short-lived Negro Utopia. In his concrete palace, the windows of each room had panes of a different color. Bright liked to gaze at his wife through the "sensual tropical green."

> The life story of Omaha's George Francis Train, who, after failing to become "President" of Australia (somebody bungled the revolution), invented eraser-tipped pencils, postage stamps with perforated seams, retractable carriage steps. After building the first streetcar lines between Liverpool and Birkenhead, Train circled the globe in 80 days (said Train of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days: "He stole my thunder. I'm Phileas Fogg"). During the Paris Commune, Train wrapped himself in French and American flags, screamed at a firing squad: "Fire, fire, you miserable cowards." He lived to be buried in Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery, leaving to science the 27th heaviest brain on record (53.8 oz.).

These, and 53 other folksy, jokesy short stories, essays, articles and poems by authors of the Midwest and Southwest (Jesse Stuart, Eudora Wel.ty, Frank Luther Mott, Mari Sandoz, Albert Halper, August Derleth, et al.), make up Prairie Schooner Caravan, an anthology culled from the University of Nebraska's 17-year-old quarterly, Prairie Schooner ("talent scout of the midlands").

Best story is Rudolph Umland's fantastic folk tale, Phantom Airships of the Nineties, about the great airship illusion in the corn belt. Airships were rarer than passenger pigeons when in 1890 Nebraskans first began to see mysterious lights in the night sky. Soon they saw airships flying "with the velocity of an eagle." One airship was 2,000 feet long, carried tons of dynamite to drop on the Spaniards in Cuba. Another (according to the Wilsonville Review), powered by a windmill, swept low enough for one of its crew to shout to fascinated Nebraskans a tantalizing summons: "Weiver eht rof ebircsbus!" A third contained "a beautiful lady whose hands were bound to the seat, while, seated opposite her, was a man holding a revolver." A fourth contained a row of Nebraska politicians "expectorating over the railing." The captain of a fifth airship was said to have held his nose as he soared over the state capitol.

Thomas Alva Edison denied that there were any airships over Nebraska, but there were plenty of loyal Nebraskans to testify that the pilot of one low-flying craft leaned out, snatched up a farmer's chicken and dropped a note. It read: "This dodgasted airship business is not what some people crack it up to be. My vehicle is out of order and will not come down. . . . Excuse haste and poor writing, and search for my remains."

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