Compiling the photos and writing the captions and introductions to tie everything together for The Bittersweet Ozarks at a Glance, was a joy. I wanted to capture in this book the land and lore of the Ozarks. I think I did that satisfactorily, but I also recaptured the ten years from 1973 to 1983 when I was the teacher/advisor to a total of 120 high school students who researched, illustrated, wrote, and published the quarterly, Bittersweet.

I began the Bittersweet after repeated urging from my brother, Ralph Gray, who was editor of The National Geographic World. As board member of the student publication, Foxfire, in the northern Georgia Appalachians, he thought I should create the same for the Ozark area.

As I worked on The Bittersweet Ozarks at a Glance, I relived some of the experiences the students and I had years ago. I remembered when students Tracy and Carmen visited Dorothy Leake to learn about life in a natural spring branch. Their photos are on the cover. I was once again with students Jay and Ronnie as naturalist George Kastler took us to explored and study many of the 120 known caves in our county. I'm sure that Dan and Doug still remember how to cut grain with a hand-held grain cradle that Dan's grandfather used to use to cut his bottom fields of wheat and oats. When 94-year-old Elvie Hough walked across the field cradling the wheat, the Bittersweet students couldn't keep up with him to take his picture. But we did get a good one, which was used for the cover of our first book, Bittersweet Country, which is now out of print.

And I remembered vividly the old-time fiddling of Bob Holt and Art Galbraith. None of us has forgotten the square dances and play parties we attended, the hunting and trapping trips in the woods and on the rivers, and the good eating of post-pioneer living of the area's people that was still extant thirty years ago.

Amazed by the quality of the photographs, some people now have asked me how inexperienced students could take such professional pictures. My secret was to give each of them lots of film, tell them to take as many pictures as they could, and trust that at least one of them was usable. Those in the book prove that many they took were more than technically good. Immersed in the subject and in their relationship with the people they interviewed, the students captured the soul of those they met and became friends with. They transmitted their appreciation of the landscape and what it had to offer. They discovered what their "backward" area had that others areas lacked. No longer ashamed to be from the hills, they wanted the world to love and appreciate their homeland and heritage as they did.

The land and the people. They go together--the wooded and isolated, rocky, hilly land watered with many springs, creeks, and rivers fashioned the lives of the people. And conversely the people descended from generations of subsistence farmers from hilly regions of the East and Europe kept the land in trust.

This is what the students captured in the photographs I selected for The Bittersweet Ozarks at a Glance. A work of love.