The stirring memoir of a beloved Texan journalist who grew up on the road during the Depression and World War II, Diddy Waw Diddy is a quintessential American saga that charts the passage of one son into manhood. Billy's story begins in the autumn of 1938, when his restless father, Tice, decided to leave the family farm in Little Egypt, Oklahoma, to become an oil field driller. During the next seventeen years, the Porterfields - the author, his parents, and his younger brother and sister - moved twenty-two times, chasing the flow of oil in Texas in their sleek Hudson Terraplane. Their destination was "Diddy Waw Diddy," a place where they'd live like arcadian lords and never have to leave. Alternately rambunctious and refined, bawdy and brilliant, enigmatic and enlightened, Porterfield's family, friends and acquaintances are all brought to life with rich color and texture, as young Billy passes through classic Southwestern scenes of oil patches, endless swaths of road, church-going Sundays, bars and brothels on his journey of discovery. Diddy Waw Diddy is the rollicking coming-of-age tale of a boy bursting with dreams and love for life, told in a rare style that is both earthy and poetic. It is an uncommon story about one family and its dreams, that captures an image of America that came and went almost as quickly as the tires on the Porterfields' Hudson Terraplane.