Coming Attractions (1981)

Fannie Flagg's novel was published by William Morrow in 1981. It is the journal of Daisy Fay Harper, which by the jacket's account begins in 1952, when she is a lonely eleven-year-old, and runs six years to the Miss Mississippi pageant. Her father, Bill, a sometime movie projectionist and full-time drinker, and his friend Billy Bundy, a radio preacher, cook up a scheme to make money from a miracle. (Open Library)

Watches

Timex (unidentified model): For the staged miracle, Daisy is to row a stolen boat out into the Gulf at one in the morning in a choir robe, wait out the night, and come ashore at dawn as a girl back from the dead. Billy Bundy lends her his waterproof, shatterproof Timex for the boat, on condition that she throws it away before she leaves it, since nobody coming down from heaven would wear a Timex. At six forty-five she switches on the projection machine and throws the perfectly good watch away (p. 176). The watch belongs to Billy Bundy. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Billy let me take his Timex waterproof, shatterproof watch, which I was to throw away when I left the boat, because he didn’t think a person coming down from heaven would be wearing a Timex. (Fannie Flagg, Coming Attractions, scan cataloged as William Morrow, 1981, p. 175; Internet Archive scan OCR)