INITIAL NARRATIVE - Anne

My name is Declan Carter. I was born in the Year of the Monkey 1968 in the summer between the Summer of Love and the Summer of Woodstock. My mother, Irene was only twenty when I was born - the product of a wild romance with an Irish immigrant named Johnny O’Gorman. They married and came to this small farm in the southern Klamath mountains of Northern California. With them, they carried all the dreams of the decade - to work the land with their own hands, to build a cabin with their own trees. And for two happy years, they did. Johnny got a job at the local lumber mill. They built a root cellar and learned to can their garden produce, planted a small orchard with grafted saplings from old varieties of apple trees. Winter came and they survived.

Then in 1970, Johnny was killed in the Mill Fire of ‘70. Not two weeks later my mother’s own mother - a beauty, in her day, of Spanish and Apache blood - died in a traffic collision in Arizona. My mother, herself beset by grief, knew my grandfather’s must be greater, so she invited him to come live with us, here at the foot of Wells Mountain.

I was only two at the time he came to stay. Since I didn’t remember my own father, I called him Papa. Since Irene was his only child, he called me Son. His name is Hamilton Carter, Scots on his mother’s side, English on his father’s. He was born in Boston in the Year of the Monkey 1920. Sitting on the porch swing with tea at his elbow and a pipe in his hand, he looks every bit like an Oxford Don.

My mother bagged groceries in town at Wiley’s Market for 10 years and in 1980, stir crazy with the monotony, she ventured down into San Francisco and found work as a clerk. On weekends, she drove the 250 miles north to our farmstead to visit and unwind. I think deep down the homestead haunted her with the memories of Johnny and their dreams and the city let her forget. Much later she told me she had lived for awhile with a man, then a woman, then another man - none of whom I ever met - and finally found peace with her own company. She may even come home one day.

Meanwhile, on weekdays, I rose early, fed the chickens and milked the goats while Papa fixed breakfast. I walked half a mile to the blue and yellow bus stop to await my school day. I studied and enjoyed school, science particularly, and made a couple of good friends along the way. In the afternoons, I’d run back up our unnamed dirt road to find Papa in the garden or amidst the spreading apple trees. I’d help him with the last of the chores. Without realizing it then, Papa and I were living my parents’ dream. Often, we carried seasonal produce to town in his old Ford truck. In the summer, we had tomatoes and cucumbers by the flat or in the fall apples by the bushel. We’d leave them by the back door of Wiley’s, then go around to the front entrance to shop for the staples we needed or the food we couldn’t grow ourselves. It was barter, I found out later. I didn’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed. Mother always brought home money, but Papa was a Depression era boy and he practiced what he preached.

At last, after chores and a light supper, we moved out on the porch. Each evening, winter or summer, we sat for awhile on the porch swing. When I was very little, I would cuddle up on his lap. Later, I sat beside him, my legs long enough to push the swing while he talked. Sometimes, it was so cold, we wore knit hats and spread a blanket across our laps as we counted the emerging stars. Sometimes, we sipped lemonade and watched the sky’s sunset fire fade to blue. And all the while Papa would tell me stories from his life. It might be what he overheard at the market that day, or of times when he himself was a boy or when my mother was a girl. These are Papa’s tales from the porch swing.

TALES FROM THE PORCH SWING

TALE #1 MUD-BUGS - Dave

"Son, did I ever tell you about the time I brought mud bugs home for dinner?" Papa asked with a gleam in his eyes. He emphasized the words "mud bugs" making it sound like he was tough. I played coy. "No Papa. What are mud bugs?"

"Well… soon after The Crash of 29, at the beginning of The Great Depression, lots of things became scarce or unaffordable. For farm folks like ourselves and our neighbors, we were used to growing or bartering for what ever we needed. Now and then something special would come our way like chocolate candy or fresh fish from The Bay. Folks were always looking to barter or work for these special treats.

Anyway…one day my best friend, Jason Liautaud came over to our house to play. We were dawdling around the edge of the marsh behind our barn when Jason picked up a stick and tossed it into the tall cattails. He says to me, "My dad says there are mud bugs at Jamaica Pond". "What are mud bugs" I asked him. "Crawdads. My mom says they're miniature lobsters. You know, like the ones they catch out in Massachusetts Bay only real small". "What do you do with them", I asked. "My mom comes from the Louisiana Bayou country and she says if we can catch a bucket full she'll make us the best crawfish pie we ever tasted". What's crawfish pie I asked Jason. "I don't know for sure, but if it's anything like her other Cajun cooking, it'll be wonderful".

Well, the next day we were off to Jamaica Pond. In those days we lived in a place called Roxbury Crossing, a little farming community southwest of Boston. The pond was actually one of a series of ponds formed out of an inlet from Boston Harbor and lay about four miles southwest of where we lived. I met Jason at Roxbury St. and we headed up to The Boston & Providence Railroad crossing a few blocks away. We walked on down to the middle of a big curve in the tracks so we wouldn't be seen jumping the train by the conductor in the caboose. They tended to frown on us kids jumping rides for fear of someone getting hurt, but the train slowed way down for the curve and it was quite easy to climb right up the flatcar ladder. We rode the flatcar down to Centre St. where we jumped to the platform when the train slowed to switch tracks at Perkins St. Station and then we began the long hike down Centre to Jamaica Pond.

After passing the storefronts at Perkins Square we could see the fields of cattails and tall grasses growing out of the shallows of Jamaica Pond. According to Jason this wet bog was where we were to catch the mud bugs his dad had talked about. The day before, we had collected the necessary equipment that had been suggested by Jason's mom. In Mr. Liautaud's barn-shop we fashioned four butterfly type nets out of old broom handles, fence wire and some old lace netting that we got from Jason's mom. In our knapsacks we brought chicken livers and string provided by my mother.

The way the traps worked was to tie a chicken liver to the inside of the net and then lay the trap, that is the net, in shallow water amongst the reeds and cattails and soon enough the crawfish would be feasting on the meat. We'd have to sneak up on them so they wouldn't all scurry away before we'd lift up the net. Jason found himself two good spots for his traps and so did I. We spent the rest of the morning and afternoon checking and re-setting our traps and taking in our haul of crawdads.

By 3 o'clock our knapsacks were full and we were headed back up Centre St.. At the Perkins Square Market we traded twenty crawfish to the butcher there for a Royal Crown Cola and two Dum Dum Suckers. We sat on the sidewalk in front of the store, leaning back against a big vegetable gondola. We just sat there sharing the Royal Crown, refreshing ourselves and staring up at the big roll out canvas awning, telling each other how good it felt to have worked hard for our catch and been able to already reap some of the reward from it all.

On our way back to the Perkins St. Station, my dad spotted us on his way home from the Abernathy Feed and Hay Store and gave us a ride in the back of his truck back to our place. We were going to take all of our catch over to Jason's house for his mother to prepare, but in our anxiousness we first had to tell my mom of our success. We ran up to the house each holding two squirming crawdads between our fingers and I yelled, "look what we brought home for dinner mom" and showed off our catch. She backed back through our service porch door using it as a shield to ward off the attacking creatures while yelling: "Hamilton Carter! You and Jason take those things straight over to Liautaud's immediately". We all had a good laugh and Jason and I headed off to his house for Mud Bug Pie.

TALE #2 - Juani

Papa went to a different church every Sunday. Sometimes I went with him, sometimes not. One evening on the porch, when I was about 11, I asked him why he did that.

"When I was little," he said, "Mother took me to Mass every Sunday. Then when I was 15 or so I got rebellious and quit going. To tell the truth, I never thought I'd see the inside of a church again - your grandma and I were married by a Justice of the Peace.

"And then the war started. I didn't sign up right away; Effie begged me not to. But finally I figured why wait and went for the Air Force in '42.

"You've heard my war story plenty of times, Declan. When it was all over they sent my division to a base in Texas, near San Antonio. We would all be civilians in a few weeks, and had time on our hands.

"One evening another pilot and I were walking into town looking for something to do when we saw a circus tent. No one was outside selling admission tickets, and we got curious and went in. There was a crowd of people, and from way in front came a voice, wound up and shouting:

"'I aim to make sin BLACK, hell HOT, death CERTAIN, and judgment SURE.'

"We had walked into a full-bore, Holy Roller-type tent revival."

Papa was quiet for a moment, remembering.

"That was J. Charles Jessup up there in front of that crowd. We stayed for the rest of the evening. I heard later that he went to jail for bilking people out of their money on his radio show. He got rich off poor people who sent him money to pray for them.

"But in that tent that night they believed. And some said they'd been cured of life-long afflictions by the laying on of his hands.

"When I got back to Boston I started church-hopping, and I haven't stopped since."

Papa didn't say any more. I wanted to ask him about the people getting healed, and Reverend Jessup's radio show, but I didn't like to somehow. So I pushed us back and forth on the swing a little longer, and then it was time for bed.

TALE #3 - Mike

Sometimes, Papa seemed to forget altogether that he'd come from Boston, and would tell wild stories of a place and time more like the Old West. Maybe Papa had just watched too much Gunsmoke, or maybe he was confusing his own life story with that of his old Pappy, or maybe he was just making up a story, though I can't imagine why anyone would want to do that.

Anyway, Papa told of how once, when he was around ten or twelve, he had the job of sweeping up and fetching stuff in the neighborhood saloon, The Coarse Remark. Papa, who, though his name was Hamilton, was always called "Bonzo" on account of his being born in the year of the monkey, and because Boston cares about such things, Papa, as I say, had been given the job by an old friend of his Pappy's, Dr. Salten Q. Pepper, who owned a number of saloons in that part of Boston. Dr. Pepper would later gain fame for the chance discovery, while on a promotional tour for his patented curative drink "Professor Pungent", of an accidental inland sea in the heart of the Southern California desert. Dr. Pepper had owned saloons in one place or another nearly all his life, and had in fact become a legend of sorts in the Boston area, in part through the popularity of a ragtime song in which he was described as having "Built him a bar/When he was only three." The Doctor decided to hire Papa (or Bonzo, as he was called for reasons described above) because his previous helper at The Coarse Remark had been enticed away from the Doctor's employ by the offer of a golden opportunity to go to sea, and because Papa (see above for derivation of alternative name) was standing nearby at the time.

Papa enjoyed his position at the saloon, not only because he liked sweeping floors and dragging out drunks, but also because it allowed him to keep the company of real men and women who could teach him valuable lessons such as how to tell when a spitoon is full without actually looking into it; how to tell the difference between a pickpocket and someone who is just feeling your bottom; how to get an old man's comb (you take it while he is showing you how he can get a dime into a shot glass without using his hands). Another thing he liked was being able to listen all day to the piano interpretations of Hoagie, the bar's laid-back Tiparillo-chomping keyboard artist, who would later gain fame as the inventor of a large sausage-shaped sandwich, the gyro, which Hoagie would name after his childhood mentor in invention, the eccentric, birdlike Franco-Japanese genius Guy Rombardo. Another thing Papa enjoyed about working in The Coarse Remark, maybe his favorite thing of all, was his warm friendship with the bar's hostess, Miss Honoria "Honey" Primshaw, the daughter of Captain Benjamin "Mad Bull" Primshaw, himself son of the legendary Percy "Blind Percy/Three Sheets" Primshaw, the Revolutionary War hero best known for his fairhanded, some say festive, approach to the quelling of the bloody St. Eulalia's Refectory Rebellion.

Miss Honey had come to her job at the saloon from a teaching position in the Boston Public School system. Her career at the specialized Coohullan School for the Undecided had come to an abrupt end one day two years earlier, when, in the course of a routine room search at the Teachers' Dormitory, it was discovered that the hope chest she had been keeping at the foot of her bed contained at the time of inspection, in addition to a trousseau reflective of an excellent upbringing, her beau of the moment, sans waistcoat, garnished with the hastily-gathered remains of a recently shared meal of inflammatory comestibles. Rather than return to her father's house, wherein she knew she could expect little more than grudging family acceptance and a shut-in life of disgraced spinsterhood, she chose instead to visit that house just long enough to steal the heirloom silver along with a few small proofs of congenital family madness, and repair to the security and anonymity of a life in the twilite world of Boston's Upper Left Side. Within a few days she had cashed in the silver and, through skillful insinuation of herself into the region's centers of power, befriended Dr. Pepper's ice man, Barney, himself a reject of the Public School system, having been expelled from kindergarten for Exceptional Accuracy in Oral Delineation. Barney, a lovable naif, wanted nothing more for himself in life than a tiny unfurnished root cellar in which he might dine on a root or two while seeing in privacy to the maintenance of clear nostrilways; where he might find quiet for a night of unworried sleep and the tranquil atmosphere conducive to the occasional unexpected thought; where he might gaze up on a rainy day out of his dingy basement window and under the raised skirt of the odd puddle-jumping schoolgirl. In fact, he daydreamed of this odd schoolgirl more than he had ever admitted to Miss Honey, but that is another story.

Through her acquaintance with Barney, Miss Honey had arranged a "chance" meeting with Dr. Pepper, in the hope that it would lead to employment in the bar. She lugged ice for several days, posing as Barney's assistant, before Dr. Pepper finally noticed her swinging a tongload of the cold stuff down off her shoulder onto the saloon's long mahogany bar.

"That's spelled m-a-h-o-g-a-n-y," he said.

Miss Honey, her opportunity at last before her, scrambled for a winning reply, something irresistible, calculated to provoke that age-old urge to employ. "I never said it wasn't," she said.

"Lotta people get it wrong," he said, pulling a Tiparillo Profumo from his jacket and chewing a bit off the end. "It's a commonly misspelled word."

Miss Honey stood silent a moment, reconsidering previously abandoned paths in her mental diagram of life choices. But something about this man attracted her. Perhaps it was his voice, perhaps his bearing, or perhaps it was nothing more than his resemblance to a short, stocky, top-hatted man in bicycle pants that she had read about once in a disjointed work of amateur fiction. Whatever it was, it was powerfully appealing, and Miss Kitty, er, Miss Honey, decided to give the man what he wanted.

"So is that," she challenged, slinging the unburdened ice tong fetchingly back onto her shoulder.

"So is what?", asked the Doctor, no less confused than the rest of us. He spit the cigar-end onto the floor.

Miss Honey shifted a hip and lowered her voice, eyeing him ironically. "'Misspelled'. It's commonly misspelled."

"That's what I said," said the Doctor, more confused. He was holding his unlit cigar in front of him, motionless.

"No. You said 'mahogany' was misspelled. I said 'misspelled' was misspelled." Miss Honey said this in the slowest, sultriest voice she could muster. She waited at a dead end in her life choices diagram, beginning to sweat.

"You're nuts, honey; but you got an interesting voice. Probably been carrying ice too long. I like it. You wanna job?"

And that's how Miss Honey got to be the hostess at The Coarse Remark. When Papa first came on the job, Miss Honey was the one who taught him the basics: spitoon management, sawdust maintenance, ice crushing, drunk disposal, and carrying stuff. "Bonzo," she cautioned him on one occasion, "Don't ever carry anything that's too heavy for you. If you have to grunt when you pick it up, you come and get me, and I'll do it. Because a woman can carry anything she can lift, but a man can suffer irreparable damage and be left walking funny and unable to carry out his phylogenetic imperative." Miss Honey had a lot of good advice, like that and the one about how to tell when an angry lady is just looking for her husband. "The ones with axes," Miss Honey raised her finger soberly on that occasion, "are temperance activists."

At this point in his story, Papa paused and looked down thoughtfully, pursing his lips under his big mustache. I know he was trying to remember why he was telling this story, because Papa always had so much to say that he often talked himself down a garden path and into a momentary state of disorientation. At these times he would stop talking and stare for a short while at his stomach; then he would let his eyes fall shut, snore, and fall over sideways. I knew this was so he would be off the hook for telling the rest of the story; but I always made him get up and continue.

"One day," said Papa, "I was sweeping up in the late afternoon, getting ready for the evening crowd, and there was nobody in the place except Hoagie and me. Hoagie was playing his piano and singing some of his "B" material to get his voice warmed up. I learned a lot of good songs from Hoagie's warmups, like "Buddha Bought a Bike", and "Faster, Faster, Zoroaster", but this time he sang one I never understood, called "The Streets of Laredo":

As I walked out in the streets of Laredo I spied an old man with a russet potato. The old man walked into a neighborhood bar And he sat at the railing and lit a cigar.

"I'll bet you a drink that's a talking potato", The old man said, catching the bartender's eye. "Just ask it a question, and if it don't answer I'll wash dishes free here from now through July."

The bartender asked the potato a question; The potato sat silent, not even a sigh. The bartender asked it an easier question; Again the potato declined to reply.

That night, washing dishes, the old codger ranted, "You traitor, tonight you get fried in my wok!" The potato intoned in a sonorous basso "I've told you and told you, I sing, I don't talk!"

Papa sang these strange lyrics out in a dreamy bass voice, then went on, for better or worse: "Anyway, I'm sweeping up. And in comes a man with a monkey. The man looks around the bar and seems upset. Finally, he approaches me and says, "Where's the pool table?" When I tell him we don't have one, he says, "Here's another foul-up," and leaves.

After him, in walk three clergymen: a rabbi, a bishop and a priest. They don't seem unhappy with the place, and they all get beers and take a table. Shortly after that, a man walks in with a little black box in his hand, which he sets down in front of him on the bar. The bartender, a guy named Jake, who'd had a promising career as a strong man in the circus until he hurt himself badly one night while wooing Nancy, the Rubber Lady, eyes the man suspiciously and stays away from that end of the bar.

Not two minutes behind the box man, in walk an Irishman, an Italian and a redneck. They pause at the door, checking out the sparsely populated house, and talk among themselves for a few moments, then take a table. Miss Honey comes downstairs dressed ravishingly as always in her signature yellow sunsuit over edible stockings, and goes over and talks with them, eventually slapping each of them in turn. Just as I'm wondering why, a guy walks in with a duck under his arm. He's followed almost immediately by a man with a chicken, a man with a pig, and a man with a parrot. Behind them come a gorilla, a panda and a penguin, in that order. A Scotsman brings up the rear of this group, and he's leading a three-legged dog on a chain. The Scotsman seems unused to his kilt and is in a brown study, repeating to himself over and over again the line, "An animal like that you don't eat all at once!"

As the place is filling up with characters like this, lawyers, engineers, IRS agents, a guy dressed as Jesus, another dressed as Superman, the Doctor begins to worry. Several guys at the bar are taking up a lot of Jake's time with odd bets and challenges relating to objects in little boxes. The men with animals are letting them climb, run and fly all over the bar, and the several large animals who came in without owners are intimidating the staff. Clergymen of incompatible faiths are arguing loudly at several tables, and may soon, the Doctor fears, come to blows. Just behind him, a particularly obnoxious customer, a cowboy in paper clothes, is repeating to his five-hundredth victim, "I'm wanted for rustling!"

The Doc, fed up, gets up on a table in the middle of the saloon floor and fires his pistol into the air a couple times. A panda, trailed by a concerned-looking girl in her bloomers, staggers out of a door on the mezzanine, hangs on the railing a moment, gasping, "Do the gag and leave, do the gag and leave, why couldn't I just do the gag and leave?" then drops dead. Ignoring this, Doc screams out, "I want all you weirdos out of my place NOW!"

One of the several penguins in the bar waddles up to the table, looks up at the Doc with a stricken expression, and says, "Can't you take a joke?"

At this point, Papa paused and looked right at me.

"Papa," I said, "Aren't you going to look at your stomach, then snore and fall over?"

Papa just looked at me. "Naw. Story's over, son. It was a sort of a joke."

"I don't get it, Papa," I said, wondering silently if Papa hadn't finally sloughed off an essential engram.

"Well…" said Papa, "you see, it's like… well, I guess really all these guys were just people that Miss Honey hired to come to the bar and cheer up the Doc, who had been feeling poorly with a misery in his big toe." Papa sounded tired.

"But the panda. Doc shot the panda."

"Just an act. The panda was pretending."

"Papa. Pandas can't really talk."

"Gorilla in a panda suit, son. 'Course pandas can't talk, bein' arboreal."

"I knew that."

TALE #4 - Tony

"Papa, did Grandmama ever tell you any stories about when she was a little girl?"

Papa always got a certain little smile on his face whenever I mentioned Grandmama, which I didn't very much. And he'd close his eyes, then open them, and sort of nod his head and look off into the distance. And this evening he settled into the swing a little, and recrossed his legs, and put his arm around me, and looked down at me.

"You know what your grandmother told me?"

"Nope!"

He kind of frowned and looked off into the distance again.

"One day, oh, golly, quite awhile back, before your Mama left home, we were watching a show on TV, a funny sort of spy show like they had a bunch of around that time, but it was a Western too, funny...can't remember what it was called...anyway, this episode of the show had an old time movie actor in it, you ever heard of Ramon Navarro?"

I shook my head.

"No, well, you wouldn't, I barely remember him myself, but anyway, there he was playing some sort of bad guy on this show, and your grandmother suddenly says to me 'My mother met my father because of that man.' And I kind of frowned and looked at this guy on TV and I said 'Who? Him? How?' And she said...you know your great-grandmother came over here from Mexico with her parents during their big Revolution down there, didn't you?"

I didn't but I nodded my head, warding off the inevitable digression.

"And that her parents had to elope because her mother fell in love with an American Indian man named Frank Littlesky? Well...well, that's another story. Anyway, your grandmother said her mother lived in Los Angeles in those days somewhere near where they used to make the movies then, or still do for all I know, and she said her mother and a girlfriend of hers used to catch the streetcar near a restaurant called The Brown Derby...because it was actually shaped like a gigantic derby hat, you ever seen it, or pictures of it maybe?"

I cautiously shook my head.

"Well, they've got a lot of crazy things down there. Anyway, she told me she and this friend of hers...golly, what was her name? I think I met her once...well, so, she said she and this friend would always catch the streetcar home from work outside the Brown Derby, and her friend...Susan?...Sally?... Sarah?...I don't know. Anyway, she said they always rode home from work on this streetcar that stopped right across the street from this Brown Derby restaurant, and her friend would make her wait with her while one of the streetcars went by, and not get on until the next one, or the next maybe, because, she said, it seemed her friend...Sylvia? No. Darn. Anyway, her friend had a big crush on this movie star, Ramon Navarro, that I told you about, and it seems he would come to this restaurant almost every evening about that time, or maybe it was just a few times, I don't remember, but there they'd wait, she told me, until Ramon Navarro got off this streetcar and, seeing them waiting there to get on, he'd always tip his hat, she said, and say 'Good evening, ladies' before he crossed the street to the restaurant. Well, after awhile, your grandmother told me, her mother got kind of tired of missing streetcars and getting home late all the time, and I remember she said her mother always used to mention how strict her parents were about her being out at all, and so she just got on the first streetcar that came and rode home alone after that. But then, she said, soon after this, she got on one day and the streetcar was full, and her mother told her that a man stood up and gave her his seat. A tall, kind of exotic looking man, she said, and she said her mother always got a little smile and a kind of romantic glint in her eye when she told her this part of the story, and that after she thanked him they got to talking small talk, since he was standing there right next to her, and it turned out he was an Apache indian who worked as an extra and a prop man in the cowboy movies they made there. And, well, she'd told me a couple of times about her folks eloping and all, but she'd never told me this was how they met and wasn't it funny, she said, that her mother's friend...Linda! That's who she was! Why did I think it started with an 'S'...well, anyway, that it was kind of funny that all this time her friend would wait just to see a movie star, and she actually met and wound up marrying a guy who worked in the movies. It just goes to show you how funny life is, eh son? Declan? You awake, boy?"

TALE #5 - Boys of Summer - Pete

"Papa, can you teach me how to pitch?" Declan started one evening.

"Can I…And how"

"Did I ever tell you about the time I struck out 25 batters AND threw a perfect game?"

Shaking his head in disbelief yet anxious to imagine himself as Papa's star pitcher, "No, I don't remember…"

"Well, let me tell you a little story." Papa interjected, adjusting himself as if he were standing on the mound.

Papa picked up a baseball that had been lying on the porch and incurred much neglect. "It was June 25th, 1942," Papa started, "…a perfect day for a perfect game. The sun had just started into its western turn and the air was filled with the smell of freshly cut grass."

In an announcer's voice, "Welcome to Fenway Park, home of your Boston Red Sox!"

Declan pulled his legs up 'Indian style' and with his elbows to his knees, placed his chin squarely in the palms of his hands.

Papa spit in to his hands and began 'working' the baseball, "Leading off was Ray 'Gapper' Oliver, the second baseman, and I started him off with a fastball down the middle. STEE-RIKE ONE! My backhand curveball dipped across the plate. STEE-RIKE TWO! A swing and a miss, STEE-RIKE THREE! The knuckler danced in confirmation that it was my day. Gapper gave the head of the bat a thump on the ground in disapproval."

Declan closed his eyes and Papa's story became Declan's reality.

Announcer, "Now batting, number 6, right fielder, Lefty Lewis!"

"The wind, the pitch, a fastball low and outside for ball one. I looked in for the sign. The 1-0 pitch, screwball, in tight. Quickly I'd fallen behind in the count 2-0. Lefty gave me a grin and a nod knowing the 2-0 pitch from a 'junk baller' is always a fastball. And Lefty was right, and lucky to still have his head. The heater was high and inside, not down the middle and caught Lefty leaning in. Now Lefty wasn't much for the 'brush back' pitch and gave me a glare that said, 'You're gonna pay for that one!' With the count now 3-0, I was beginning to doubt myself and THAT is the worst thing a pitcher can do. I knew I had to recover and quick, so back to the fastball I went. The 3-0 down the middle for a strike and Lefty knew it was coming. The 3-1, a drop ball that didn't drop, and Lefty fouled it straight back, just missing himself a 'Four Bagger'. Full count now and I was ready to end this battle. Curveball over for a strike, but so was Lefty's bat. I didn't even turn around. He crushed it. As I stood there kicking at the dirt, the crowd began to cheer. MY crowd was cheering? I looked up to see Lefty trotting across the infield in my direction. He said, 'You're just lucky the wind is blowing in from right today!' 'Oh-yeah', I says, "Ain't no luck about it, you just can't hit a ball out of a park!"

"Next up was Kip Johnson, the center fielder. He was a first pitch swinger, so I threw him a '60-footer', but he didn't bite. I came back with the knuckler and he got a piece of it. Just enough to dribble it past the mound, and now it was a foot race. Johnny Pesky the shortstop, charged in and in one motion, barehanded the ball and threw a sidearm strike over to Jimmie Foxx for out number three and the inning was over."

"I found my rhythm and with the exception of a few foul balls, they didn't touch a thing I threw. Down they went: Norman Riggs, Paul River, 'Stealing Dan' Foster, 'JJ' John Joseph, Andy Edwards, and Matt Morris."

"The next time I saw a fresh face was in the top of the ninth with two outs. In he stepped and I could see the fear in his eyes, they were pleading, 'Please God, just let me hit the ball?' I don't remember his name, but I'll never forget his face."

"The next year, Johnny Pesky and I left for World War II."