The Snipe Hunt

Somewhere in Kansas, Summer 1960: I was a truck driver on the wheat harvest, working for the Moser family. We cut the grain and hauled it to the grain elevator for the farmers, and we moved north as the grain ripened.

On this particular afternoon, Jake, Old Man Moser's son, was driving his pickup, and myself and another driver riding along, returning from the town. Somehow in the conversation, the other driver mentioned snipe hunting to Jake. Jake picked up his cue.

"Yeah," he said, "I've heard they have snipe around here. In fact I think I heard some the other night."

"What's a snipe?" I said.

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Wizard in a Cave

Henrietta, Texas, 1951. My mother played her nice radio in the evenings, and we listened to Green Lantern, the Phantom, the Great Gildersleeve, the Lone Ranger, and the Inner Sanctum. Not long after, television would arrive, stealing drama from the radio, but in those days radio was one story after another.

Hobby time went well with radio. For example, my mother was a great and wonderful crafts person, and made marvelous things. As we sat in the evening with one lamp turned on, she was making colored flower stencils on pillow cases.

I had a project too. She'd bought me a drawing toy called a Magic Slate. This cardboard rectangle has a gray plastic sheet attached, and a pencil-shaped wooden stylus. With this stylus, you write or draw upon the gray sheet. Whenever it's filled up, or you get tired of it, just lift the sheet and all the writing vanishes, and you can start over. Oh, the sheer magic of it!

That night we were listening to Inner Sanctum, which was a scary show about some sort of bird or a bat. But I wasn't scared. My mom was making stencils and I was a Wizard in a Cave.

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Tale of Quacking Duck

Henrietta, Texas, 1971: After Dr. Strickland had died, but before we moved to the farm, I'd finally completed my Bachelor's Degree at Midwestern University, so I lived in our home on the west side of town. (Just across from where Eddy Frank lives now.)

There, in a back room, while waiting to see if I'd be accepted into the University of Iowa or some other school with a Creative Writing department, I wrote stories every morning.

Everybody was warned not to bother me. I was an artiste!

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In the Shadow of the Space Needle

Seattle, Summer 1961: My friend Lefevre and I looked up at the towering building and gawked like hicks. Eighteen years old I was, just graduated from high school.

"Gawrsh," I said.

It was a grand adventure. The best one yet.

In study hall, while studying Life magazine, I'd seen the photographs of the Seattle World's Fair. Photographs of the towering, unique 'Space Needle'. It was far from Henrietta, Texas. It was on the West Coast, way north of fabled California, where I was born but really didn't remember

Jerry was three years older. He'd graduated earlier, an artist, and he was working at a ritzy department store in Wichita Falls, arranging their windows, and I found him in a back room, standing over an empty Coca-Cola bottle, holding an unlit cigarette four feet above the bottle.

"You see," he said, pointing to the shadow on the floor, which showed him, the bottle, and the unlit cigarette in his hand, "if you get the shadow lined up right, you can drop the cigarette into the bottle." He let go of the cigarette.

It fell four feet, and slithered into the coke bottle. As always, I was impressed. But I had bigger game on my mind.

"Do you want to go to the Seattle World's Fair this summer?" I asked.

"Sure," he said. "We'll camp out, and take v8 juice and lettuce. Just the ticket."

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