Richard A. Lupoff by Patterns

Author:Patterns [SS]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-18T20:45:53+00:00

KEWEENAW BAY GAZETTE

Keweenaw Bay, Michigan

August 19, 1940

—

Mr. Zachary Grand

Editor-in-Chief

Grand Publications

143 West 43rd Street

New York, 16, New York

—

Dear Izzy,

That sure is exciting news, that you’re starting up a comic book line there at Grand Publications. Of course, I won’t breathe a word about it, not that there’s much of anybody to breathe it to here in Keweenaw Bay. But sometimes we stop in at the Tip Top Tavern for a couple of wee ones after we close up shop for the day and people do talk. “We” being Jack and Tim and myself. Charlie Potts keeps trying to invite himself along but Marty O’Hara runs a tight ship down at the Tip Top and he says he can’t have any minors in there or he’d risk losing his liquor license.

Funny, Percival Dunning didn’t worry about people being over twenty-one to join his Friday-night soirees and nobody ever said a word. But then I think the whole campus, from Prexy on down, felt sorry for old Percival and wouldn’t say boo at anything he did, so long as he was quiet about it.

Everybody except Henry von Eisen, that is. I’m not just saying this because I know there was bad blood between von Eisen and you, Izzy. The man was a brass-plated son of a sea cook, if you know what I mean. I think Charlie Potts had the key to von Eisen. If he really was the same Heinie von Eisen who pitched that game against St. Louis and then got his hand sliced open and lost his curveball, that would explain a lot about him and why he was always so sour and so ready to jump down anybody’s throat.

I think he especially hated Percival Dunning because Dunning was English and had been in the King’s Fusiliers during the Great War. Von Eisen was a few years younger than Dunning and he couldn’t have been in the war himself, and besides, we were on the same side as the English, weren’t we? But von Eisen was Pennsylvania Dutch, not really Dutch, you know, Deutsch, German, and there was a lot of pro-Kaiser sentiment out there in western Pennsylvania during the war.

Oh, you know this as well as I do. We used to sit in the same row in Professor Trowbridge’s modern-history class, just Carolyn Deering between us to help us not concentrate on Trowbridge’s lectures. Wasn’t that girl something, with those sweaters of hers and those plaid skirts she used to wear! You’d think she’d freeze herself to death in those Cheshire County winters, but I don’t think she ever did.

Anyway, I never heard von Eisen say a kind word about Percival Dunning. Used to mock the way he walked, hunched over as if his chest was killing him, and talked, in that soft, almost whisper of his. Well, his chest was killing him. He never got over that gas attack in France. And as for the whisper, I just don’t think he had the breath to do any more than that.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.