Box Socials. W. Kinsella P.

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      Contents

       Title Page

      Copyright

      SECTION ONE: TRUCKBOX AL’S BIG BREAK

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       SECTION TWO: THE FULL SCHOLARSHIP ORPHANED GENIUS

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       SECTION THREE: THE LITTLE BOX SOCIAL

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       SECTION FOUR: BOB FELLER, HAL NEWHOUSER, AND JOE DIMAGGIO HIMSELF

       Chapter Fifteen

       Also by the W.P. Kinsella

       About the Publisher

       Chapter One

      This is the story of how Truckbox Al McClintock almost got a tryout with the genuine St. Louis Cardinals of the National Baseball League, but instead ended up batting against Bob Feller, of Cleveland Indian fame, in Renfrew Park, down on the river flats, in Edmonton, Alberta, summer of 1945 or ’46, no one can remember which, though the date in question has brought on more than one disagreement, which turned first to a shoving match, then to an altercation, and finally a fist fight, though not a brouhaha, the general consensus in the Six Towns area being that it takes more than two people to staff a brouhaha, the fist fight though, usually resulting in bent cartilage of someone’s proboscis, and blood spots on a Sunday shirt.

      I was young and pretty small at the time, not much taller than my dog, Benito Mussolini, who, when he stood looking sorrowful, if the light was right, appeared to have a long, bald head, though in reality he was just a plain old soup-hound of unknown but varied ancestry, with whiskers that stuck out like a cat’s and bad breath.

      ‘We’re hillbillies,’ my mama said, on more than one occasion, ‘only difference is we know we’re hillbillies, and we won’t always be that way, unlike some we know.’ Mama hailed from South Carolina, and though she’d grown up prosperous, with a daddy who was a mining engineer, had had at least a passing acquaintance with hillbillies, up until the time she met Daddy.

      The unlike some we know at one time referred specifically to three families, the Venusberg Stevensons, the more-or-less-Doreen Beach Sigurdsons, and the Red Sigurdsons, who were also known as our Sigurdsons because they lived in the general area of Fark, which was also the town my family lived in the general area of. Fark was about nine miles as the crow flies from New Oslo, a little further than that from Sangudo, and exactly eleven miles from Doreen Beach, which wasn’t a resort or even on a lake, as many surprised visitors found out each summer. Fark wasn’t big enough to be a town, and it was, Mama said, a cruel punishment for anyone to have to live in the general area of a town called Fark, the naming of which I’ll get around to later.

      My family, the O’Days (my father was John Martin Duffy O’Day, my mother Olivia), had been forced into unsuccessful farming by the Depression. One of my grandfathers was an engineer, not the steam-engine kind, but the coal-mining kind, and a great-grandfather had owned a winery in the old country, and my daddy, John Martin Duffy O’Day, built fine houses, only there weren’t any fine houses to build СКАЧАТЬ