Word: boyhoods
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Most of his material comes from his own backwoods boyhood spent on a 2,500-acre cotton plantation in the Arkansas Delta country. There, as a youth, he listened in on back-porch yarn spinning, submitted to hell-fire-and-damnation sermons, saw ghosts at the foot of his four-poster and, like many another adolescent, doubted his own provenance ("Was I adopted? Had I been stolen from the gypsies?"). Unlike most children, though, he drew constantly. "At first it was only cowboys, then it was baseball and football players. Finally," he recalls, "I drew a cowgirl." Not long after...
...gaunt, gifted art student, he had been invalided at 20 when a motorist crashed into his bicycle, fracturing his spine. Often unable to paint, scarcely able to walk, he took up his pen and wrote two books of stories, two fictionalized autobiographies of boyhood, a lengthy journal and this brilliant, terrible novel. Published in England in 1950, it received scant attention; but critics have recently recognized Welch's memoir as a minor masterpiece, and it has now been published in the U.S. for the first time...
...versed himself in Yiddish and Zionism to confuse Jewish spokesmen. He found the transport to ghettos and crematoriums. Nothing personal, he testified. He came from an ordinary Bible-reading Protestant family, and had had Jewish friends during his Austrian boyhood. In transmitting orders, he never persecuted "individuals"-"it was a matter of a political solution. For this I worked 100 percent...
...slacks, shiny black shoes, navy blazer with brass buttons and a gold F on the breast pocket. Neat, but not too gaudy. Even in the office, as he feeds IBM cards into the computer, the Fidelity man is certainly a credit to de corps. No longer is there suppressed boyhood envy of the white-suited Good Humor man, no longer jealousy of bankers' grey. A fig for Braniff stewardesses in Pucci bloomers. Even those Avis chaps with their blazers and TRY buttons shrink to insignificance when one no longer has to go to work one day in a blue...
Family Saloons. Royko remembers his boyhood as just the right background for a future columnist. Born in a middle-class Polish neighborhood, he got to know the city by tagging along after his father, a "tavern tycoon," who bought and sold one saloon after another. As he grew older, he graduated to important jobs, such as transporting money for a bookie operating out of one of his father's taverns...