Word: gaspard
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...country there are really several worlds," says Author André Dhôtel at the outset of this wistful, wonderfully comic tale. His young hero, Gaspard Fontarelle, is born to a resolutely matter-of-fact world, the sleepy, stodgy French resort village of Lominval. But all about Lominval, as the young boy grows up, is the dark, beckoning world of the Ardennes forest. And Gaspard himself is marked from birth as another-worldling. At his christening, thunder rumbles in the distance, and a panicked cat scratches the notary's wife. Calamities hound the sweet, shy child-a deer hunter...
...villain of the piece is Gaspard's aunt, put in charge of the boy because his parents are unsolid citizens who ragtag about the countryside peddling neckties. A mightily mundane soul, the aunt has lofty plans for Gaspard-was not one of his ancestors mayor of Lominval, and another chief of the town's wolf-exterminating brigade? But the never-never land claims the boy; sent into the forest to gather mushrooms, he is soon lost to Lominval and launched on a mad, careering plunge of adventure...
...Gaspard befriends a runaway boy who says he is searching for a lost homeland, but it soon turns out that the boy is really a girl. Plagued by an evil servant and a lunatic film producer, aided by an addled deaf boy and a family of wandering musicians, Gaspard and the girl search for the vanished "territory" of her childhood. Because this is a fairy tale, they find it, and it proves to be the wandering carnival world of Gaspard's parents, a world where the horizon "retreats unceasingly in time and space . . . and where we never find beauty...
...because this is a spoof of the strict and stuffy, the step-by-steppers and the serious-takers of life. Author Dhôtel winds up his ramble with the mocking hawker's chant of Gaspard's papa: "Step up here sir; don't be afraid of life. Don't take one tie; don't take ten, take twenty, and have one to your taste every morning of your life! And hear this, hear this, the most necessary and inevitable purchase of all your days, for the picayune supplementary cost of sixty-five francs, this...
...first singles, captain Ben Heckscher won easily from G. P. Gaspard, 15-13, 15-4, 15-3, and at second singles Cal Place took a quick match from Tony Ellison, 15-10, 15-11, 10-15, 15-9. After a shaky start, Larry Sears took the measure of Pete Williams, 11-15, 15-11, 15-7, 15-4, and at fourth and fifth singles both Charlie Hamm, and Charlie MacVeagh won decisive 3-0 matches...