Word: sousas
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John Philip Sousa III (grandson of the late, great bandmaster John Philip Sousa) has written one of those hilarious life-with-father stories in which the day-to day doings of a respectable U.S. family suggest a quiet hour in bedlam...
...Mother Sousa. Though she lay in bed most of the time, garbed in a tattered blue kimono, Mrs. Sousa nourished a secret passion for efficiency. Incapable of keeping the house clean, she never failed to mark letters to local stores AIR MAIL. Her favorite recreation: brooding over her own canceled checks. Her conviction: that hired help led lives that "were pretty drab and needed brightening." So hired help always left the Sousa home stewed to the gills...
...Father Sousa. He did more than anyone else to give "strangers the impression that we were engaged in a constant celebration of Bastille Day." Father was a sportsman, with "a special fondness for equipment." A trail of duffel bags and duck decoys filled the Sousa hallways. "All the best closets were quickly filled with sleeping bags, tents, canteens, fishing rods, tackle boxes. . . ." Father had a passion for the society of policemen, for presiding on committees. "After the first couple of months [he] virtually ran Chilapa, although not necessarily by consent of the inhabitants...
Father spent much of his time "enlarging at least twenty separate collections, ranging from duelling pistols to out-of-the-way specimens of trout flies." Most of the Sousa living-room was given over to a truckload of balsam wood, several barrels of paint. Out of these Father planned one day to fashion his own duck decoys. On the dining-room table stood his favorite Christmas present- joint gift of the family-a bullet-loading machine. Father always slept with one to three loaded revolvers under his pillow, plus spare rounds of ammunition. His own room resembled "a merger between...
Father had one unfortunate tendency-a deep hatred of small boys. He was always threatening to shoot them, "had converted the police department into an agency whose sole occupation seemed to be the jailing of these children." When Halloween came around, children vengefully hurled vegetables at the Sousa windows. One Halloween Father decided to put a stop...