Once Below a Time

In nineteen forty eight, when I was a mere sapling of eight, I was reared in the provincial Buchanan Valley of Adams County, a rifle shot fromGettysburg, Pennsylvania, and some fifty years removed from Philadelphia. All elementary students in our valley were reluctantly incarcerated in a two room schoolhouse of eight grades of mostly mayhem named Strasbaugh School, full of tight fisted boys and precocious giggling girls; an environment wherein a six year old ruffian could enthusiastically learn thewicked ways of the eighth grade boys, and the six year old girls would . . . but never mind that now. Suffice it to say, this was not a setting approved by the "sorcerer of souls", Father Genovese, a demonic Catholic priest whose shepherdship invaded and pervaded every moral fiber of the valley's faithful residents. His actions and the directives of the diocese were vehemently opposed by a revered, crusty octogenarian named Monkey Kump, the other principal in this memoir, who was born shortly after his father fought at the Battle of Gettysburg, and was a cantankerous opinionated jokesmither, folkliar and soothsayer, whose addiction to alcohol, profuse profanity and a tendency toward insanity, instantly marked him as my mentor. Along the cherubic protagonist's barbed and brambles odyssey, he is raped at school by a female upper classmate, battered by a hurricane, accidently observes an adult lesbos love tryst, survives a torrid love scene with a comely adolescent Jewish queen, is excommunicatedfrom the Catholic Church, survives a brawl with the valley's venomous bully, and observes a violent homicide at the South Mountain Fair. This satirical, lyrical, irreverent and hilarious memoir is not for the faint of heart. Portions deal with profanity and romance in a slightly naughty and bawdy manner, in a raucous setting, during the innocence of the Eisenhower years. "And I alone escaped to tell thee."