The Squirrel Whisperer

 Justin Mulneix was a pretty normal kid growing up.

He did the usual kids’ stuff. He liked playing and he liked animals and when he got old enough he liked lying in bed staring at the posters of various female singers and movie stars on his wall. Enough said about that.

But one thing that made him different from the other kids on Patterson Avenue was his fascination with squirrels. It’s not clear how and when Justin became so interested in these little creatures.

The First Annual Patterson Avenue Pancake Eating Contest

Every Saturday morning Malcolm Forsythe and his next-door neighbor on Patterson Avenue, Scott Barringer, would have breakfast together.

They always ate at the same place: Floyd’s Flapjack Palace. All of Floyd’s customers claimed there wasn’t a better place to eat pancakes than there.

Malcolm, who was a pretty big guy, always ordered the big stack of buttermilk pancakes. Scott, who was about average size, would go with the short stack of buckwheat pancakes. During their meal Malcolm would invariably start bragging about how many pancakes he could eat.

It could be asked at this point what kind of man has nothing more to brag about than how many pancakes he can eat, but maybe that’s a story for another day.

Easy as Pie

This is how one man’s supermarket blunder became two new culinary experiences.

It all started one day when Lionel Ferguson was making his way through the local grocery store. Lionel wasn’t much for any kind of shopping, but he was okay with shopping for food as long as there weren’t a lot of other shoppers in the store. As a matter of fact, he found it kind of relaxing to go to the supermarket and look at all the food.

As he walked down the frozen food aisle he noticed a buy-one-get-one-free special on Brubaker’s frozen crumb apple pies.

History will show that up until that day Lionel had never purchased a frozen pie. But the lure of two for one was too much to pass up. Besides, he liked pie. So he bought two of them and took them home. Then things started to unravel.

The Book Signing

This was the greatest day in Lydia Starling’s life.

As she sat at a table in a corner of the local Barnes & Noble, with a stack of her book “The Seaweed Diet” in front of her, she couldn’t contain her happiness. She was a newly published author holding her first book signing.

Hoping to be the Host with the Most

As far back as he could remember Curtis Dalrymple wanted to be just one thing: a game show host.

He grew up idolizing game show hosts like Bill Cullen and Peter Marshall. He’d write fan mail to Bob Eubanks and Jim Lange. When he tried to run away from home he stood at the corner holding a sign that read “Wink Martindale’s House or Bust.”

He fantasized that maybe his father, Curtis Sr., a genuinely nice but somewhat bland man, was actually his stepfather, and that maybe Gene Rayburn or Art Fleming was his real father. This didn’t please either of his parents to any great extent, although his mother did find Art Fleming to be a rather handsome man.

An Orphan Called Pickaxe

Sometime during junior high school Byron Milanovich acquired a nickname that would stick with him for the rest of his life. The kids all called him Pickaxe.

The name came from the fact that back in those days Byron was very skinny with a longer-than-average and very pointed nose. In other words, he was shaped like a pickaxe.

Emile Gets an In-basket

Emile St. Claire was the kind of person who relished small victories.

Not that he was happy with only small victories. He really wanted big victories. But since he’s never really had any big victories in his life he figured he would look at small victories as the stepping stones to big victories, if and when those big victories actually occurred.