Mention by at least two posters of The Bishop's Jaegers and other Thorne Smith books got me to thinking about those and other books I compulsively read and reread when an adolescent.

Which reminded me of the funniest book I ever read, I think, Barefoot Boy With Cheek, by Max Shulman. And reread. And reread. His later books were good, but to my mind he never again achieved the sublime zanyness of Barefoot Boy.

To this day, sixty-six years later, I remember verbatim the first paragraph of the novel, where the hero, Asa Hearthrug, says:

The morning of the great day dawned bright and clear. "Huzzah!", I cried, bounding out of bed. I bounded right back in again. During the night my drop-seat pajamas had become entangled in the bedspring.

It was "the great day" because Asa was about to leave home to attend the "University of Minnesota". It is explained by the author, of course, that "The University of Minnesota" is a purely fictional institution. The word "Minnesota", we are informed, is actually an American Indian word meaning "The place where three Braves and two Squaws ate underdone pemmican." Shulman gives the reader, through the mouths of various characters, the history of what he calls "The University of Minnesota". Or maybe I should say "histories". Each "history" is wildly different from the others, but equally weird.

His characters have magnificent names. For instance, the glad-handing president of Asa's fraternity is Roger Hailfellow. The fraternity treasurer is Shylock Fiscal. Asa's girlfriend, an enthusiastic missionary Communist who interprets EVERYTHING Asa mentions in the light of dialetical materialism, is Yetta Samovar.

I've got to quit now. I have way too many hilarious instances and circumstances from Barefoot Boy With Cheek to give any fair representation of the book in this post, which is too long already.

Now I have to quit this post, to put in a request to the library for Barefoot Boy With Cheek, which I have neglected reading for about twenty years.

Dave Oesterreich