Tippy Locklin

The war was going badly for America in 1942, but the Tebo shipyard was bursting with ships and the waterfront bars were exploding with sailors, hustlers, and shipyard workers. When a smashed rivet ship limped into port requiring urgent repairs, Terry Peirce, in charge of personnel, had to hunt down hard-drinking, temperamental rivet gangs to handle the job. War fever consumed the nation. Girls like the bewitching Viola Wakeless went mad for gold braid while Terry, crazy for Viola, tried to break free of her. Brilliantly depicted here, this was an electric time like no other in America’s history.

Joseph William Meagher's Tippy Locklin is a magical and wildly funny re-creation of a Brooklyn boyhood in the 1920s. As Richard Sullivan in The New York Times Book Review observed, it is a novel "so loaded with warm, hearty people, so charged with honest, affectionate fun that in final effect it is a small celebration of the very goodness of being alive." For what Tippy's world instills in him is "a belief that all is intrinsically well and that the world is not a jungle of broken glass but a well-ordered place where things go wrong and people misbehave, but whose foundation is strong and indestructible." The characters in Tippy's world are memorable. Especially notable is his neighbor, Mr. Duffy the cabdriver, wondrously tattooed with a motto of his own composition: "For God, Country, Mother and Girl Friend." Mr. Duffy has an enormous wife ("Lousy cook, but the strongest woman you ever saw"), a lady addicted to sitting down. Early on she endears herself to the reader when she sits down on a crate, part of the parlor furniture, and just as she cozily establishes herself, there is a noise of splintering wood and above it a pleasant tinkling sound. "Fine!" Mr. Duffy says. "Those were the Christmas tree ornaments." Reading Tippy Locklin is like opening a grab bag of delightful surprises - the laughter, warmth and love that fill the book remain vivid long after the last page has been turned. "I little thought," wrote Dorothy Parker at the close of her lengthy review in Esquire magazine, "that I should ever go on like this over a book about a small boy - especially one named Tippy. But here I am, and all naked of apologies."

DEMONS TO DOUGHNUTS joins two novellas as different as a cold December moon and strawberry pudding. THE TIPTOP JELLY DOUGHNUT, all warm sunshine and good eats, will delight dreamers and lovers of jelly doughnuts from eight to 108. It is set in a lovely land called the Kids' Republic where nobody over ten is allowed. Here the government is run (quite well) by babies. At the helm is President Baby Bumkey, seventeen months old and a born leader. For diplomatic reasons it is urgent that the baker of certain sublime jelly doughnuts be found so he can supply them for a vital state banquet. But the baker of these glorious doughnuts, having reached the age of ten, has been obliged to leave the comfort and safety of the Kids' Republic. Three children and a Six O'Clock Cat are chosen to make the perilous journey Somewhere Out There to find him. Will they succeed? In contrast, THE LUCIFER GYPSIES is a haunting chiller set in nineteenth-century New England. In this dark and fascinating tale a casket-maker inadvertently insults a band of gypsies who happen to be wards of the Devil. In their fury they inflict on the poor shopkeeper a fiendishly cunning curse which he must somehow overcome to survive.

P.J. Linenette is a Manhattan accountant. The disabled son of his building superintendent vanishes and P.J. is asked to hunt him down. P.J. then notices the abrupt disappearance of all the disabled people he's been seeing around town for years. Where are they? P.J. finds out when he gets off at the wrong floor of a factory and stumbles into a conspiracy of cripples led by the Bundle, a quadriplegic with an outrageous mission. The cripples refuse to let P.J. leave. In a strangely cozy imprisonment filled with macaroni dinners and dire threats, he learns some profound lessons about the disabled and himself.

"In 1922, at the age of four, Joseph William Meagher contracted polio, leaving him with a back shaped like the harp of his Irish ancestors. Only all-night massaging by the family doctor saved him from a wheelchair life. After a barbaric (and fruitless) treatment to straighten his spine, Joe returned home to the shelter of a loving family. But little by little, the cold eye of the outside world made clear to him how different he was. His parents took medical advice and sent Joe off to Port Jefferson, Long Island, to spend the next four years at a hospital/school for crippled children. Though many there were severely disabled, they had the same unquenchable zest for life as any other kids, and with great innocence and gusto went about the business of being kids in the best way they could. In addition to presenting a picture of the very beginnings of rehabilitative therapy, Broken Yesterdays is the unswervingly candid and often amusing memoir of a boy who learned early that tears did no good, and that he faced a choice: Either surrender to the bitterness of being different or, through strength of will, make the best of what he had in him. Fortunately for his readers, Joseph William Meagher made the right choice."

Includes Part 1, Number 1 & 2: Books and Pamphlets, Including Serials and Contributions to Periodicals (January - December)