Vanishing baseball teams and preventable head injuries, but also stories about missing pets, storm-damaged utility poles, traffic accidents, spitball contests, Sputnik, and the state of the president’s health, as well as brief notices about the current doings of the Ferguson and Adler clans, such as STORK BEATS DEADLINE!: “For the first time in human history, a baby was born on its due date. At 11:53 P.M. on December 29, just seven minutes before the clock ran out on her, Mrs. Frances Hollander, 22, of New York City, gave birth to her first child, a 7 pound, 3 ounce boy named Stephen. Congratulations, cousin Francie!” Or, A BIG STEP UP: “Mildred Adler was recently promoted from associate professor to full professor by the English Department at the University of Chicago. She is one of the world’s leading authorities on the Victorian novel and has published books about George Eliot and Charles Dickens.” And then, not to be overlooked, there was a boxed-in rectangle in the lower right-hand quadrant of the back page that bore the title Adler’s Joke Corner, which Ferguson planned to include as a regular feature in all issues of the Crusader, for how could he neglect a resource as valuable as his grandfather, the king of the bad joke, who had told so many bad jokes to Ferguson over the years that the young editor in chief would have felt remiss if he hadn’t used some of them. The first example went as follows: “Mr. and Mrs. Hooper were on their way to Hawaii. Just before the plane landed, Mr. Hooper asked his wife if the correct pronunciation of the word Hawaii was Hawaii — with a w sound — or Havaii — with a v sound. ‘I don’t know,’ Mrs. Hooper said. ‘Let’s ask someone when we get there.’ In the airport, they spotted a little old man walking by in a Hawaiian shirt. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ Mr. Hooper said. ‘Can you tell us if we’re in Hawaii or Havaii?’ Without a blink of hesitation, the old man said, ‘Havaii.’ ‘Thank you,’ said Mr. and Mrs. Hooper. To which the old man replied: ‘You’re velcome.’”
Subsequent issues were published in April and September of that year, each one an improvement on the last, or so Ferguson was told by his parents and relatives, but with his school friends it was a different story, for after the success of the first issue, which had taken his class by storm, a number of resentments and animosities began to surface. The closed-in world of fifth- and sixth-grade life was bound by a strict set of rules and social hierarchies, and by taking the initiative to launch the Cobble Road Crusader, that is, by daring to create something out of nothing, Ferguson had inadvertently overstepped those bounds. Inside those bounds boys could win status in one of two ways: by excelling at sports or by proving themselves to be masters of mischief-making. Good marks in school were of little importance, and even exceptional talent in art or music counted for almost nothing, since those talents were seen as inborn gifts, biological traits similar to the color of one’s hair or the size of one’s feet, and therefore not fully connected to the person who possessed them, mere facts of nature independent of human will. Ferguson had always been reasonably good at sports, which had allowed him to fit in with the other boys and avoid the dreaded fate of outcast. Mischief-making bored him, but his anarchic sense of humor had helped to cement his reputation as a decent fellow, even if he kept his distance from the wild, strutting boys who spent their weekends dropping cherry bombs into mailboxes, shattering lampposts, and making obscene phone calls to the prettiest girls in the grade above them. In other words, Ferguson had breezed along so far without running into excessive difficulties, his good grades considered neither a plus nor a minus, his tactful, unaggressive approach to interpersonal relations having buffered him against the angers of other boys, which meant that he had been in few fistfights and seemed to have made no permanent enemies, but then, in the months before he turned eleven, he decided he wanted to make a splash, which expressed itself in the form of a self-published, one-sheet newspaper, and suddenly his classmates understood that there was more to Ferguson than they had suspected, that he was really quite a clever young man, a crackerjack boy with the strength of mind to pull off an intricate stunt like the Crusader, and therefore all twenty-two fellow members of his fifth-grade class coughed up their nickels for a copy of the first issue, congratulating him on his fine work, laughing at the funny turns of phrase that dotted his articles, and then the weekend came and by Monday morning everyone had stopped talking about it. If the Crusader had ended after that first issue, Ferguson would have spared himself the grief that ultimately fell upon his head, but how could he have known there was a difference between being clever and too clever, that a second issue in the spring would start turning some of the class against him because it would prove that he was working too hard, too hard as opposed to their not hard enough, meaning that Ferguson was an industrious go-getter and they were little more than lazy, good-for-nothing louts? The girls were still with him, every one of the girls, but the girls weren’t competing with him, it was the boys who were beginning to feel the pressure of Ferguson’s diligence, three or four of them in any case, but Ferguson was too filled with his own happiness to notice, too flush with the triumph of completing another issue to question why Ronny Krolik and his band of hoodlums refused to buy the new edition of the Crusader when he brought it to school in April, thinking, if he thought about it at all, that they simply didn’t have enough money.
In Ferguson’s opinion, newspapers were one of mankind’s greatest inventions, and he had loved them ever since he had learned how to read. Early in the morning, seven days a week, a copy of the Newark Star-Ledger would appear on the front steps of the house, landing with a pleasant thump just as he was climbing out of bed, thrown by some nameless, invisible person who never missed his mark, and by the time he was six and a half Ferguson had already begun to take part in the morning ritual of reading the paper while he ate his breakfast, he who had willed himself to read during the summer of the broken leg, who had fought his way out of the prison of his childish stupidity and turned into a young citizen of the world, now advanced enough to comprehend everything, or almost everything but abstruse matters of economic policy and the notion that building more nuclear weapons would ensure a lasting peace, and every morning he would sit at the breakfast table with his parents as each one of them tackled a different section of the paper, reading in silence because talking was so difficult that early in the morning, and then passing around completed sections from one to the other in a kitchen filled with the smells of coffee and scrambled eggs, of bread warming and browning in the toaster, of butter melting into hot slabs of toast. For Ferguson, it was always the funnies and sports to begin with, the oddly appealing Nancy and her friend Sluggo, Jiggs and his wife Maggie, Blondie and Dagwood, Beetle Bailey, followed by the latest from Mantle and Ford, from Conerly and Gifford, and then on to the local news, the national and international news, articles about movies and plays, so-called human interest stories about the seventeen college boys who crammed into a telephone booth or the thirty-six hot dogs consumed by the winner of the Essex County eating contest, and when all those had been exhausted and there were still a few minutes to spare before he set off to school, the classified ads and personals. Darling, I love you. Please come home.