Many thanks to Mike and Christine Thomas, both students at Penn State University, who read the manuscript and offered some important advice.
Many thanks to Natale Grande, a graduate of the University of Florida's School of Engineering and Architecture, for some helpful technical advice.
Many thanks to Dan Hogan, a free-lance editor, who provided some critical editorial assistance.
Many thanks to my word processing specialists, Jeanette and Monica, for their expert advice.
And finally, many thanks to Sal LeRose and the Grande family, and to the employees and customers of Il Capriccio. You're the greatest!!
Gifford Bailey, the author of this book, has a lot of people to thank. It takes many minds to help a great manuscript come together, and I'm looking forward to seeing just what they helped him with.
And now the story begins.
Sometimes you can learn a lot about an author by their choice of details. So we know that Archie is twelve, and apparently he has a slender body. That he slowly rolled out of bed. At 7:00 A.M. on Saturday.
There is no Riverwood in New Jersey, btw.
The rest of the chapter is very short and mentions Archie's two twelve-year-old friends, Billy Evers and Hank Johnson, who we're going to meet very shortly.
The major thing it introduces though, is the "secret passage". What is the secret passage? It's
In the process of looking, he suddenly discovered that he liked the path he had taken through the backyards. He liked climbing the walls, hopping over and through the hedges, and jumping the fences that divided the properties. He found it a challenging exercise, something like an obstacle course. He liked it so much that he decided to phone Billy and Hank about it right away, to arrange a day when all three boys could travel it together.
(Paragraph break mine, since the book really should have had it)
So in other words, one day when Archie was looking for his missing pet cat, he went through people's backyards to try to find him. Once he finally found his cat, he decided that going through people's backyards so much that he wanted to take the exact route all over again just for fun. And he was so excited over the idea, that he called his friends to do it with him.
What would that phone call look like? Probably something like this:
"Hey man! Yo, you gotta hear this. I was looking for my cat, going through people's backyards and jumping fences and stuff, and it was so much fun that you gotta do it with me. No, seriously, get Hank together and the three of us can go through backyards together and jump fences and stuff. Seriously, we gotta meet at 9:00 in my backyard. Dude, we totes gotta do this. You haven't lived until you've run through backyards and hopped fences and hedges. Oh, and let's take the same route that we took when I was looking for my cat. I got it memorized and everything. So, 9 on Saturday? Sweet."
Archie has some odd hobbies. Or maybe the author has some odd ideas about kids' hobbies, but considering this book's accolades, I'm assuming that the author was instead realistically representing the mind of a very unusual individual with great accuracy.
But we'll see. We've only just begun, and the story gets way better, take my word for it.
Oh, and notice the exact details given in the story, such as exact times, and exact distances, such as "five yards from his house"? The author does that a lot, as you'll notice later. But wait. Archie had wandered down five yards from his house? How far is five yards?
That's how far. So Archie barely wandered anywhere, yet somehow managed to make his way through backyards and over walls and hedges? These must be the tiniest walls and hedges in the world! Either that, or the author has no idea what a "yard" is.
Or he meant "five backyards", in which case he should have chosen his words more carefully. But as you'll see, our esteemed author is not the most careful user of language, nor the best at measuring space.
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