The Adventures of Moochie

Book excerpt: Does anybody know what growing up in the 1950s was like? Follow Moochie and the rest of the Spruce Street Gang as they play baseball, and basketball and invent other games all while making up the rules of those games in the "Growing Up in the Fifties in a Small Midwestern Town." We learned a home was more than a bunch of numbers on the outside of a house in "The Vagabond Family." The brothers learned about what makes the capitalist system work in "The Box of Everything." We learned about growing up from little boys to young men to grown men in "Mike and Moochie." The adventures of Moochie are true. They deal with two people . . . okay not really, but Steve and Moochie are kind of like two people. Steve is now sixty-eight years old, but Moochie stays pretty much like what the writers of the Disney child star character, Moochie of the mid 1950s and early 1960s, describe as "part All American boy and part hellion." The stories are written in "Moochie" which is one of those "part English and part Moochie" variations of the language. In the Manual of Moochie rules, "Talking or Thinking in Moochie," you can peer inside the mind and language of Moochie. Through it all there is one constant: his friends and his classmates who stood not only with him but beside and behind him through all of the adventures""these and MANY MORE adventures.