Harold's Boys

Book excerpt: If there is one thing Mark Gaedtke does not want to do in life, it is to imagine his parents being romantic with each other. Yet as he reminisces about how he grew up in an old farmhouse in northern Wisconsin, Gaedtke cannot help but reflect on how his God-fearing mother and relentlessly sociable father managed to find the time to create six males and still get dinner on the table every night. In his collection of amusing recollections of his youth in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, Gaedtke strives to find the answers to life's most elusive questions such as why he considered taking a fire extinguisher to his senior prom; why he changed the name of his baseball glove from Old Yeller to Old Banana Peel; And why that beefy linebacker snarled like a jaundiced badger. As he details the events of his childhood, Gaedtke shares entertaining tales about how he fed his passion for knife throwing with the help of his father's screwdrivers and survived the steel-toed saddle shoe incident and birthday gifts from his parents who were obviously trying to kill him. Harold's Boys seeks to encourage others to look at their youth in an entirely different way and realize that all our crazy experiences are what made us the harebrained fools we are today.