Another rerun — this time by popular request, which means one person suggested I post in here again. This first appeared on this blog on 8/6/14…

This time out, I'm going to tell the story of two of the best laughs I ever got in my life, one at age ten and one at twelve. They were both with the same joke and the person who laughed at it twice was my Uncle Aaron. He was a nice man — my father's sister's husband — who looked enough like Art Carney to be occasionally mistaken for him.

One time when we went to a crowded restaurant with him and Aunt Dot, we were surprised to be seated immediately, ahead of many other parties. As he passed out the menus to us, the host told Uncle Aaron how much he loved him on The Honeymooners. Uncle Aaron, who was afraid they'd rescind our preferential seating, said, "Thank you. I love working with Jackie Gleason."

As I've mentioned here, he sold window displays. If you had a small business, you could peruse his catalog and order little, relatively-inexpensive creations of wood, styrofoam and cloth to jazz up your store or front window. He offered low cost displays for all holidays and occasions. As Halloween approached, he sold a lot of witches and ghosts. As Thanksgiving neared, he sold turkeys and pilgrims. Christmas accounted for around 50% of his annual sales.

The displays were manufactured by a company in Japan and much of Uncle Aaron's life revolved around "The Japanese." He never spoke of his suppliers by name unless, I suppose, he was meeting with them, here or there. When he wasn't, it was "The Japanese are giving me trouble again" or "The Japanese overcharged me on that last shipment" or "The Japanese will be in town next week."

Even as a child, it struck me as bizarre to refer to his associates that way. He'd say, "The Japanese will be visiting my apartment on Saturday" and I'd say, "Really, Uncle Aaron? All of them?" And he never got it. He'd say, "Of course. The Japanese will be in town all next week. I'm taking them all to lunch on Monday." There was nothing racist about it. It was just shorthand. In the same way, he'd turn to his secretary and say, "Get Chicago on the phone!" and I'd think to myself, "Really? You're going to talk to the entire city?"

The displays were also designed in Japan, often from little sketches Uncle Aaron would doodle out and mail to them. He wasn't much of an artist but he'd draw a crude, almost-stick-figure snowman sunning himself under a cruder palm tree and then "The Japanese" would figure out what he had in mind and build it. A few times, he let me do the sketches and even at age 10, I was better than he was.

He had an office/warehouse down on Beverly Boulevard in what was then largely a Hispanic neighborhood but is now trending Korean. Once every few months, I'd spend the afternoon there. He'd assign me my own desk and I'd sit and draw or sit and read. Sometimes, Uncle Aaron would let me stuff catalogs into envelopes. Then he'd ridiculously overpay me for about an hour of work and I'd spend it all on comic books.

One day, "The Japanese" presented Uncle Aaron with a proposition. His supplier over there had acquired interest in a firm that could make full-sized mannequins for an absurdly low price. I do not remember the exact numbers but they went something like this. The top department stores were paying $100 and up for the kind of mannequin you dress in the clothes you're selling and place in your store window or on the floor. Via this new connection, Uncle Aaron could sell mannequins of the same size for $29.95 and still make a nice profit on each one.

"The Japanese" proposed a partnership arrangement whereby he would advertise and sell them in America. He made the deal which meant expanding his business considerably. Fortunately, the store next door to his office was for rent so it became the warehouse and shipping center for the mannequin side of his business. There was a considerable expenditure in setting up that store, staffing it and especially in advertising and mailings but he saw it as a great investment. And indeed, orders were soon rolling in and mannequins were arriving from Japan for him to repackage and ship to buyers.

You have probably seen a horror movie or suspense drama where someone is trapped in a warehouse full of mannequins. They walk nervously through it with eerie lighting and eerier music setting the mood. They glance from face to face, from silhouette to silhouette with the mounting terror that one or more of those mannequins might just be…alive?

Well, I got to play in just such a warehouse.

I have this odd memory of being alone in the warehouse at least once. I don't recall the circumstances that led to me being alone in there and probably it was for a matter of minutes as opposed to the hour or two I recall. But in the memory, I am ten and I'm wandering around amidst hundreds of nude, genital-less mannequins, females outnumbering males by about two to one. At that age, I was still trying to get clear on what women actually had under their clothing and nothing I saw there was any help. The whole thing was, like I said, odd.

It was not scary like in the movies because it lacked the ominous music and lighting…but it was odd. At one point, I turned to them and said aloud, "Okay, you can knock it off, guys. Move!" When they didn't move, I felt safer.

Mannequins today are, like everything else except tattoos and Joan Rivers, sexier. Female mannequins now look very much like the women in Playboy, which is partly a function of more realistic eyes and hair and makeup and a greater suggestion of reproductive organs on the mannequins. It's also partly a function of the women in Playboy looking more and more like they were sculpted out of papier-mâché. The mannequins in Uncle Aaron's warehouse were designed to be as non-offensive (i.e., non-sexy) as possible.

That was true of the ones on the north side of the warehouse, which were the ones that were all assembled, mostly for display purposes for when potential buyers came around. Less sexy were the ones on the west side of the warehouse. These were the ones in pieces, newly-arrived from Japan, which were to be shipped to buyers for assembly. Each of them was in nine parts — head, a two-part torso plus pairs of arms, hands and legs. Being low-cost mannequins, they had limited posing possibilities…but what did you want for $29.95?

Well, you might have wanted something sturdier. On the south side of the warehouse were the broken ones. What turned out to be an unacceptable percentage of them arrived from Japan in unsellable condition. The secret of the $29.95 price tag was that they were made with cheap material from cheap molds by poorly-paid employees and then were shipped over with inadequate packaging.

When a shipment of mannequins arrived from their maker, one would be missing a hand, one would have a leg that was busted, one would have a defective arm that wouldn't lock into place, etc. Uncle Aaron found he had to have his staff inspect and try assembling each one. Then they'd cannibalize, taking the head from this one and the arm from that one to turn three busted ones into one whole one. He would soon get into a lawsuit with "The Japanese" over this. They'd bill him, say, for one hundred mannequins. He'd pay for the seventy-one out of a hundred he considered complete. They finally sued him and in a counter suit, he charged that the product they were delivering to him was inferior to the samples he'd been shown when he agreed to the joint venture.

There were also many returns from buyers of mannequins that didn't live through their 90-day guarantee. The flesh-coloring would flake off or fingers would break or the torso would implode from the slightest bump. The metal fittings whereby one part locked to another would snap off and be unrepairable.

The mannequins may have had a 90-day guarantee but Uncle Aaron's new business didn't. In less than three months, he realized he was in trouble and for a simple reason: He was being delivered, and was therefore delivering to his customers, an inferior, shoddy product. That doesn't always put you out of business in this world but it did in Uncle Aaron's case.

Before long, it was all in the hands of lawyers. Eventually, there was a settlement and I never heard the terms but Uncle Aaron did refer to it as — and I quote: "A very expensive lesson." I wish some companies today would learn it.

My almost-final memory of Uncle Aaron's mannequin venture was the last day I spent in his office, watching and helping a bit as he and his few remaining employees packed to vacate the premises. He was leaving the mannequin biz behind and moving what was left of the window display operation to new quarters a few miles away. As he packed, he quoted to me what he said was an Old Jewish Curse. It went as follows: "May you have partners."

Uncle Aaron, by the way, was an Old Jew and he knew how to curse.

As he put the lid on one box, he asked me to give him a hand. My comedy impulses were starting to kick in at that age so I ran into the adjoining warehouse, came back with the hand (only) of one of the mannequins and gave it to him. He looked at it for a second, puzzled. Then he "got it" and began laughing uproariously.

It was one of those laughs that just went on and on. Tears — the good kind — came to his eyes and then he hugged me and said, "This whole business venture has been such a nightmare. But this almost makes it worth it." I didn't believe that but I was real happy I could do anything good for my Uncle Aaron. Real happy. A little later, he let me pack up a box of pads and pencils and other office supplies he wouldn't be needing so I could take them home. When he wasn't looking, I put a few of those stray mannequin hands into the box. Just in case.

This all happened in 1962. A few months later, and I'm not suggesting a connection, Uncle Aaron got sick and he underwent a series of operations. The first was certain to solve the problem but it didn't so he had the second one which was certain to solve the problem. It didn't so he had the third one which was certain to solve the problem, which led to the fourth one which was certain to solve the problem. By that point, even I knew how the problem would end and that it would not be long.

One day in 1964, my parents told me we were going to see Uncle Aaron in the hospital. They didn't say "This may be to say goodbye" but from their manner, I figured that part out. Since a visit to the hospital usually involved sitting around a waiting room for long periods, I packed a little bag of comic books and a pad of paper and my favorite doodling pen…and I took along something else. Just in case.

Uncle Aaron looked terrible there in the bed. The sheet didn't completely cover his chest and I could see terrible, ugly scars and stitching all over him. I tried to look at his face without looking at the scars but his face wasn't much more pleasant. You could see he was in pain — the physical kind and the emotional kind. The latter kind seemed to be worse.

We all talked for a little while and then I was sent out of the room so he could talk to my mother and father in private. I later learned he was asking them to take good care of the woman who would soon be his widow. And of course, they said yes.

Then he asked to have a moment alone with me. My mother and father went out and I went in. Uncle Aaron told me how proud he was of me and how he regretted he wouldn't be around to see what I would become but he was sure it would be impressive. He asked me to never forget about my Aunt Dot, the woman he loved so, and to do what I could to be of help to her, especially right after he was gone. The way he said it, I wondered if he expected this to happen within the hour.

It was all a lot for a child of twelve to hear and I remember thinking two things during it. One was to wonder if I should say something like, "You're not going anywhere. You'll be up and around in no time." I didn't believe that. I also knew he would never believe that. And I really knew that he would never believe I believed that. Still, I was thinking: Isn't that the kind of thing you're supposed to say in these situations?

I wasn't sure why but I decided not to say anything of the sort. Looking back, I suppose my instinct was that what he was telling me was very serious. This was perhaps the most serious moment of his life and if I'd said "Oh, you'll be fine," that would have been me not taking his seriousness seriously.

So I was thinking that and I was also thinking, "How can I get this man to ask me to give him a hand?" Because you know darn well what was in my bag with the comic books and the drawing pad.

As he finished his emotional plea to me to grow up right and to prosper and to care for Aunt Dot, he got a tad hoarse. On the table next to the bed, there was a little cup of club soda with a straw in it. He started to reach for it and I asked, "Do you need help?" and he said, "Yes, please, give me a hand!" I couldn't believe my luck.

I grabbed for my bag of stuff and out came the mannequin hand I'd brought. Uncle Aaron stared at it and began howling with laughter. Howling! I have never made anyone laugh like that in my life since then and I doubt I ever will again. My parents and a nurse came in to see what was happening. For a moment there, I thought maybe I'd harmed him somehow…perhaps hastened his demise. Then I thought, "No, he's not going to survive anyway. Maybe I've given him the chance to literally die laughing."

I thought he would have liked that. I know when I go, I'd like that.

He survived my joke, snickering and savoring it, and insisted on putting the mannequin hand on his bedside tray. That was the last time I ever saw him but Aunt Dot and one of his nurses both told me he couldn't look at it without laughing and feeling a little better. He died about two weeks after my visit.

Yeah, the hand thing was a silly joke but it wasn't bad for a kid that age…and it made 100% of its audience laugh, which is more than most jokes do.

When you're a kid, you can't do much to make your family happy. You can not get into trouble, and I almost never got into trouble, but you can't actually do anything. I was glad I could do something good for my Uncle Aaron. He did so many good things for me.

And yes, that's Oprah Winfrey narrating…

These days, I have zero desire to sit in an audience and even less to sit on an airplane…so I don't care how wonderful Hugh Jackman is as The Music Man, I ain't going. But it sure would make me feel good to know that Broadway was alive and thriving and being enjoyed by people who were properly vaccinated and masked…

I really liked the show Spamalot. I've seen it four times — once in Columbus, Ohio with the national touring company…once in Las Vegas…once at the Ahmanson in downtown Los Angeles…and once down in Redondo Beach in a production that used (I think) the sets and costumes of the national touring company. The one I enjoyed the most was the one in Columbus because it was expertly presented, everything was new to me…and I was in it.

And I've listened many, many times to the Broadway Cast Album. I'm not sure why I never listened to the 2010 album done by the company that went on tour with a revival of the show in the United Kingdom. Guess I never noticed it…but I did recently. You can buy it on Amazon but it's very expensive. I listened to it on Spotify and discovered that (a) it's very good and (b) a lot of it's different.

There are quite a few lyric changes, most notably in "Whatever Happened to My Part?" And what may be my favorite song in the show — "You Won't Succeed on Broadway" — is completely rewritten to omit all mention of Jews. It's now called "The Star Song" and instead of trying to have a hit show on Broadway, it's about trying to have one in Bromley, which is a large town in South London. Here's a before-and-after of one small hunk of each…

BROADWAY VERSION:
In any great adventure, if you don't want to lose,
Victory depends upon the people that you choose.
So listen, Arthur darling, closely to this news,
We won't succeed on Broadway if we don't have any Jews.

BRITISH VERSION:
In any show biz venture, from Shakespeare down to Keats,
If you want to be successful, you must put bums in seats.
So listen, Arthur darling, or you won't get very far,
You won't succeed in Bromley if you haven't got a star.

And then all the stuff about goys and shiksas and the little snatch of "Hava Nagila" and the Fiddler on the Roof reference is gone. The quest from that point on is not to find Jews to be in the show but to land a major star. Some of the dialogue that surrounds the songs on the U.K. cast recording suggests other changes in the book.

This is not a complaint. I'm just sharing something I just found out and find interesting. Based on a bit of Internet Research, it would seem that the original London company on the West End used the Broadway script when it debuted in 2006. Then in 2010 when a tour began, it was decided to change the song to make it more local and about the theater business in Great Britain and its stars. Also, British theater has nowhere near as much Jewish blood in its DNA. And apparently, it's only "Bromley" in this CD because it was recorded when the tour was playing in Bromley. In other cities, there were other place names there.

You can probably hear the song a dozen places online if you search for "star song spamalot" without the quotes.  And if you're as much a fan of this show as I am, you might want to listen to the whole album which you can do on Spotify, Amazon and probably other places.  It's a pretty good presentation of the songs.

From 1967, it's the wonderful Gwen Verdon performing a number from Sweet Charity on The Ed Sullivan Show. Doesn't get much better than this…

Happy  AGE REDACTED  birthday to the lovely Betty Lynn, who had a grand career as an actress, most famous playing Thelma Lou on The Andy Griffith Show. She may have been Barney Fife's girl friend but she was my next-door neighbor when I was growing up (to the limited extent that I grew up) and I still love her like a close relative. I just called to wish her a Happy Birthday and got her voicemail so I guess she's out celebrating…which is just what I'd be doing right now if I were  AGE REDACTED .

• Would someone please rescue every reporter and camera crew that is outside during Hurricane Ida trying to report on Hurricane Ida?

I greatly admired Ed Asner as an actor and as an activist…mainly as an actor, mainly as an on-camera actor. Obviously, he was terrific in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant and other high-profile jobs he had. But when he wasn't being paid what one would assume was Big Bucks for jobs like that, he always seemed willing to act for little-to-no money in anything that had sincere effort behind it — any play in any venue, any reading, any radio drama, any student film. There are actors, including some very fine ones, who'd say "That stuff's beneath me" and prefer to sit home, not acting. Not Ed Asner.

And that's about all I want to say right now.

This probably shouldn't bother me as much as it does. I order a lot of things off Ye Olde Internet and I'm constantly amazed or puzzled or just somehow reactive to the fact that companies presume that few people know how to comparison shop or do math or even how to use their calculator apps.

Let us say you want to lay in a supply of Skippy Natural Super Chunk Peanut Butter Spread in 40 oz. jars. Here are your best options on Amazon as I write this. These numbers may change slightly by the time you read this. Two of these ship free if you have Amazon Prime and the other three ship free regardless…

• One jar is $28.00 so you'd be paying about 70 cents an ounce.
• A package of two jars is $24.25. That's right: As I write this, buying two jars on Amazon costs less than buying one jar. So rounding up a half a penny, you'd be paying around $12.13 per jar and about 30 cents an ounce.
• A package of three jars is $36.35, which translates to $12.12 a jar. The Amazon listing says that's 91 cents an ounce but by my math, it's pretty much the same as the two-jar option.
• A package of four jars is $59.00 which is, of course, $14.75 per jar. The four-jar package costs more than two two-jar packages. Amazon says this works out to $1.48 per ounce but I think it's more like 37 cents per ounce.
• Lastly, they offer a five-jar package for $53.58, meaning five jars costs less than four jars. This works out to $10.72 per jar and while Amazon says this option will run you $1.34 per ounce, I think it's about 28 cents an ounce.

Now, I recognize that Amazon orders are fulfilled by different suppliers and that the company that set the price for the four-jar package is not the same company that set the price for the five-jar package but you'd think Amazon would get these guys lined-up a little better. If you're in a hurry and you order the four-jar pack and later realize you could have gotten more for less, you're not going to feel swindled by those outside suppliers. You're going to think Amazon took advantage of you.

And of course, there's no excuse for the price-per-ounce being so far wrong. (By the way: If you're puzzled by the references to "2.5 pound," these are 40 ounce jars and 40 ounces is 2.5 pounds.)

So which one are you going to buy? Answer: None of the above. You're going to go over to the Target site where you'll discover that they sell the same 40 ounce Skippy Natural Super Chunk Peanut Butter Spread for $7.39 a jar, which is 18-and-a-half cents per ounce. Postage is free if your total order is over $35.00 so you can order five jars or you can order a lesser number plus some other items from Target.

But you're probably not going to order from them, either. Unless you have some moral problem with buying from Walmart, you're going to go over to their website and discover that they sell the 40 ounce Skippy Natural Super Chunk Peanut Butter Spread for $5.58 a jar. Again, you have to get your order over $35.00 to get free shipping but how hard is that? The price per ounce for the peanut butter works out to 14 cents…and that's the lowest price I could find for what is, as you might have guessed by now, my favorite peanut butter.

My thanks to pals Bruce Reznick, Phil Geiger and Tom Galloway who helped fact-check my math.  I just find it amazing that if you don't pay attention, you can wind up paying twenty-eight bucks for something you can purchase elsewhere for $5.58.

It's been quite a while since I featured a barbershop quartet in this space. Here's one of the best — The Gas House Gang favoring us with "Strike Up the Band"…

• The "My Pillow" guy is now claiming to have absolute proof that will cause the Supreme Court to reinstate Mike Richards as the host of Jeopardy! before the end of September.

Jack Kirby was very important to my life and my career but so was a man named Chase Craig, who was also born on August 28. Chase was the senior editor for many, many years at Western Publishing, which was the firm which prepared the contents of Dell Comics for many, many years and also prepared the contents of and published Gold Key Comics. The odd relationship between Dell and Western is explained here.

What you mainly need to know is that Chase edited a lot of Disney comic books and a lot of comics with the Warner Brothers characters and he edited Tarzan and Magnus, Robot Fighter and countless others. He probably supervised as many issues of as many comic books as any man who ever lived. A lot of them were quite wonderful. He also for a brief time ran a comic book division for the Hanna-Barbera Studio.

Chase taught me an awful lot about writing and also about being an editor. When he turned some of his editing duties over to me, one of the things he told me went like this…

The hardest part of this job is prying the work out of the artists' hands. Some of them like to hold onto it and fuss with it and tweak little things here and there. You'll find yourself pleading, "Please, we have deadlines here. I need it now." And they'll say, "Oh, please! Can't I have a few more days on it?" If they're lying about having it done and they're still working on it, you're stuck. But sometimes, they really do stall handing it in, even though it means they'll be paid later. As soon as they hand it in, it's not theirs anymore and they know it's going to get judged, which scares them, even guys who've been doing it forever. So they'll stall and fuss with it and what you need to do is get it away from them because nine times out of ten, they'll ruin it.

That didn't prove to be true with everyone I hired but it was true of enough of them that I'm glad Chase warned me. Just in case you ever edit a comic book, I thought I'd pass it on to you…and tell you about this other man born on 8/28 that I'm glad I got to know and work with.

Jack Kirby would have been 104 years old today. If you go by influence and impact, he's still with us.

I've written so much about Jack over the years that I'm not sure I have anything to say that I haven't said many times before. If you haven't watched the video I made last year with my ex-partner Steve Sherman — now, sadly, the late Steve Sherman — there's plenty in there of both of us discussing this man we were privileged to know. With each passing year, I realize that privilege was greater than I thought.

Someone a few months ago wrote me — I can't find the e-mail right now — to ask me to name three things that I wish people all knew about Jack. The first one that comes to mind is this: If you think of Jack only as an artist, you're missing most of what he was. The man was a thinker, a writer, a philosopher, a visionary, a dreamer and many other nouns in that category. The amazing thing about him was not that he could put something down on paper. It was that he saw it in his head in the first place.

Secondly, he was a thoroughly decent human being. I knew him to sometimes be confused or mistaken but never to be devious. A friend of mine told me that one of the things that impressed him when he watched that conversation I recorded with Steve was when we said that we never had a formal financial arrangement with Jack. He just gave us money whenever he felt it was appropriate — and sometimes when we didn't think it was or that we should be paying him — and we never felt cheated. My friend said, "I've never had anyone in my life I would trust to work that way" and I'm not sure I've had anyone else. But there was no one else quite like Jack.

And lastly…well, I can think of a few dozen things that could be in the third slot but I guess I'll pick that there was a timeless sense about Jack. I not only learned from him when I was around him, I'm still learning from him. And I still see his creativity and innovations and influence everywhere I look. I have lost many people I cared about in my life and I think about most of those people in the past tense. I mostly think of Jack in the present.

From a 1968 Ed Sullivan Show, here's a gent who was one of my favorite comedians back then…Jackie Vernon. This isn't one of his best appearances but I thought he was funnier than the audience did.

As he usually did, Vernon tossed in the name of Sig Sakowicz, who was a longtime radio and TV host in Chicago and later in Las Vegas. Apparently, there's no great story about why Mr. Vernon did this. He just thought it was a good funny name…

• Odd that of all the horrible, unethical things Rudy Giuliani has done to undermine democracy, there are people out there who are truly upset that he was caught shaving in a restaurant.

This is a rerun from 9/8/13 and I should warn you it has a sad ending. Proceed at your own risk…

I mentioned here once about some unpleasant encounters in my life with folks who owned dogs. Here is the story of the unpleasantest. I tell it not to demean all dog owners or even any but just this one guy who I assume is either very old or very deceased by now. He was about 35 when this story took place in 1960. I was eight.

The house I grew up in had a rather large back yard. In the center of this yard was a set-up for tether ball, a popular sport of the day. You don't need to know how tether ball is played to understand what I'm about to describe. All you have to know is that we had a small hole in the yard into which concrete had been poured around a metal ring. The tether ball pole was inserted into the ring so the pole stood erect in the yard like a flagpole. Sometimes, as in the incident I'm about to describe, the pole wasn't set up so you just had this little circle of concrete and metal in the middle of the yard.

The back fence of the yard was metal links covered with a thick blanket of ivy. It was about six feet tall and on the other side of the fence was the back yard of a neighbor who lived on the street to the south of ours. I do not remember this neighbor's name so for reasons that will soon become apparent, we'll call him Jerko. Jerko was married but from all indications, he didn't love his wife half as much as he loved his Irish Setter. The Setter — he was called Duke — was pampered and hugged and combed and generally treated like royalty. Jerko was so proud of that dog. Another neighbor remarked that Jerko chose not to have children because if he did, he might have to spend as much as five minutes a day on them — time better spent brushing and petting Duke.

Duke caused us some problems. There was a terrible, foul smell that came from over the fence. It was so bad that I couldn't go too near that side of our yard. There were also awful noises. Whenever Jerko went somewhere and left Duke alone in the back, the pooch would spend the entire time howling as if in pain. It was so agonized that at least once, another neighbor called the police to report that an animal was being mistreated. Cops came to investigate and they reported that the dog was not being harmed. He was just lonely.

Duke continued to howl much of the day and he began trying to scale the fence and get into our yard. Sometimes, he did that when Jerko was home, too. But it was a high enough fence that the Setter couldn't climb over it and so what you heard was the repeated sound of Duke hurling himself against the fence — over and over, sometimes for hours at a time. My parents and I were all concerned about it but when we told Jerko, he said it was nothing to worry about. And when we called the City Animal Shelter, they told us basically that since the police had been out and had reported that the dog was well cared-for, there wasn't sufficient cause to send someone else.

So day after day, Duke would howl and hurl himself against the fence. One day, he made it over.

I was playing alone in the yard when it happened. I looked up, saw the dog get his front paws over the top of the ivy and haul the rest of himself over. Then he tumbled into our yard. I was scared and I started to run towards our house. Duke galloped towards me. I turned towards him to try and shoo him away but he jumped on me, knocking me backwards. The back of my head hit not the dirt but the metal-and-concrete setting for the tether ball pole.

I didn't know what the pain was but I'd sustained a small crack on the back of my skull. What I did know was that something back there hurt like hell and I couldn't get up because Duke, who was not a small animal, had his front paws and most of his weight on my chest.

So I began screaming — partly in pain and partly in the hope that someone would hear and come help me. My father was at work and my mother had gone to the market but there were neighbors all around us. So I just screamed and screamed, and all the time the Irish Setter was licking me and drooling on me as he sat on me.

Finally, someone else came over the fence: Jerko. I don't think he emerged from his house in response to my screaming. I think he went to check on his beloved, found the hound to be missing and only then heard the sound of an eight-year-old boy shrieking in agony. He climbed over the fence, walked over to where the dog was still sitting on me and I was yelling, and he said, "Don't yell. That's his way of showing affection!"

I yelled, "Get him off me! He hurt me!"

Jerko made no move whatsoever to get his mutt off my chest. He stood there and said, "No, Duke would never hurt you! He's a good dog!"

This went on for several minutes. I was yelling for him to get the dog off me because I was injured and he was refusing to do this because his wonderful Duke would never, ever hurt anyone. Pinning me down to the ground was his way of showing he loved me. (Years later, I had a girl friend who…)

Finally, my mother got home, heard the commotion and ran outside. She ordered Jerko to get his dog off her son and he finally did, all the time muttering, "He's just showing affection." When she got me up and found blood on the back of my skull, she called Jerko a very nasty name, then scurried off to get me to a hospital. I have this vivid memory of her leading me into the house and of Jerko standing in our backyard with his Irish Setter. Jerko was still saying, "Oh, Duke would never hurt anyone."

She drove me to a hospital emergency room where they did a little bandaging and, I think, a bit of stitching. My mother asked the doctor if he thought there had been any permanent damage. With a solemn stare, the doctor said, "I'm afraid so. Your son has suffered sufficient brain damage that all he'll be able to do with the rest of his life is write silly cartoons and comic books…and some day if and when they invent the Internet, he may even start 'blogging,' whatever that is." And yes, I'm lying. He said nothing of the sort. What he did say was that the injuries were minor and would heal quickly.

That evening, Jerko called and asked if he could come over. My father told him yes, assuming the man wanted to see how I was and to apologize for his dog and, more importantly, for himself. Instead, Jerko came in, sat down, and without even asking how I was, he began explaining that Duke was shaken up but seemed fine. "He would never harm anyone, especially a child, so I have to assume your son did something to provoke it all." My father turned the color of Libby's Tomato Juice and told Jerko off but good, including a few threats involving lawyers and/or law enforcement. Jerko left, still convinced that somehow his fine pet was the victim in the whole matter.

That is not the end of the story but I have to warn you: From here on, it gets rather sad and ugly. The dog dies a pretty awful death and if you can't handle that, stop here.

A few weeks later, there were a couple of very rainy days in Los Angeles. Throughout them, as usual, we heard Duke howling as he always did. Then one afternoon, the howling took on a different tone — sadder and more desperate. It almost sounded like a human crying. My mother came into my room and asked, "Do you hear that?" I did.

It had stopped raining so I put on my little slicker and ran around to the other side of the block. Outside Jerko's house, there was a car stopped awkwardly in the street. An elderly man and woman who'd been in the car were out of it, standing next to it and looking very upset, trying to decide on some course of action. The first thing the man said to me was, "I didn't see it. It came running right out in front of my car. I slammed on the brakes but it's so wet and I skidded and…" And then I saw in front of his car, a pool of blood.  There was a trail of it that led up Jerko's driveway and towards his back yard. "It was a big, red dog," the woman said.  She was trembling and crying.

They had no idea what to do. They'd knocked on the door to Jerko's house and there was no answer. They'd knocked on a few neighbors' doors and there was no answer. They were standing there in the street by the car, hoping either a policeman would drive by or maybe the owner or some neighbor would come home. I asked if they'd followed the trail of blood into the backyard. They said no, that was private property and they didn't want to trespass. I think now as I did then that that was just an excuse because they didn't want to see the dog. It seemed cowardly but at least they had enough integrity to not hit-and-run.

I decided I would trespass. I followed the blood droppings through an open gate that I guessed Duke had somehow opened, and I crept into Jerko's yard where I'd never been before. I realized the agonized howling had stopped just as I came across the source of the dreadful odor we'd been noticing for months. The yard was full of dog excrement. Full. It was everywhere and since it had been raining, its aroma was enhanced by moisture. It was also squishy and to follow the blood trail, I had to delicately walk through a lot of it. I remember thinking we might have to throw away the shoes I was wearing.

I found Duke curled up in a corner of the yard, covered in blood and whimpering. It was the saddest thing I'd ever seen in my life. It may still be the saddest thing I've ever seen in my life. He was alive but it didn't look like he'd be alive for long.

I ran out of the yard, nearly slipping in muddy dog excrement, and I told the older couple that I was going to go call someone. I still don't quite understand why they could do nothing but wait for an eight-year-old kid to come by and take action. I ran back around the block to our house, doing my best as I ran to scrape the soles of my shoes as I ran. When I got home, they were still clumped with unpleasantness so I took them off and left them in the patio. We actually did wind up throwing them away.

In the house, my mother called some city department that seemed to cover such matters. She put me on the phone so I could describe what I'd seen. A lady at the other end of the line told me that they would send police because there was no one else they could send at just that moment, and because the animal control people couldn't on their own enter private property without the owner present. I put on other shoes and ran back around the block while my mother got dressed so she could join me there.

When I got back to the street outside Jerko's house, the elderly couple was gone. I waited a few minutes and about the time my mother arrived, a police car showed up and I flagged them down and explained the situation. The officer I spoke to said, "We'll go take a look but there's probably nothing we can do and there's no way we can get anyone out here from Animal Control for an hour or two." I warned them about the lake of liquid dog poop in the back yard and they donned some sort of plastic covers for their shoes and went back. Soon, they returned and said the dog had apparently died.

They asked us if we were aware of the dog being mistreated. That was not a simple question to answer but we did our best. We told the officers that Jerko seemed to love his pet and pamper him…but the dog did, after all, spend most of his life howling and trying to get out of that yard.

We went home after that. I have no idea what happened next between the police and Jerko but later that evening, we had a visitor. It was Jerko and he was very upset. My father, who sensed trouble was looming, sent me to my room while he and my mother met with Jerko in our living room. When I heard yelling, I came out anyway.

Jerko was basically accusing me of having let his wonderful dog die as revenge for that silly incident wherein I "wrongly" believed Duke had injured me. I still do not know what he expected me to do, aside from what I did, that might have saved the dog's life but he was furious that I hadn't done it. He was also mad that I hadn't gotten the license number of the car so he could track down the murderers…so much so that I half-expected him to accuse me of having been behind the wheel.

Oh — and though he was furious I hadn't done more to save Duke, he was also upset that I'd caused the police to enter his private property. The officers had cited him for a health hazard in his back yard and he had something like ten days to clean it up or face jail time. I remember thinking, "Oh, I hope he doesn't clean it up."

My parents yelled a bit at Jerko, then I yelled a little at Jerko, then my father told him to get the hell out of our house and never come back. Jerko announced we'd hear from his lawyer and then he stormed out of our home and we never heard from his lawyer or from him again. Within days though, the smell from his yard went away and within a month or two, so did Jerko. He moved out. Another family soon moved in…and they didn't have a dog but they did have a son, a bit older than me, who became a good friend.

The whole thing left an emotional scar, along with the one on the back of my skull. In the years that followed, I would flinch and cringe when we were out and someone came by with a big dog on a leash…anything larger than, say, a Scottish Terrier. Everyone but my parents thought I was afraid of dogs but really, I was afraid of dog owners. Eventually, my feelings about them went away. I met some nice, responsible ones…folks who seemed to place human beings on a level at least equal to their canines. I still feel an occasional twinge of anger at Jerko — you should see what I called him in this piece before I decided to soften it down to "Jerko" — but I accept he's atypical of those who own dogs.

So now I'm fine with dogs and dog owners…though I really do prefer cats and by a significant margin. I don't feed stray dogs but I feed every stray cat that comes within a couple blocks of me. The cats may have Jerko to thank for that.