I will never forget Bob Swartzendruber. He had a memorable name, and he was an unforgettable character. We met when I was just a little kid, maybe five or six years old, and they moved in next door. A couple of years older and a lot bigger, he quickly became the "alpha" dog in the neighborhood under-ten-year-old set pecking order. He was tough, and could have been a menace, because I was such a little pipsqueak; but he became my friend, and my bodyguard. He occasionally picked on me, just for drill; but nobody else could. We played together and got into normal kid mischief; and from the time Bob came to town, I never again got overlooked or chosen last or had somebody say, "You take Piatt," when it was time to pick teams.
Yet what I remember most about him was that you could never get the best of him. In addition to his powerful personality, his athletic ability, his size and his toughness; he could talk you into, or out of, just about anything. Whatever you had, his was bigger. Wherever you had gone, he'd been there twice. If you saw a good movie, he saw it first and got in free. If your new skates cost fifteen dollars, his had cost twenty. I always suspected that he was making it up and was tempted at times to call him on it, but I wasn't completely witless, and as the "omega" kid around there I did as little as possible that might get me flattened.
Now about this time we had a serious problem in our household, at least serious for me. As the youngest of three brothers, I was also the "omega" kid at our dinner table; so whenever there was a holiday that called for a roast turkey or a chicken, I never got a drumstick, my favorite. At Thanksgiving and Christmas my big brothers always seemed to get the legs, while I ended up with a wing. It's just not the same, and it wasn't fair. Occasionallly my mother would intervene and give me the drumstick; but that was not really a pleasure that I could savor, because depriving an older brother of a drumstick could be hazardous to one's health when the parents weren't around. In some ways my entire early childhood can be summed up in the sad and hapless phrase, "drumstick deprivation."
Then one glorious holiday my dad put on his cooking mitts, lifted the turkey out of the oven, brought it to the table, announcing that he had found and prepared a four-legged turkey. And there it was, golden brown, steaming hot, with two massive drumsticks poking out of the back of the bird, and two more poking out of the front of the bird on either side of the opening with the stuffing. What a glorious day! Never was there a more delicious and happy dinner; and I was too giddy with turkish delight to think through the fact that there was really no such thing as a four-legged turkey.
Of course I had to tell my friend, Bob. So just before we ate I ran next door and told him to come right over and see the most amazing thing ever. So Bob dropped in, and my dad showed him the bird, saying, "Look, Bob, a four-legged turkey! There's an extra one for you." Without batting an eye or a moment's hesitation, he said, "That's OK, Mr. Piatt, we get those every Christmas. My dad has a friend who raises them."
Not longer after that Bob moved away, and we hardly ever saw them again. Several celebrations came and went before I realized how my dad had rigged the deal, how he had bought the turkey and a couple of extra jumbo "sticks," how he wired them to the front of the bird and basted them all around, and how you couldn't tell it was a fake, especially if you were a little kid and a little slow. Looking back, it was one of the coolest things a dad ever did for his kid.
And even though that Bob was such a liar, I didn't mind. He was my friend, the coolest of friends, and when he was gone I missed his looking out for me. What difference does it make if someone else claims a four-legged turkey, as long as you don't get stuck with a wing?
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