MAN ABOUT TOWN: James Thurber Is Still Following Me

By GEORGE SOUTHERN
Falls Church Times Columnist

June 29, 2009

Poking around at the University Women’s book sale at the Community Center, I came across a copy of The Thurber Carnival. Of course I had to buy it — James Thurber has been following me all my life.

I met James Thurber in the 7^th or 8^th grade — he was dead by then but his humor was alive in the English literature anthology I was told to read, which included “The Night the Ghost Got In,” a story of his eccentric family while growing up in Columbus, Ohio. During the last 15 minutes of class we were supposed to ”read silently” from the literature book. Thurber tells of hearing footsteps downstairs about quarter past one in the morning. Fearing burglars, his mother threw a shoe at the neighbors’ bedroom window, breaking it and successfully waking them. Police arrived quickly, smashing through “our big heavy front door with its thick beveled glass . . . A half-dozen policemen . . . pulled beds away from walls, tore clothes off hooks in the closets, pulled suitcases and boxes off shelves.”

Eventually they heard sounds from the attic, where Thurber’s grandfather slept. Grandfather, Thurber wrote, “was going through a phase in which he believed that General Meade’s men, under steady hammering by Stonewall Jackson, were beginning to retreat and even desert.” As the police bounded up the attic stairs, Grandfather “evidently jumped to the conclusion that the police were deserters from Meade’s army.”

“Back, ye cowardly dogs! roared grandfather,” as he knocked down an officer, grabbed his gun from its holster “and let fly,” wounding the officer in the shoulder. “He fired once or twice more in the darkness and then went back to bed.” Read more