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MANIAC MAGEE

JERRY SPINELLI

WINNER OF THE NEWBERY MEDAL

Before the Story

They say Maniac Magee was born in a dump They say his stomach was a cereal box and his heart a sofa spring.

They say he kept an eight-inch cockroach on a leash and that rats stood guard over him while he slept.

They say if you knew he was coming and you sprinkled salt on the ground and he ran over it, within two or three blocks he

would be as slow as everybody else.

They say.

What's true, what's myth! It's hard to know.

Finsterwald's gone now, yet even today you'll never find a kid sitting on the steps where he once lived. The Little League

field is still there, and the band shell. Cobble's Corner still stands at the corner of Hector and Birch, and if you ask the man

behind the counter, he'll take the clump of string out of a drawer and let you see it.

Grade school girls in Two Mills still jump rope and chant.

Ma-niac, Ma-niac

He's so cool

Ma-niac, Ma-niac

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Don't go to school

Runs all night

Runs all right

Ma-niac, Ma-niac

Kissed a bull!

And sometimes the girl holding one end of the rope is from the West side of Hector, and the girl on the other end is from the

East side; and if you're looking for Maniac Magee's legacy, or monument, that's as good as any -- even if it wasn't really a

bull.

But that's okay, because the history of a kid is one part fact, two parts legend, and three parts snowball. And if you want to

know what it was like back when Maniac Magee roamed these parts, well, just run your hand under your movie seat and be

very, very careful not to let the facts get mixed up with the truth.

PART I

1

Maniac Magee was not born in a dump. He was born in a house, a pretty ordinary house, right across the river from here, in

Bridgeport. And he had regular parents, a mother and a father.

But not for long.

One day his parents left him with a sitter and took the P & W high-speed trolley into the city. On the way back home, they

were on board when the P & W had its famous crash, when the motorman was drunk and took the high trestle over the

Schuylkill River at sixty miles an hour, and the whole kaboodle took a swan dive into the water.

And just like that, Maniac was an orphan. He was three years old.

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Of course, to be accurate, he wasn't really Maniac then. He was Jeffrey. Jeffrey Lionel Magee. Little Jeffrey was shipped off

to his nearest relatives, Aunt Dot and Uncle Dan. They lived in Hollidaysburg, in the western part of Pennsylvania.

Aunt Dot and Uncle Dan hated each other, but because they were strict Catholics, they wouldn't get a divorce. Around the

time Jeffrey arrived, they stopped talking to each other. Then they stopped sharing.

Pretty soon there were two of everything in the house. Two bathrooms. Two TVs. Two refrigerators. Two toasters. If it were

possible, they would have had two Jeffreys. As it was, they split him up as best they could. For instance, he would eat dinner

with Aunt Dot on Monday, with Uncle Dan on Tuesday, and so on.

Eight years of that.

Then came the night of the spring musicale at Jeffrey's school. He was in the chorus. There was only one show, and one

auditorium, so Aunt Dot and Uncle Dan were forced to share at least that much. Aunt Dot sat on one side, Uncle Dan on the

other.

Jeffrey probably started screaming from the start of the song, which was "Talk to the Animals," but nobody knew it because

he was drowned out by all the other voices. Then the music ended, and Jeffrey went right on screaming, his face bright red by

now, his neck bulging. The music director faced the singers, frozen with his arms still raised. In the audience faces began to

change. There was a quick smatter of giggling by some people who figured the screaming kid was some part of the show,

some funny animal maybe. Then the giggling stopped, and eyes started to shift and heads started to turn, because now

everybody could see that this wasn't part of the show at all, that little Jeffrey Magee wasn't supposed to be up there on the

risers, pointing to his aunt and uncle, bellowing out from the midst of the chorus: "Talk! Talk, will ya! Talk! Talk! Talk!"

No one knew it then, but it was the birth scream of a legend.

And that's when the running started. Three springy steps down from the risers -- girls in pastel dresses screaming, the music

director lunging -- a leap from the stage, out the side door and into the starry, sweet, onion-grass-smelling night. Never again

to return to the house of two toasters. Never again to return to school.

2

Everybody knows that Maniac Magee (then Jeffrey) started out in Hollidaysburg and wound up in Two Mills. The question

is: What took him so long! And what did he do along the way!