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Maniac Magee
by
Jerry Spinelli
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
& K 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 river.
And just like that, Maniac was an orphan. He was three years old.
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 Holidaysburg, 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.
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