--click title for final report card

From the Bob Willard Collection, Volume 1
The last day of 5th grade at Teller Elementary was a Thursday. May 31st. Every kid in school was excited. Anxious. Expecting.

Outside, big black clouds were forming into a large storm. The rumbling of distant thunder could be heard. Near the end of lunch, in the school cafeteria, you could feel the bright flash out the windows, followed by the loud boom... and the instant downpour. The big storm arrived. And stayed a while.

At 3:10p, when they finally let us out, the sky was still dark and cloudy even though the black thunderstorm had shifted direction away from us...

--click title for final report card

From the Bob Willard Collection, Volume 1
The last day of 5th grade at Teller Elementary was a Thursday. May 31st. Every kid in school was excited. Anxious. Expecting.

Outside, big black clouds were forming into a large storm. The rumbling of distant thunder could be heard. Near the end of lunch, in the school cafeteria, you could feel the bright flash out the windows, followed by the loud boom... and the instant downpour. The big storm arrived. And stayed a while.

At 3:10p, when they finally let us out, the sky was still dark and cloudy even though the black thunderstorm had shifted direction away from us...

--click title to unleash story

From the Bob Willard Collection, Volume 2
In the basement of the synagogue was a large walk-in: a refrigerator the size of a railroad car with stacks of racks loaded up on both sides. There were meats and cold cuts, including pastramis and salamis and corned beef and there was a huge vat of Kosher dill pickles. There were also cut flowers and beautiful bouquets. But mostly there were desserts. Hundreds of desserts that would flop over or sink if not kept cool...

--click title to consume story

From the Bob Willard Collection, Volume 3
Late one morning, about a month into the summer, end of June and its getting hotter, the morning dew evaporated hours before Frisell and I even got our brains together and hurriedly decided to try to make some 'big-time' money. We didn't put much thought into it. But that's what we set out to do.

We didn’t know much about business. We were ten-year olds. We knew about Kool-Aid stands. There was a 'big-time' market for Kool-Aid. In fact, we had a Kool-Aid stand, briefly… maybe only ten minutes, if that. After setting it all up and leading with Black Cherry, Mike Collins from across the street threw a basketball and knocked the whole thing over, so we were finished. Broke the table and my mom's pitcher. We didn’t sell one glass.

So Frisell and I decided to change our focus. I suggested brownies and that was easy because Frisell was a sucker for brownies. Along with every other kid in the neighborhood, including me, which is why it was a sure-fire idea...

--click title to relive the horror

From the Bob Willard Collection, Volume 4
It didn’t take long after the constant nighttime bombardment of news blasts from Vietnam for it to become known as the ‘living room war’ or ‘the television war’. The distant discordance became the keynote of American politics. Film shot in Vietnam of forests burning and people burning and explosions and crying children and chaos and bombs and mud and debris and of the dead mouldering in the soil was flown to Tokyo daily from where it was transmitted via satellite into American living rooms each night with pounding kettledrum beats by broadcasters primarily on NBC but also on ABC and CBS. It didn’t seem like it would ever stop...

--click title to enter hallways

From the Bob Willard Collection, Volume 5
With fireflies filling the hallways, and toads warbling tales, with winged monkeys protecting it all from the high bell tower in the morning rainbow sunlight, three magical years at Oz began for each of us who were lucky enough to be in the right place, at the right time...

--click title to go inside... be careful

From the Bob Willard Collection, Volume 6
If you drive along that hard pack dirt road parallel to the South Platte River, and get up to speed, before the hard pack transforms into soft sand, and then turn left, and accelerate up that steep hill, with the right curl at the top, in total a difficult, yet manageable, 110-yard ascent, you'll park under the sentinel line of Ponderosa pines.

And once the dust settles, you have arrived at the surprisingly still-standing, and always magical, Willard’s Cabin...

--click title to digest story

From the Bob Willard Collection, Volume 7
The guy that my girlfriend and I were living with, his name was Billy. He was really thin, not emaciated thin, not creepy thin, but thin. He didn’t work at all and had long sandy hair. You’d say he was a hippie. He smoked a lot of hand-rolled cigarettes, and the pupils in his eyes were the shape of a cat’s. Not round. They were vertical slits. You couldn’t help but notice.

Back then, at the time, he said he was told by someone who would know, that his condition was one in a billion. Which meant that Billy was one of four people on earth that stared at the world through cat eyes...

--click title to begin the journey

Beyond the Bob Willard Collection, Volume 1
The decisive moment sparked suddenly, Tuesday night, March 18, 1975. It felt like I was at the point of a pistol. After I had entered Lytton’s Corner bar, in Palo Alto, a big red-haired guy, with enormous hands, that ended with bloody chewed-up fingers, and broken fingernails, sat down on the red vinyl barstool right next to mine. He had a slouch and was fidgeting. We were sitting sort of shoulder to shoulder, his was about a foot higher, and we didn’t know each other... yet.

We both had a story to tell, but when he started to tell his story, between big swigs, and big swallows, about some tree on a hill, and was it at the top of the hill?, or just a little bit down from the top of the hill?, and was the wind blowing?, and maybe there was a dog somewhere, over there, that was barking, or it could have been two dogs?,... my brain shut down. I already knew. I already knew. I couldn't listen to this. I wouldn't be able to follow any of it. I had to FAKE LISTENING. I had to. You would have done exactly the same thing.

The guy was a giant behemoth with a red top, and gnarled bloody fingers, and he probably chewed staples, and ate glass. And... he was fidgeting. And... I'd been called a pipsqueak more than once in my life. OK? That's what happened. I didn't catch anything that he said. Not a thing. Zip. Sorry.. Oops, an extra period.

Consequently, this story, Exodus, will NOT include any of Big Red's story... maybe a smidgeon. Maybe one bloody drip.

--click title to join the party

Beyond the Bob Willard Collection, Volume 2
Eno and I got to talking about sports, and sports betting, more often at lunch, cuz the microfilming was going pretty good, so there wasn’t really nothing to talk about with regards to the biz. We had it under control.

While chomping down on my lunch sandwich, with my yellow napkin on my lap, sitting across the table from Eno, I came to learn that he had a ‘connection’ to a bookie in Reno, Nevada, and so Eno and I started to place bets on a daily basis. On baseball. It was baseball season. June advancing into July. We started with 50 bucks, and quickly extended to make multiple bets daily. Multiple parlay bets. We weren't pipsqueaks. This was the real shit.

Result? We were losing our asses! We had to adjust, or our legs could be next...