The gang of local toughs. My dad looks like he could be some Bowery kid who stole apples and threw snowballs at the tophats of passing swells.

On the left, my dad and his twin brother, whose name I carry in between my first and last. In the summer they'd be sent to work at different farms, and my dad said he'd borrow a horse on Sundays and go off to see his brother.

When he was 15 he got a bloody nose that wouldn't stop. They went to a hospital and were turned down for indigence. A doctor finally came to the shack where they were living - my father remembers the rats at night in that place - and whatever the quack ended up doing, my father's twin aspirated his own blood and suffocated.

My father, having lost his twin, looked around town, looked across the fields, considered the future, and did something quite remarkable for a 15 year old kid.