Staggerford

Informationen zum Autor Jon Hassler  was born in Minneapolis in 1933. He received degrees from St. John’s University in Minnesota, where he was an English teacher and writer-in-residence, and from the University of North Dakota. The author of many widely acclaimed novels— Staggerford, Simon’s Night, The Love Hunter, A Green Journey, Grand Opening, North of Hope, Dear James, Rookery Blues, Dean’s List, The Staggerford Flood, The Staggerford Murders,  and  The New Woman —Mr. Hassler passed away in March 2008. Klappentext Originally published: New York: Atheneum! 1977. FRIDAY    OCTOBER 30   FIRST HOUR, MILES YAWNED.   It seemed to Miles that while the faces changed from year to year, the personality of a first-hour class never varied. It was a tractable class. Most of the thirty students hadn’t been out of bed for more than half an hour and they weren’t yet sharp or restless. Like Miles, they were sleepy. Moreover, they were slow-witted. The Staggerford High School band rehearsed during first hour, and the better students for some reason were inevitably drawn to band. Each morning as the band marched across the street to the football field, high-stepping and tooting in preparation for its halftime formations, these thirty students were left in the classroom to puzzle over the formations of the compound sentence or the working parts of the business letter. Love poems by Rod McKuen were beyond them. To say that all nonmusicians were dull would have been unwarranted, and Miles would not have said it. What he would have said, however, was that Staggerford’s nonmusicians were dull. But it was an agreeable, easygoing sort of dullness that would never lead to trouble; and since Miles himself was no ball of fire at eight in the morning, he and these thirty seniors moved comfortably through the weeks together, rubbing the sleep from their eyes.   Miles thought of Lee Fremling, who sat facing him in the front row, as the emblem of first hour. Lee Fremling was heavy, good-natured, and lethargic. He was the son of Albert Fremling, editor of the Staggerford Weekly and the wildest father a boy could possibly have. But none of this wildness seemed to have been handed down to Lee. Albert Fremling was an alcoholic with a passion for driving on Friday nights as fast as he could go. One Friday last spring Albeit Fremling had swerved to miss a tree and smashed, doing eighty-five, into a small house at the edge of town. At the time, fortunately, the widow who lived in the house was in the hospital with a broken hip (she had fallen from the bottom rung of a stepladder while taking off storm windows) and so was spared being run over in bed, but the editor was left with a permanently crippled left arm and a scarred forehead. Mrs. Fremling could recall the names of at least seventy-five people who had tried over the years to cure her husband of his drinking and his suicidal driving—the names of highway patrolmen, psychiatrists, businessmen, neighbors, jailers, and the pastors of three Lutheran churches—all to no avail. By nightfall on Fridays the Staggerford Weekly was out on the street, and that was when its editor drank himself cockeyed and got into his red Pontiac and flew off down the highway to Berrington or crisscrossed the prairie south of the river, his headlights sailing over the dirt roads and lighting up, when he doubled back, the clouds of his own dust. People sitting in their houses with their windows open could hear the squeal of the editor’s tires as he left town, and sometimes they could hear, shouted from his car, his pledge never to return; but he never traveled beyond the limits of Berrington County and he always came home before morning, sometimes on bail, often sick, and always profoundly depressed.   How then (Miles wondered) could there have come from Albeit Fremling’s house such a son as Lee—slow and congenial and even-tempered? Lee must have...

Product details

• Authors: J. Hassler, Jon Hassler
• Publisher: Ballantine
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.07.1986
• EAN: 9780345333759
• ISBN: 978-0-345-33375-9
• No. of pages: 304
• Series: Mysteries & Horror
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature