Followup

When I was 7 years old, my family moved 45 miles away to a small town named Cambridge City, Indiana. I remember missing Eddy very much, in some ways he was a substitute father for me while my dad was serving in the Navy during WW II. My attempts through the next 12 years to locate Eddy failed. When my parents had their 50th wedding celebration, Eddy's sister came to the gathering and gave my family Eddy's address. He had become a school teacher at a private school in New York. Over the next couple of years he and I occassionaly corresponded by mail. We never talked about the Arrow Event. He as sense retired, and I have lost track of him.

The Arrow (William Tell ??)

This is the first close call/near miss that I remember. Let me set the stage. I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1940. WW II was getting started in Europe. My father was a Funeral Director and my mother was a nurse. In that era the neighborhood was full of kids both young and old -- and we played together as a group. I can remember us running around the neighbor hood, creating forts, forming a club, listening to the radio's half hour serials such as The Lone Ranger and others, and watched the tralley cars go by on the tracks in from of our houses. I imagine that was 5 years old (1945) when this event happened. One of the neighbor kids was Eddy Sweetman, his father had been killed in the war, I was in kindergarden, he was in early grade school (PS 65), and he and his sister and mother lived 2 doors down the street. I think he was about 3 years older than me. One day in his back yard, he showed me a bow and arrow set that he had just gotten. He told me to stand up against his house and he would shot something off my head (I do'nt remember what). So as the younger with the older, I complied. I remember having couple of arrows in my hands and sort of putting them in front of my face as some sort of shield, so in someway I must have intuited that there was a danger in this activity. Eddy shot the arrow, which had a metal point on it, and rather than hitting something on top of my head, the arrow struck my forehead just above my left eye. I burst out in tears and ran home which was 2 houses down the street. I heard later that Eddy got spanked by his mother. I wore a patch for several days. Fractions of an inch, made a major difference in my life.