It was a wild night at the Plain Dealer tonight during Dart’s shift. I’ll let him tell the story in his own words. “Tonight we had an exceptionally sordid story (or one with exceptionally sordid implications) about an OSU co-ed who ran away with an ex-convict 22 years older than she. They had wanted to be married, but when the charm wore off, there was an arrest warrant out, charging kidnapping and unlawful occupation of hotel facilities. When we dug out the story, it got on the Associated Press wire, and we had three simultaneous calls from Chicago’s forever-amber newspapers, offering money for ‘exclusive rights’ to the story, including all the inflammatory insinuations against the character of the girl. (Note: I love Dart’s ‘forever-amber’ phrase – the sly reference to yellow journalism.) As yet, nothing has been proved, but those Chicago rags are sure on the lookout for stuff like that. Burke, with his constant slams against Chicagoistic journalism, sure would get a big kick out of such goings-on.”
There was a fair share of killing going on in Cleveland tonight, too. In fact, a hold-up just a few blocks from the Peterson family apartment resulted in one guy getting shot and later dying at the hospital.
Dart got a nice letter from Dot’s mother today, but it was written before her emergency surgery, so there was no update on Dot’s condition.
Today he started cleaning his room but the shifting piles of junk forced him out just as he finished sweeping the floor of its “precipitated air pollution, including soot and dust and young trees and chemical refuse.” The horizontal surfaces are inches deep in papers and sundry other material, but the floor looks nice.
Instead, he tackled the job of taking down the Christmas tree, sorting, cleaning and organizing all the decorations, and putting them all away. Both his parents had quite a surprise when they came home from work and found the apartment devoid of the trappings of the holiday.
If Dot noticed a peculiar glow in the western sky around 5:30 yesterday, it was probably the glow of his face as he savored his supper of bacon and eggs, cooked nearly expertly by none other than Dart himself! Yes, he’s been so hungry and so broke lately that he has started cooking his own meals. “Of course, with eggs at $.77/dozen and bacon at $.69 per pound, it may become too expensive to keep me supplied. Hamburger has also gone quite high, so I had to limit myself the other night to a single 4-ounce burger.” He adds “Hey, what do you do when you stab a hot soup can with a can opener and soup squirts out all over the kitchen? Well, I duck!”
He has big ideas for what he wants to accomplish tomorrow, so he needs to end this and get some sleep. Now that Dot will have plenty of time for writing long letters, he hopes to be on the receiving end of them any day now. “Don’t spare the griping, but at least let me know how you like being waited on.”