HOW FAR BACK CAN YOU GET?

Back to the sticks -- in the form of Peterborough, a small ""somewhat Orange, somewhat anti-Catholic"" city in central Ontario. Craig's (he's the author of ten adventure novels) boyhood recollections are mostly diversions -- amateur hockey games, fishing for pickerel, pinball and the Y -- which structured the lives of so many gamins during the Depression. In addition to his adolescent pastimes, the author resurrects certain memorable happenings which titillated Peterborough -- the time the Indian Boschink Bill tried to canoe across the Atlantic to his town's namesake in England. . . or the day the local militia had to be rescued by an intrepid troop of Gift Guides. Like the Four-Way Action ticket operation of the '30's (the precursor of the numbers game), the book is ""probably no more than a matter of nostalgic curiosity."" Homey, even pleasant Canadian Graffiti -- however, the writing's been on many a wall.