HEADFIRST IN THE PICKLE BARREL: A Rocky Mountain Boyhood

This is an affectionate memoir of the author's lively boyhood in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, back in 1903 and thereabouts. Mr. Burroughs' life was so clean-limbed and uneventful that most readers will have to settle for a pickle relish of details from the vanished American past rather than anything more substantial. He tells small tales of his father's hunting expeditions after antelope and bison, of his mother's arithmetical struggles with the month-end batches of store bills, of his relationship with his six-years-older sister, and tells you what the stores were like, of his playmates, their games and beanies, and about how he fell into his grocer's 31.5 gallon pickle barrel while trying to scoop one out when he was three years old. He ends his recall at the onset of adolescence as he gets his first fulltime job (packing and carrying barrels of ice cream). Homemade, harmless.