As Bill Sees It

Boomerang, p. 185

When I was ten, I was tall and gawky, and smaller kids could push me around in quarrels. I remember being very depressed for a year or more, and then I began to develop fierce resolve to win.

One day, my grandfather came along with a book about Australia and told me, “This books says that nobody but an Australian bushman knows how to make and throw a boomerang.”

“Here’s my chance,” I thought. “I will be the first man in America to make and throw a boomerang.” Well, any kid could have a notion like that. It might have lasted two days or two weeks. But mine was a power drive that kept on for six months, till I made a boomerang that swung around the church yard in front of the house and almost hit my grandfather in the head when it came back.

Emotionally, I had begun the fashioning of another sort of boomerang, one that almost killed me later on.