The Money-Stealers' Club: the buried childhood fraud

pivotal · UNDATED (early 1970s, B.S.), 3rd grade, East Watertown

• When: UNDATED (fall term of third grade, "early 1970s" per his own telling; B.S. era, East Watertown MA)
• What: As a necktie-wearing, glasses-and-carefully-combed third-grader (full name given as Eldred K. Ewell Jr.), Ewell fell in with tough blue-collar East Watertown Irish lads and, on the strength of a precocious "gift" for adult rhetoric, became ringleader of the "Money-Stealers' Club," a door-to-door bunko operation soliciting donations for a nonexistent "Project Hope Youth Hockey." Discovering "the verbal manipulation of human hearts," he then embezzled the club's take (a Chock Full O' Nuts can) into Pez, Milky Ways, Mad magazines and a Creeple Peeple set; doctored purple-marker "bank statements" for a fictitious Franklin W. Dixon savings account; and, when Christmas exposure loomed and the swarthy lads' eyes narrowed, stole over a hundred dollars from his father's I.B.E.W. Local 517 "petty slush" shoebox to pay them off — and got a savage wedgie and hung from a locker hook anyway. Consumed with shame ("Under any tenable definition of bad, I was bad"), he resolved to remake himself as good, "never knowingly committed another felony," and buried the whole interval so deep he had forgotten it ever happened. A signature origin: the fraud, the gilded tongue, the "self-will run riot," the class-fastidious contempt for the "malice and muscle" lads he ruled.