In our family everybody was a comedian, even when we prayed we told God a joke and hoped he liked it enough to listen to the rest.

A few time I asked my Mother why I had never meet my Grandfather (my Grandmother has a small photo of as a young man  with  crazy smile holding his upturned Panama hat full of fire-crackers, obviously my kind of guy) but the question made her angry, angry and sad.

She snapped back, “he’s a ventriloquist on the radio, his work keeps him away”, she hit me when I asked what time and station.

Years later when I was in college some Great Aunt I never heard of contacted us with sad news, my Grandfather had died of cancer in Phoenix.

He’d been living out there she said since this release from prison some years earlier having served out his full sentence on Federal mail-fraud charges.

Too bad, I thought as the pieces now fell into place, wish I could have hear him tell the story of what happened, probably would have been pretty funny.

by-Doug Mathewson