THE BOY WITH FOUR EYES

A man recalls his formative years in 1930s and ’40s Missouri in this memoir.

Nonagenarian author Allen notes that he initially didn’t want to go back to his hometown of Neosho, Missouri, in 2022, given that his family, friends, and classmates were deceased. Yet he also says that he “needed to examine my own small-boy thoughts before my lurching through life caused them to disappear forever.” Allen then shares how his mother, Bessie Marie Allen, was an unwed teenager living in Mount Vernon, Missouri, when she became pregnant with him; he was born in 1928. When a fire destroyed the small city’s mill, where Allen’s grandfather worked, the family moved to Neosho. Allen’s mother then met and married a man named Claude Gray, who was “constantly looking for the greener pasture that he was sure must lie on the other side of some fence, somewhere.” While in grammar school, the bespectacled Allen went to live with his grandparents to stay in Neosho’s schools while his mother, stepfather, and stepsiblings relocated to a nearby farm. He joined the school band and eventually formed a jazz group that played gigs at a local resort. At memoir’s end, the author tells of setting off to attend Oklahoma A&M in 1945as the first in his family to attend college. Allen, who went on to work in radio and TV in Oklahoma, has written a charmingly wry memoir celebrating his Ozarks childhood. Typical of his tone is a passage in which he tells of being baffled by the fact that a teacher dubbed him “Gene A” for clarity, because a female schoolmate was named Jean. Indeed, Allen’s style is reminiscent of another Jean—famed humorist Jean Shepherd—particularly when he references a decoder ring, which also appears in the Shepherd-narrated classic 1983 comedy film, A Christmas Story. Allen also provides material with a more serious dimension, including sharp portraiture of his grandmother (“She had few enemies, but she cherished the ones she had”) and a touching epilogue, set at his mother’s deathbed in 1994.

Appealing musings from an insightful raconteur.