FOR a long time now I've threatened to put this damn-fool story down on paper. Actually the only threatening I've done has been to myself, since I've been a little afraid that the story is one of those things that is better in the telling than in the reading. But I figure that it should be put down somewhere, if only as a sort of small contribution to the volume of stuff that the future historians will sift through in the battle of trying to know just how it was back in the twentieth century. One of the great problems of historians , by the way, is that there is always plenty of documentary material pertaining to the events of any time, but damn little about the people who lived on the periphery of those events...