Fun Reads Friday: Saddle Up Your Pig and Don’t Cry ‘Arp!’

Over the years, I have chuckled, chortled, and choked with laughter over the wacky escapades of young Pat McManus, his dangerously inventive best buddy Crazy Eddie Muldoon, and their dubious role model, that crusty old woodsman who avoids both baths and work, Rancid Crabtree.

The problem was those stories were gems sprinkled throughout collections of the humorous essays written by outdoorsman Patrick F. McManus. What I needed was a collection of stories of just young Pat, Crazy Eddie, and Rance.

Never Cry “Arp!” and Other Great Adventures is a good start.

Stories include A Really Nice Blizzard, in which Pat and Crazy Eddie pick up an old parachute from Grogan’s War Surplus to serve as a sail for their sled in the pounding wind. When Rancid demonstrate how an upside down truck fender would make a slicker sled, the wind snatches the parachute and it’s Rancid Crabtree who is howling.

“There was no sign of Rancid, except an occasional blasted-out snow drift marked by a spray of tobacco juice and claw marks that looked as if they might have been made by human hands.”

A rope tied to Mr. Muldoon’s belt and an ornery horse make quite the scene in Real Ponies Don’t Go Oink!, a story in which Pat and Crazy Eddie long to gallop into the sunset like cowboys in the movies.

 “Occasionally, I would ride one of our pigs by the kitchen window, hoping to shame Mom into buying me a pony. ‘There goes old short-in-the-saddle,’ my sister, the Troll, would shout. ‘Hopalong Hog and Gene Oink, the smelly cowboy!’ Then she and Mom would have a good laugh. Their response didn’t leave me much hope of every getting my very own pony by appealing to sympathy.”

And it just wouldn’t be a proper collection without The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw. When Pat goes on a camping trip with the Muldoon family, he waits until everyone is asleep before pulling from his pack the old fur coat he’s forced to use as a sleeping bag and buttoning himself inside. In the dark of the night, Goombaw—Eddie’s grandmother—shrieks when she awakens to a bear in the tent.

“Figuring Goombaw already for a goner and myself next on the bear’s menu, I tore out from under the tarp just in time to see Mr. Muldoon trying to unstick an ax from the stump in which he had embedded it the night before. Even in the shadowy dimness of moonlight, I could see the look of surprise and horror wash over Mr. Muldoon’s face as I rushed toward him for protection. He emitted a strangled cry and rushed off through the woods on legs so wobbly it looked as if he knees had come unhinged. Under the circumstances, I could only surmise that the bear was close on my heels, and I raced off after Mr. Muldoon, unable to think of anything better to do.”

This collection of short stories is missing a lot of my favorite Pat and Crazy Eddie adventures—building a submarine to sink in the duck pond, concocting an airplane to fly off the barn roof, and the time Rancid was mistaken for a low-flying bat.

Long before I wrote my humor novels featuring kids riding cows, harnessing pigs, and building a pirate ship out of an old shed door and a bed sheet, I was a huge fan of Patrick F. McManus. If you need a laugh or if you want to study how to tell a well-crafted humor story, visit the mountains of Blight County, Idaho, to meet Pat, Crazy Eddie, Rancid and other characters such as Retch Sweeney, cousin Buck, and Pat’s dog Strange. It’s worth the trip.