Slider, The Leo Butterburger Story

By Michael Shaw

Inspired by real-life events, SLIDER, The Leo Butterburger Story is a poignant and touching fairy-tale about a warm hearted character born in the mid 1950’s in the village of Mariemont, Ohio not far from Cincinnati. His real name was Leopold Knight. He was soft spoken and a little plump. The bullies called him “Butterburger.” Leo had a passion for sports but no athletic ability. He was the kid nobody ever wanted on their team, so he created his own games. One called SLIDER changed his life and the lives of everyone who knew him. A loveable underdog, Leo is given a chance to be everyone’s hero, a once in a lifetime opportunity. Along the way he makes the ultimate sacrifice, one that reminds us that on earth, we are all angels with one wing, able to fly only when we embrace each other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Shaw
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463034040

Michael Shaw

By profession, Mike is a professional musician, working as a keyboard player and private music teacher. Mike has been teaching piano, electronic keyboard and electric organ for over thirty years and as a keyboard player worked in many night clubs and entertainment venues. Mike has also branched out in to composing music and has written and recorded many new royalty free tracks which are used worldwide in TV, film and internet media applications. "My favourite piece of music is "Music" by John Miles, it describes how my life has been and continues to be, I consider myself very lucky" Mike is also proud of the fact that many of his students have gone on to be musicians, composers and teachers in their own right. "Learning to play a piano, keyboard or any musical instrument is the greatest gift anybody can gives themselves" Listen to Mikes royalty free music here: http://audiojungle.net/user/audiomichaeld/portfolio?ref=audiomichaeld See Mike playing the Roland Atelier organ on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/user/captinmichaeld

Book preview

SLIDER

the LEO BUTTERBURGER STORY

by Michael Drew Shaw

SLIDER is truly an inspirational journey. The author employs his pen as a fine painter uses a brush. - Michael Teiper, CBS Television Philadelphia.

SLIDER is a riveting story about following your dreams. The lesson to never put those dreams away deeply moved me. - Louis Tartaglia, author of The Great Wing

American Retro Publishing

A Division of

American Retrospects, LLC

4428 Weldwood Lane, Suite 143

Sylvania, Ohio 43560

419.283.9409

COPYRIGHT 2019 BY MICHAEL DREW SHAW

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated to The Big Wheel

With special thanks to J. Walter Guy

MICHAEL DREW SHAW is a filmmaker, author and syndicated radio personality. He is the voice of Radicals and Visionaries, stories about American business pioneers who revolutionized the 20th Century, and Limelight America, a Cumulus Radio show about entrepreneurship.

Michael is a featured audio book narrator for Amazon/audible with twenty-five audio books to his growing library of works.

His television documentaries include The Flight of Apollo Eleven and Satin Dolls, a new PBS series about female vocalists from the big band era. Michael’s literary works include Unsuspecting Friends, On Fire With Ignorance and Hopkins. He lives and works in Sylvania, Ohio.

The Manuscript

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

PROLOGUE

Inspired by real-life events, SLIDER, the LEO BUTTERBURGER STORY is a poignant and touching fairy-tale about a warm hearted character born in the mid 1950’s in the village of Mariemont, Ohio not far from Cincinnati. His real name was Leopold Knight. He was soft spoken and a little plump. The bullies called him Butterburger.

Leo had a passion for sports but no athletic ability. He was the kid nobody ever wanted on their team, so he created his own games. One called SLIDER changed his life and the lives of everyone who knew him.

A loveable underdog, Leo is given a chance to be everyone’s hero, a once in a lifetime opportunity. Along the way he makes the ultimate sacrifice, one that reminds us that on earth, we are all angels with one wing, able to fly only when we embrace each other.

CHAPTER 1

Leopold Knight was born on December 14, 1956 in Mariemont, Ohio, a quaint little town ten miles outside Cincinnati, where his mother, Doris, made a modest income at the ice cream shop across the square from the Mariemont Inn. His father, Herbert Coleman Knight, was a rugged, hard-drinking fireman, who died in a midnight blaze at the corner of Eastern and Columbia Parkway in 1967, when Leo was eleven years old.

Doris always tried to protect Leo, her baby, from the mean streaks that ran through her husband and two other sons. Herbert had no patience for little Leo, and the boys picked on him constantly.

The older brothers, Tim and Travis, were good looking, natural athletes. Travis, a powerful catcher, made it to the minors, playing three seasons for the Red’s triple A team before going into sports-broadcasting. Tim, an equally powerful third baseman, chose golf as a career. He was good enough to play on the tour for four years, and even made the cut for two major tournaments.

Leo, on the other hand, was clumsy, average looking and pudgy. Because of his plumpness, his classmates called him Butterburger after the locally famous half-pound grease-burger, served at the White Tower Restaurant that overlooked the Little Miami River on Route 50. They meant it as an insult, but Leo took it as a sign of affection for some reason.

Years later, following the death of his mother and the eventual estrangement between Leo and his brothers who had tormented and then ignored him most of his life, he legally changed his name to Leo Knight Butterburger.

When he was eight, Leo’s father took him to a ball game to watch Tim and Travis play. After the game, Herb took Leo out on the field and made him catch fast balls, most of which he caught with his facemask while his brothers ridiculed him from behind the fence, something Leo never forgot.

Disgusted with his youngest son’s lack of athletic ability, Herbert Knight never took Leo to another game or threw him another ball.

Although Leo was no good at anything that required full body coordination, he loved sports and was a dedicated fan. To satisfy his wistful hunger to participate in the real games of baseball, basketball, football and golf, Leo invented games of his own, that he played by himself in the privacy and safety of the old coal room, in the Knight’s basement.

Standing under a 60-watt bulb in the dim room, he would pitch a tennis ball dipped in flour out the door, at a strike zone chalked off on the wall at the far end of the basement. He’d sponge the flour away after each inning.

Basketball was played with stale marshmallows, jump-shot into a plastic cup nailed to an old cutting board hung from a cross beam.

Football consisted of field goals and extra points using a miniature ball from a Green Bay Packers souvenir key chain.

Using his index finger, Leo could kick the hard little plastic pigskin accurately from as far away as thirty feet through goal posts made with toilet plungers, standing side by side.

Golf was Ping-Pong balls chipped into a red wicker plant holder with a sawed off sand wedge he’d found in the garage. The flag was a Boston Celtics mini-pennant taped to a #2 pencil.

Leo’s only company was an AM radio tuned to whatever game happened to be on, and there was almost always some kind of game being played somewhere. Otherwise, he dialed in WJKW Radio, across the Ohio River in Covington, Kentucky.

During the school year Leo did his homework as soon as he got off the bus, then spent the rest of the afternoon playing his games. After supper it was back to the basement until bedtime.

In the summertime, he was fish-belly white from being indoors so much. Doris was concerned about the amount of time Leo spent in the basement,