Comedy of Errors

By George Rothacker

Life isn’t always fair. Get over it!

“Comedy of Errors” is the story of Stewart Little, a boy who grows up with some handicaps that might have led him to failure as an adult, but which actually propel him to a successful career as an innovative and renowned cartoonist and graphic novelist.

Stewart began life without any obvious physical or mental flaws, but was given a name at birth that was similar to that of a mouse-like fictional child created by the essayist E.B White for a book written in 1946, the year before Stewart’s birth.

It was not until Stewart reached middle school in the early 1960’s that he was ridiculed by a classmate familiar with the children’s story who nicknamed him, “Mouse,” at precisely the same time that an undiagnosed learning disorder kicked in, which led to Stewart to  failures in school and contributed to a decline in his grades and his self-esteem.

The story takes the reader on Stewart’s pathway through a childhood of poverty and aimlessness, through his teenage years, as he stumbles awkwardly with little assistance from teachers or his parents to expand his goals. With little to guide him, Stewart approaches adulthood at which time he forges a successful career as a cartoonist and an innovative writer and illustrator of graphic novels.

Despite, or because of, his mistakes and mishaps, Stewart adapts quickly to his circumstances and develops relationships that enrich his life as he uses every advantage presented to  him along his journey.

“Comedy of Errors” is about persistence, passion and survival, and the ways humans can change the course of their lives by making positive use of their failings as well as of their assets, their loves lost as well as those that blossom, and goals dashed as well as those achieved, to attain fortunes that are often far richer than those achieved by individuals blessed by perfect genetics, wealth, and opportunities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Sep 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781977268990

George Rothacker

George Rothacker grew up in Upper Darby, Delaware County, Pennsylvania in the 1950s and ‘60s, and graduated from Upper Darby High School and then Temple Technical Institute in North Philadelphia. He has owned and operated a successful design and marketing firm since 1978, has had a parallel career as an illustrator and painter for more than 50 years, and has written a memoir and six novels since 201, at the age of 72. Comedy of Errors is his eighth book, a semi-fictionalized autobiography of a life both plagued and guided by his unconventional learning style, which was often misunderstood and diagnosed by educators throughout his formative years. George and his wife, Barbara, have four children and eight grandchildren, and live in Radnor, Delaware County, less than ten miles from where much of “‘Comedy of Errors ”takes place.

Book preview

Mouse

Chapter One

Herman Long, a shortstop who began his baseball career in 1889 with the Kansas City Cowboys and ended it in 1904 playing for the Philadelphia Phillies, holds the record for the most career errors in the history of Major League Baseball: 1,096.

Despite Long’s many errors, Hall of Fame pitcher Kid Nichols proclaimed this error king as the greatest shortstop of them all. The reason for this contradiction lies in the fact that Long had the greatest range of any shortstop and would reach for any ball hit anywhere near him, which resulted in him leaping for balls that would touch his glove, but which he couldn’t catch, or running and diving for impossible catches of ground balls that would have made their way to the outfield without his attempt to stop them.

Oftentimes, errors in baseball are like incomplete passes in football; they have nothing to do with the skill of the fielder’s or quarterback’s attempt, but with the skill, or lack of it, of the players who support them, or the skill of the members of the opposing team to thwart the attempts of their competitors.

The same evaluation can be made for people who make errors in life. Their inability to succeed may have been caused by circumstances beyond their control which could easily have changed the outcome of their lives, if they only had had a better backup team to assist them on their journey.

Stewart Little was such a man. Athough he was nearly 5’ 11 by the age of 18, he was cursed by his family name, as well as the first name Stewart,"chosen for him by his parents, Dottie and Jim. When he was born, his parents thought the name was cute and never considered the later ramifications of naming their son after a mouse who was the protagonist of a children’s book: Stuart Little, by E. B. White.

Stewart’s full name was Stewart James Little, with the James honoring his father and his parents’ favorite actor, Jimmy Stewart. His last name was anglicized from the German Klein to Little by his grandfather, who changed it after America joined the fight with England against Germany during World War I. Why Stewart’s parents chose to reverse the order of his first and middle names remains a mystery, and Stewart could have elected to change his name to James, but he never did. He liked his name and respected his parents’ decision. Perhaps that was a mistake...or not.

Stewart spent his early years in Havertown, a suburb of Philadelphia, in a planned community built in 1949. The houses were small, but each had three bedrooms and were designed for newly married couples raising families after World War II. Many of the men who returned from Europe and the Pacific had returned to jobs taken over by women when the men were sent overseas. Although incomes were often low, these young families were happy to start fresh, and the men tried to forget about the deprivations and horrors they had endured during the war years. Few of the men who returned without physical injuries were considered damaged from the effects of the battles they fought, even as they dove under their beds at night when they heard a car backfire, or woke in a sweat after a dream of a firefight. It was to be expected and not something to worry over. They tried to be stalwart, not wanting to show weaknesses to their families, and they were just thankful for their return to a normal life.

Many young men and women of those times had endured the Great Depression as children and were accustomed to hardships in the years prior to the rationing of food and other staples due to the war. Many had lost brothers, sons, cousins and friends, while others they knew returned diminished by blindness, missing limbs and irreparable damage to their brains, lungs and masculinity, along with other deformities that would remain with them throughout their lives.

Stewart was raised from a toddler to a pre-teen in the 1950s, which in later years would make him a member of the Baby Boomer generation, defined as people born between 1946 and 1964. For many children of those times, life was free of worry. Jobs were plentiful and the economy was bustling. Schools were well-funded, and if a child was white, he or she was confident that his or her future would be bright and secure.

The Littles seldom spoke about the war, or the excessive and persistent drinking problem of Stewart’s father. The dependency might have begun prior to Jim’s four years in the Pacific, but it became more pronounced after he returned to the States. He would often arrive home stumbling through the door and berating Stewart’s mother for her failings as a wife. When he’d worn himself thin of complaints, he’d fall across the bed fully clothed, leaving his wife to quietly cry under a blanket in the living room, hoping not to disturb Stewart’s sleep.

Jim Little had worked as an oil and gas lease manager in Port Alleghany before the war, and was skilled at his job and of value to his employer, who hired him back immediately upon his return. But as the weeks and months went by, Jim began to drink in the morning before his arrival at work and started making serious mistakes on the job. Employers of that era had a great deal of sympathy for such men, since many of their own sons and nephews also had difficulty adjusting to normality and had turned to drink for solace. So Jim’s manager had a talk with him, and for a while Stewart’s father attempted to change his ways, but even as he tried to shield himself from his memories of the battles he had faced in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands and the friends he had lost, flashbacks of fellow soldiers exploding in front and to the sides of him filled him with dread and he’d often have to leave his post for the toilets, where he would convulse in tears and tried to calm himself, many times by sipping from a flask he kept with him at all times.

Alcohol calmed his shakes to a certain degrees, but Jim wasn’t able to moderate his drinking. It possessed him in a way that mimicked Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, who turned into the monstrous Mr. Hyde in the movie Jim saw before leaving for boot camp. Jim’s hair would even stand up in spikes as his personality changed from a man of kindness into a slovenly, uncouth and raging beast.

His boss finally came to the realization that Jim was not only dangerous to himself and his family, but also to the firm, and apologetically fired him with severance pay after speaking with Stewart’s mother and explaining the reason for his decision.

Jim has a major issue, Dottie, but he needs help, and we can’t have him on the rigs under the influence of alcohol. See what you can do to get him counseling.

Jim’s boss handed her $500 to assist, and Dottie thanked him for his help, but her anger at her husband’s behavior had begun to match that of his anger when he was drinking.

Jim never did get counseling, and each time after a disappointing interview he’d come home drunk, having spent what few dollars the family had on shots and beers.

The family moved back to the Philadelphia area, first to Havertown and then to Broomall, at which time Dottie finally called it quits and moved with Stewart back to her mother’s house. Stewart’s grandfather on his father’s side had been dead for many years, so Jim’s only alternative to homelessness was to live with his mother in her tiny apartment, where he slept on a foam rubber mat in the hallway. He tried to get work and took whatever employment he could get, including soliciting phone orders for a fish market in nearby Ardmore, and picking up and shredding fallen tree limbs for a landscaping company, and digging around the bases of telephone poles, treating the wood below ground level with insecticide to prevent further insect damage.

Dottie secured a job as a salesgirl in the women’s department of Gimbels, a department store near her mother’s home in Cheltenham. Dottie’s mother coldly stated to her daughter that she had raised her as well as three other children and paid for excellent educations for them with her husband’s earnings as a cab driver, and that it was not her job to take on the care of her grandson, so Stewart was soon sent off to live with Dottie’s sister and her family.

Eventually Dottie found a job rendering black and white drawings of shoes, handbags, perfume and women’s accessories in the eighth-floor offices of the Gimbels headquarters in Philadelphia, and pulled her family together by renting a small apartment in the suburb of Upper Darby. Since she couldn’t manage raising Stewart by herself, she reunited with Jim, who watched over Stewart and never again attempted to gain steady employment. Dottie provided Jim with a small allowance for personal needs, which included drinks at a taproom near the family’s home, the second floor of a stone twin where Stewart lived until he completed high school and technical school.

During the early years of his life, Stewart, though not exactly thriving, took many of his family’s difficulties in stride. As an only child, his parents were the central focus of his life, even as they struggled to maintain the mere basics of food and housing. When his father was sober, he was a nice, if ineffectual, man, and the parents doted on their only child as much as possible. Stewart knew the difficulties they faced, but they were his parents and he understood that it was their problem to take care of him while it was his to endure the many difficulties of growing up poor, including a lack of direction for his future, and surviving the name he’d been given, but not chosen.

During Stewart’s grammar school years, his teachers smiled when calling his name when he raised his hand, usually sounding out his whole name, and the children seemed to accept that he shared his name with a fictional mouse. His name only became a problem for him after entering junior high school, at a time when children begin to change from innocents into vicious little creatures intent on playing off the weaknesses of their classmates.

Soon after Stewart entered the seventh grade, he encountered a rough-and-tumble Irish boy, Jason McCann, who had transferred from a Catholic school to Stewart’s junior high. In one of his meaner moments, Jason coined the name for Stewart that stuck well into his high school years: Mouse! Once the term escaped the young bully’s mouth, the nickname quickly spread throughout the junior high.

It was somewhat surprising that no one before that time had thought to call Stewart Mouse, but kids often have strange names, and most of his classmates knew him only as Stewart, or Stew. But having read earlier in his life the E. B. White story of the courageous little mouse, Jason couldn’t help but denigrate Stewart by giving him a nickname that many of the other young teens then applied to Stewart as well. Though the stories painted Stuart Little as heroic, when passed from classmate to classmate as Mouse, the name provided great fodder for derision of Stewart, suggesting he was of small stature, which he was not, that he looked like a mouse, which he didn’t, and was less than capable at normal tasks, which he never was, nor ever would be.

The positive aspects of the tiny Stuart Little, as described by White, contributed nothing to any appreciation of Stewart and his own abilities, but instead led him to retreat further into his parents’ lives and avoid contact with as many students as possible.

It was also only then that Stewart pondered why he was given such a name and decided it was time to read the book. Stewart was surprised to find little to be upset about after the reading Stuart Little as he, too, admired the small, rodent-like boy. But he could also sense that it would be nearly an impossible task to educate students into reevaluating their opinion of him, since the name Mouse was more than just a derogatory name: it also referred to a particularly annoying kind of vermin that in no way translated to Mickey Mouse or Mighty Mouse, but to a dirty rodent to be trapped, used as snake food, and who made women shriek as they climbed upon chairs to avoid them in their pantries or kitchens.

After graduating from junior high school, the ninth grade classes of two Upper Darby schools merged into one larger class in a high school two miles from Stewart’s home. Meeting new students and finding friends required Stewart to develop a counteroffensive plan to erode the negativism his name seemed to imply. Over the summer, he had learned to draw various expressive cartoons of mice by copying and then enhancing characters in a how-to book he had borrowed from the Upper Darby Public Library. The book provided Stewart with the groundwork for a series of pictures of bright, fun-loving mice involved in various scenarios such as driving a sports car, reading classic novels, visiting world-famous sites such as the Eiffel Tower, and racing a small bicycle to the front position of a competitive team of cyclists.

On the first day of class, Stewart handed out fliers he had made using different images he’d created for each homeroom classmate as well as the teacher. Though each drawing was unique, Stewart titled each one the same in red marker: Call Me Mouse!

Below the headline he wrote, My name is Stewart Little, and I was named for a courageous little mouse in a children’s story by E. B. White, a famous writer and editor for The New Yorker magazine, who wrote the tale of Stuart Little two years before I was born.

Very few of the kids I know call me by my real name, Stewart, or Stew. Instead, they call me Mouse. So whichever name you choose to call me, I welcome it.

The flier was signed Stewart J. Little.

As he had hoped, Stewart’s classmates got a kick out of the fliers and soon shared their own personalized versions throughout the school.

After reading her own flier, Stewart’s homeroom teacher addressed the class and having not previously understood Stewart’s purpose in passing the flier to his classmates, commented that it would probably be best if they all called him Stewart.

Her response added to Stewart’s confidence and his imagination as he wondered how he might further capitalize on his name. The flier proved that he possessed some of his mother’s artistic ability, but it also showed that he could turn a disadvantage into an advantage by using his imagination. Over the next few years, there were those who still called Stewart Mouse, but as an honor rather than with any thought of being malicious.

Another benefit from the flier was that instead of being viewed as quiet or weird, he was noted by students and teachers alike for his creativity and for a name connected to a famous writer’s work. Even Jason McCann, the Irish boy who had originally made fun of him and his name, altered his attitude towards him and, when passing Stewart in the hallways, would sometimes high-five him, smile and then silently mouth the word mouse and roll his eyes, proud of himself for having invented the nickname, but also very pleased at Stewart for taking ownership of it.

Overall, Stewart began paying more attention in class and read other E. B. White books, including Charlotte’s Web, and many of his essays on writing and on life. Although Stewart may not have known it at the time, the author was to become a mentor to him, though it would take years for him to realize the impact of the man on his life. Certain phrases written by White remained with Stewart as he struggled through his early career as a draftsman, but more so as he developed his avocation as a cartoonist, a skill upon which he built hus reputation and a career that would celebrate him and his name: Stewart Little.

30,000 Postcards

Chapter Two

Jim Little had always had a knack for drawing, but had never had any training. He had gone to Staunton Military Academy, where he failed to reach his full potential. He was small and wiry, and could wrestle, walk on his hands and do handsprings. He read books, but was not particularly disposed to scholastic learning. His father, Gerard, died in November of 1929, and although food poisoning was the explanation for his death, as noted by his wife and family, there were many indications that he had lost almost all of the money the family had during the stock market crash the previous month. There was also speculation that he was part of a ring of bootleggers that brought contraband whiskey from Canada to Avalon, New Jersey, by boat into the community where the family owned a house and a gas station along Shore Road.

Jim’s aunt overheard the men of the family covering up the details of Gerard’s death after they discovered that Jim’s mother was left nearly penniless. Jim was unable to return to Staunton for graduation and no one was ever sure whether it was because of the family’s inability to pay his tuition or the need for him back in Avalon to work at the gas station. In any event, the Avalon house was sold to pay off debts and provide Jim’s mother with some means of support.

Jim never knew the real story of his father’s death, or just never admitted to knowing it. Jim had established many relationships with wealthy friends during his school years, and by working at the garage in Avalon, he had learned a lot about cars, gears, motors, and their maintenance. Through a friend who owned a machine shop nearby, he acquired the additional skills needed to become a machinist and a toolmaker.

Jim’s mother, Ethel, had been born into a prominent family, but their fortune was also diminished by the market crash and they were unable to provide much financial assistance to her and her two sons. Ethel was trained in fashion illustration at the School of Design in Philadelphia. She was an accomplished needleworker and watercolorist, and Jim inherited her creativity and artistic sensibilities, most of which were ignored by his teachers at Penn Charter and Staunton. Men in his family were directed to occupations that focused on business, investing and financial planning.

Unfortunately for Jim, his artistic abilities were never developed enough for him to use them in a trade, and since he had no college degree, it was difficult, if not impossible, for him to expand his social and business connections beyond those of his high school friends.

Fortunately, in the late 1930s he was able to capitalize on one relationship with a friend, Tom Tyson, a supporter of his father who took him under his wing and trained and employed him as a stock salesman. Jim was a quick thinker and understood the concept of accumulating wealth. He also had an ease with the patter advantageous to selling effectively, but which was often marred by a bending of the truth and by applying his own spin on financial affairs.

Though he was quite good at acquiring new accounts, his brand of selling didn’t jibe with that of his firm, and although Tyson and Jim remained friends, Jim was forced to return to his trade as a machinist while still exploring opportunities he’d opened during his time as an investment counselor. He drew on his relationships with classmates and downplayed his occupational skills as a mere hobby, rather than promoting them as the profession he depended on for survival.

In 1938, a wealthy friend from Haverford, Bill McCucheon, contacted Jim about a job opening he had for a director of an oil and gas field leased years before by his father. The fields were located in north central Pennsylvania along Route 6 near the New York border. Having nothing to lose, Jim packed up and followed the lead to the small river town of Port Allegany and stayed in its only hotel, the Canoe Place Inn, which also housed a bar and a restaurant. The large building anchored Main Street and was the only place where a single room could be rented. The day after he arrived, Jim was taken by car to a two-room shack heated by a wood stove, and connected to a pump that fed water from a well twenty feet below. A gas-powered generator provided minimal electricity. Jim was given the keys to a Ford Model A pickup truck and a map that indicated the area leased. With no reason to return to Avalon or Philadelphia, Jim ran the business, such as it was, and remained off the grid until war broke out in 1941 and he enlisted.

Jim often claimed that he could have applied for Officer Candidate School, since he had gone to Staunton Military Academy, but he chose to enter as a private, and spent the next 4-1/2 years after basic training in the infantry, stationed on bases in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands. He survived The Battle of Peleliu and returned home early in ‘46 with his only physical injury a piece of shrapnel from a Japanese pillbox embedded in his rear end.

Though the oil industry in Pennsylvania had nearly dried up, the gas wells were still somewhat profitable, so he returned to his job and the shack he’d abandoned more than five years earlier.

Prior to enlisting, Jim had become engaged to a local girl who worked at the Inn, but who dumped him two years before his return to the States. While overseas, he had also kept in touch with Dottie, a girl who had attended the same art college as his mother. Jim asked her to come up for a visit to Port Allegany, and although the shack was pretty much a dump, Dottie, who had recently turned 33, jumped at the chance to live a bohemian life in the wilderness. The couple married in April, just three months after Jim’s discharge from the Army. With Dottie’s help, and that of the men working the gas wells, he turned the shack into a cottage, put in a glass-faced fireplace and bought a used upright piano and Victrola for Dottie that would help them create the soundtrack for their new lives in postwar America.

In July of 1947, Stewart was born, and the small family returned to Philadelphia to christen their newborn child. Dottie’s parents were not happy about their daughter living in an oil town, but the couple seemed happy enough and continued to work on their cottage and their dreams until it became evident that the wells were no longer profitable and the rights to the lease would be terminated.

As a machinist, Jim could have lived and worked in and around Port Allegany for the rest of his life, but Dottie made it clear that she wasn’t going to have her child bought up a bumpkin in a dried-up oil town with a father who fixed peoples’ cars and welded gas tanks for a living. With Bill McCucheon’s financial support, Jim and his family moved back to the Philadelphia area where Jim found work as a machinist wherever he could, while Dottie continued her campaign to move to the wealthy Main Line and for her husband to get back into the business of selling stocks and providing financial advice.

During his military tour of duty, Jim had forged a place for himself with the soldiers in his battalion by painting pin-up girls on bombs and aircraft using whatever types of paint he could get his hands on. He used his raw drawing skills to craft personalized V-Mails he’d send home to his grandmother, mother, cousins, the girlfriend he soon would lose, and to his future wife. He had his own untrained technique, but borrowed on others, including the style of the Sad Sack created by the artist Sgt. George Baker, who repeatedly spun the tale of a lowly private experiencing the absurdities and humiliations of wartime service. He also wrote articles for Time Out, a military newspaper, that he typed on a Smith Corona left by a New York Times correspondent. He paired his essays with drawings of beautiful women and soldiers like himself, and shared the daily events of everyday life in the Pacific minus the tragedies of war.

He continued to create and send postcards after returning home, but found little humor in his situation after leaving the oil fields and being left without a viable income suitable for the needs of his wife and son. For a while, he borrowed money which he hoped to pay back from his earnings as a machinist, but Dottie had bigger plans for her son than what Jim’s salary could hope to provide. Her father had driven a cab, and she had gone to private school, so she figured that her husband, with only one child, could certainly afford the luxuries she had, especially since Jim had grown up wealthy and had never mentioned the family’s financial losses. She enrolled Stewart at Montgomery School in Wynnewood, and had him delivered and picked up in a cab. She rented a piano and hired a teacher who came once a week, but then stopped coming once there was no money to pay her, or to pay the rent to keep the small spinet.

Jim hid his job as a machinist from his wealthy friends, and spoke of the deals he had made in the oil and gas industry, and about the money owed to him from the results of his prospecting trips to Denver, Dallas and the Permian Basin that promised big returns for upfront investors like himself. Unfortunately, although Jim represented his wealthy friends on those trips, he never had any personal money to invest, but traded on his prospects while acknowledging to himself that he was taking money that would never be returned, with or without any profit. But the pressure was on, and Jim continued to borrow on his dream and continued to drink.

When sober, Jim was a good worker and tried in every way possible to share in Dottie’s dream, but he was tortured inside by the remorse he felt for scamming his friends to pay for a lifestyle he never needed. When drinking, his wrath came out boiling hot. He never hit Dottie or their son, but his meanness and resentments burned a hole in the boy that would take decades to heal.

By the time Dottie found a job, Jim, only in his mid-forties, had already given up hope of ever again gaining meaningful employment. He held onto the lie of riches owed to him nearly to the end and continued to embellish on stories of fortunes gained that existed only in his head. In the meantime, he read paperback mysteries stolen from the library, played solitaire to keep his mind off the failures of his existence, and continued to draw and send postcards that mimicked events in the lives of the people he came across on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, and also depicted himself surrounded by oil rigs and wearing a cowboy hat and with a Texas star belt buckle on his jeans.

Many of the cards were well-crafted and cleverly depicted the recipients as penguins, bears, rabbits and squirrels. They were light-hearted and skillfully drawn and representative of the talent and imagination exhibited when he was sober, while the dark, brooding and often messy cards he drew after too many drinks in the bar shed light on the reasons for his diminished existence.

In 1983, Stewart estimated that his father had created more than 30,000 cards. Stewart lost or misplaced nearly all of the cards he’d collected since childhood, while scores of other people his father touched with his art cherished their cache of clever cards that followed their lives and achievements.

Stewart gave his mother the credit for his survival, but only realized as he grew to be an adult how closely he had followed in his father’s footsteps as an artist, cartoonist, writer and pictorial commentator.

It probably wouldn’t have helped Stewart to recognize during those early years