TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 ~ STORYLINE SAMPLER 1~Storyline Sampler CHAPTER 2 ~ BIZARRE TALES OF ENDANGERED BABIES 5~Baby Jumping in Spain 8~The Child-Eater of Switzerland 9~Lithuanian Baby Racing CHAPTER 3 ~ ANIMAL ACTS 12~Froggyland 13~Strike of the Cobra Effect 15~Reindeer Games 15~The Bat Bomb ~ A True Story From WWII CHAPTER 4 ~ HISTORICAL HIJINKS 20~The Legend of Paul Revere 22~Bunker Hill Brouhaha 23~Lighting Up Thomas Edison 24~Finding Ferdinand in the Philippines 25~Tipp Hill Tally Ho 28~Seventy-Five Famous Masons CHAPTER 5 ~ TOP 10 COUNTRY STORIES 35~Rose Island 36~San Marino 37~Moosylvania 38~Pitcairn Island 38~Sealand 39~Alcatraz 41~Micronesia 42~Christiania 43~Cocos (Keeling) Islands 45~Clipperton Island CHAPTER 6 ~ CRIMES AND PASSION 47~Lizzie Borden’s 40 Whacks 49~Charles Manson’s Maniacal Mayhem 51~Marilyn Chambers ~ She Was 99 + 44/100 % Pure 54~Brigham Young CHAPTER 7 ~ DEFTLY DEALING WITH DEATH 55~Helen and Henley 56~Final Farewell to a Fallen Friend CHAPTER 8 ~ HOPING FOR HIGH HOLIDAYS 62~All the Way with MLK 63~Salaciously Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day 64~Determining the Date of Easter 64~Doubling Down on Dyngus Day 66~A Haunting Halloween 67~Thanksgiving Truths 68~Christmas Island is the Real Deal CHAPTER 9 ~ TITILLATING TRAVEL TALES 70~Justifying the Jim Thorpe Theft 71~The Perpetuation of Pervasive Partying in Peekskill 75~Honeymoon Histrionics CHAPTER 10 ~ MAKING MUSICAL MEMORIES 77~Surf’s Up with the Beach Boys 79~Partying with the Parrotheads 80~Dark Side of the Rainbow 87~Melanie’s Happy Hippie Christmas Gift CHAPTER 11 ~ ON THE HOMEFRONT 97~Legal Eagle Sheldon Boyce 98~Mary Therese ~ Our Miss U.S.A. Neighbor 100~The Hippies, the Hoods and the Jocks 102~Skyler Smith’s Tour of Mendon 112~Shuttle Shenanigans 114~Centerfield ~ Put Me in Coach 116~David Grant Wright’s Downright Great Read 117~Thanksgiving Eve with Santa Claus 119~The Great American Hotel CHAPTER 12 ~ FALLING FOR NIAGARA FALLS 123~The Bad-News Bear Joins the Jersey Jumper 125~Navigating Niagara Falls CHAPTER 13 ~ SPORTS SPECTACULAR 130~It’s a Numbers Game 131~Hockey Highlights 133~The Simpsons ~ All Aboard for Albuquerque 134~Muhammad Ali ~ The Greatest 136~Brawlin’ at the Bronx Zoo 138~Is that an NFL player in our house? 147~Let’s Just Call it a Veeck Wreck ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We write a weekly feature for our local paper the Mendon‐Honeoye Falls‐Lima Sentinel which services the southern suburbs of Rochester, New York. We get the whole back page and our weekly contributions check in at about 1,500 words. With the publication of this book our total word count for all of our articles and books now exceeds a million. But we don’t want to get too hung up on the numerology. There’s always another superlative to put things in proper perspective. For example, there’s a billion people in China. Do you know what that means? In China, if you are a one‐in‐a‐million kind of guy, there’s a thousand other guys just like you! At any rate, recapping the story of our writing, the publisher of our newspaper, Chris Carosa, had been encouraging us for some time to write a book. While the idea always intrigued us, we didn’t jump right on board because we were having too much fun on our foray flitting from one topic to another. In general, our column has covered an eclectic variety of topics including music, sports, travel, history and human interest. The stars, for us, aligned in the beginning of 2019 when we connected the dots on some historical events and came to realize that occurring within a 30‐day period that coming summer would be the 50th anniversaries of First Man on the Moon, Chappaquiddick, the Manson Murders, Woodstock and one other thing … it also happened to be the 50th anniversary of the day we met. We were waiting for a sign from God and this seemed to be thrust down upon us like a lightning bolt hurled here from Heaven. We needed to pick one of those 50th anniversary events, take it by its literary horns and run with it. That led to the composition of our first book, The Beatles, The Bible & Manson: Reflecting Back with 50 Years of Perspective. At this point, many of you may be wondering, “Why pick the Manson story?” Well, we actually have a pretty good answer for that. Think about the story potential for the anniversary options. Man on the Moon may have been the most tempting tale, but where do you go with the storyline? “Rocket ship flies to the moon, dude gets out and walks around, dude climbs back into rocket and flies home.” Story over. Regarding the Manson story, while it is obviously a totally tragic tale, it’s truly intriguing. What with all the sex and drugs and rock n roll, the story has so many bizarre twists and turns it gets interesting even if you don’t want it to be. Every time you turn a corner there’s another “I can’t believe it” moment. So that one worked out well and we’re on to book two, which is the one you are now holding in your own sweet hands. Please allow us to explain to you how we landed upon our title, Tit for Tat Exchanges ~ Tim & Deb’s Greatest Hits. We’ll start at the end with the Tat piece before working our way forward to the Tit piece. Our subtitle of Tim & Deb’s Greatest Hits reflects the fact that this book showcases the most positively received features we have published over the past 5 years, thematically clustered. Having covered the Tat part of the title, let’s move on to the Tit. The first half of our title is Tit for Tat Exchanges. That colloquialism first appeared in our writing within an article we wrote about Easter Island. A dispute between the territory of Easter Island and its mother country of Chile was described as a tit‐for‐tat exchange. That storyline gave us pause to ponder … isn’t “tit‐for‐tat” such an interesting little colloquialism? Does not the pause to ponder give one cause to wonder, “What exactly is tat? How do I get some? And where can I turn it in for the other thing?” As two former teachers we would like to jointly assume the role of that favorite teacher you had in high school. You remember the one. It was the teacher who demanded that you work hard, but you didn’t mind doing the work because the class was engaging and you knew you would emerge not only educated but inspired. So at this point please allow us to become your tour guides for a serendipitous sojourn. We will run you through the gauntlet of your total emotional spectrum. We will make you laugh. We will make you cry. And if things work out right, there will be a few occasions on which we’ll make you laugh so hard you’ll cry. Surf’s up. Let’s do this! CHAPTER 1 ~ STORYLINE SAMPLER Welcome to our second book. It is our grandiose goal to enticingly engage you in a joyful journey through an amazing array of tantalizing topics. In establishing our objective, we sought to achieve the perfect balance of educating our audience as well as entertaining you. Please prepare yourself for an eye-opening and mind-expanding menagerie of research and revelations upon which we have wantonly worked for the past several years. We are two retired school teachers who have honed our writing skills while composing the full-page feature which comprises the back page of our local paper every week. Just to play around with the numerology piece, we have written about a million words in our collective literary career and we are about to share with you, in this book, what we consider to be our best 50,000. It’s Tim and Deb’s Greatest Hits, so to speak. But we realize that the numbers alone don’t tell the whole tale. In the end it comes down to quality not quantity. Think of it this way. There are a billion people in China. Do you know what that means? If you live in China and you‘re a one-in-a-million kind of guy, there’s a thousand other guys just like you. So in our quest to entertain you, we will not be restrained by the nuances of numerology. We plan to execute an overall style which runs the gamut of emotions. On occasion we hope to move you to tears, but for the most part we’re haranguing for humor With that in mind we hereby offer up a first chapter sampler of what you can expect throughout this book. It will be our goal to entertain as well as educate you on a vast variety of topics. Our purpose having been thusly established, here’s a sumptuous sampling of snickering snippets we hope leaves you tempted to turn some more pages. PINK PANTIES ~ We spent Halloween 2018 at an Alice Cooper concert in Syracuse and it was a seasonally exciting experience. The last time we had seen the band was during our senior year in high school. One rite of passage that we will always be able to claim is that the ultimate Alice Cooper anthem “School’s Out” was released during our senior year. The lyrics “School’s Out Forever” resonated in our hallowed hallways as we cleaned out our high school lockers for the final time.