: Max Blue
: Tin Can Down The Outrageous Exploits of Mickey Michigan and Sunshine McGee
: GM Books
: 9781882383429
: 1
: CHF 2.80
:
: Biographien, Autobiographien
: English
: 160
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
In racially tense 1952, an unlikely pair, a white and a black, team up in Navy boot camp to strike it rich. 'Mickey Michigan' a phenomenally lucky poker player, and his cohort, 'Sunshine' McGee, proceed to take hundreds of poor enlisted saps for thousands of hard-earned dollars. But not without incurring an enemy dead-set on revenge.

—CHAPTER ONE —

Mickey Michigan and Sunshine Mcgee

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee where the cotton blooms and blows. Why he left his home in the South to roam ‘round the pole, God only knows.

Hank McGee smiled and leaned back in his coach car seat on the Memphis Express speeding toward Chicago and his destination, the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, north of the great city. He was reading from theCollected Poems of Robert Service, a book his Uncle Sam had given him just before he boarded the train in Memphis. And yes, Hank really did have an Uncle named Sam. Uncle Sam gave him the book with instructions to read “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” starting on page 33. Hank promised his Uncle Sam that he would do that. He also promised that he would not take any wooden nickels.

“Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code,” Hank read.

Hank, along with his God, knew why he was leaving Tennessee to join the Navy; there were many reasons. First, because his Uncle Sam had served on Navy combat vessels in the recently ended World War II and had excited him with tales of seaborne glory. Next, the slogan JOIN THE NAVY AND SEE THE WORLD seemed like it was written just for him. Hank had never seen an ocean and he was tired of school, ready to see for himself the wonders of the vast new world he had read so much about; and then there was the universal military training law. He was nearing draft age and here in 1952, newspaper accounts of U.S. Army losses in the frigid hills of Korea filled him with a morbid dread. A former high school football teammate had returned from the Korean War missing a leg. Hank had been a linebacker on that team, powerfully built and solid as a brick wall. Hank did not shy away from physical confrontation, he just feared the type of artillery barrage he had seen in movie newsreels and that had cost his friend a leg.

And what about his home life? It was awful; the endless alcoholic bickering and worse between his mother and stepfather was sometimes frightening, often terrifying. It was time he got out.

But topping everything was the hope of escaping racial discrimination. Hank had reached a tipping point; the burden of being treated as a second class citizen was more and more intolerable. He thought God would