The Summer of Inexplicable Happenings

For Danny Fletcher, the summer of 1962 wasn’t supposed to be like this.It was supposed to be sleeping in until 10 and cooking hot dogs over a campfire at Anderson’s Lake. It was supposed to be eating Milk Duds from a box in the back row of the Rialto Theatre as alien robots marched across the movie screen. It was supposed to be Ben E. King and Spanish Harlem, Sam Cooke and Cupid, and Chubby Checker and Let’s Twist Again.It was supposed to be normal.But from the moment he climbed into the red Ferris wheel seat, Danny Fletcher’s summer began to turn from normal to something that was not normal at all.“One thing after another. Bang, bang, bang. They just keep happening,” he tells his best friend. “You’d think it’d stop; you’d think one of these days God or somebody would look down and say ‘OK, kids, you’ve had your fun; now let’s turn everything back to ordinary, back to the way it was.’ Part of me’s scared that that’s what’ll happen, Mick, that it’s all going to end, just like that. Part of me’s scared it never will.”In The Summer of Inexplicable Happenings, author Bill Smith takes us on a strange, sometimes unsettling ride into the middle of small-town America at the height of the Cold War, a time when John Kennedy was in the White House and Stan “The Man” Musial was winding down his record-breaking career with the St. Louis Cardinals just across the Mississippi River.He introduces us to Newt Bradford, owner of the local variety store who has a sentimental love affair with an old, World War II battleship; Curt Wadlow, a boy who appears to be able to see into the future, and Bobby Lulay, a nearly deaf, mentally disabled 17-year-old who may hold the secret to the remarkable series of events taking place in Sanbury Hills, Illinois.At its heart, The Summer of Inexplicable Happenings is a story of friendship, family and the unexpected improbabilities of life. It is a story, too, of how it is often the smallest and simplest of things that can lead us to our most unimagined rewards.