The Cheerleaders

By E. Jean Carroll Spin June 2001 Welcome to Dryden. It’s rather gray and soppy. Not that Dryden doesn’t look like the finest little town in the universe—with its pretty houses and its own personal George Bailey Agency at No. 5 South Street, it could have come right...

LeeRoy, He Ain’t Here No More

By Pete Dexter Inside Sports May 31, 1980 The child in the child is somehow faded. She is eight years old but there is nothing in her manner to say she isn’t nineteen, with a house full of screaming babies and a high school sweetheart who doesn’t always come home at...

One Throw

By W.C. Heinz Collier’s July 15, 1950 I checked into a hotel called the Olympia, which is right on the main street and the only hotel in the town. After lunch I was hanging around the lobby, and I got to talking to the guy at the desk. I asked him if this wasn’t the...