The Echo of a Voice by Shoji Umo

Speaking of the mentally ill among lovers-of-friends reminds me of an episode that happened many years ago when I was a little boy in the early grades of grammar school. This episode that happened so long ago now returns vividly to my mind and stands revealed to me for what it really was.

In 1920 or 1921, when I was in the first or second grade in Public School, my home was in Hollywood on the slope of a little hill, overlooking a small long valley about two blocks wide. Beyond this valley was a much higher hill with its top about a mile up from the boulevard that bisected the valley. A street ran up that hill.

One autumn evening in October or November when it got dark early I was resting in a glassed-in porch near our dining room about 6:30 or 7 o'clock. I was sitting on a quaintly shaped chair at the opened door of the room, beside the screen door admitting to the unroofed porch and the stairs leading down to our garden terraced toward the valley.

In those days Los Angeles Sunday newspapers had funny-paper sections with drawings outlined for children to color. This was done by brushing water on the sketches. They then came to life. The colors were made to appear by the application of water. It was quite fascinating at the time, and I remember the pictures as charming fantasies from fairy-tales and stories like The Wizard of Oz, The Young King, Sleeping Beauty, The Birthday of the Infanta, The Princess in the Tower, and so on. I eagerly awaited these pictures each Sunday. I colored them whenever I had time, and I saved them all in binders.

This evening after dinner I was coloring my pictures there as I said, when across the valley and way up on the street that ran to the top of the high hill, I heard a young man's voice cry out with a terrible cry-that echoes across the years in my memory and fills my eyes with tears as I write this. He called: "JOHN -COME BACK!" A great shout again: "JOHN! COME BACK! COME BACK!" A pause, then another cry: "JOHN COME BACK! COME BACK!" A great