The papers have been full of stories lately about bullies in schools and it might make you think that big guys picking on little guys is something new. It is not, never has been. Little people have been low hanging fruit since Goliath.

I know because even though I weighed 10 pounds at birth it seemed like I got smaller as I got older.

That was not all bad. Of course it made me eligible to wear hand-me-downs till I was 14,and I was the perfect size to crawl through a 10-inch size hole in the wall in the handball sport court at the Peninsula Park swim pool. Whenever an errant shot escaped into the hole they hunted me up and coerced me to wiggle through the tiny spider web ridden gap to get their ball under penalty of dangling me by the heels in the deep end until I hollered "unclezzzzzzzzzz" glub glub.

Sometimes they said thanks.

And though I looked like a refugee I was able to entertain my sister's boyfriends by putting my legs behind my head, roll my eyes and walk on my hands across the front room linoleum. I made a starving orphan even though my shorts were black velvet scraps from Mom's sewing basket.

I often garnered some polite applause and a nickel.

But the penalty of being a pipsqueak at school resulted in a some bloody noses and bruised eye sockets after school or some times during. Nothing serious. Lots of disdain by boys with noticeable biceps.

Like Quentin Bouncer. I was his favorite runt.

One time I was sitting on a top rail during lunch hour with my feet securing my perch behind a second steel rail.

Quentin came out of a door behind me and my back was the target for the day. He gave it a shove and I went head first into the concrete base. My left cheekbone was devastated as he flounced off to greener game and I stumbled to the nurse's room. I did not die. Just bled like a stuck pig. Still have a vee notch in the bone.

I told her I fell down but I told my big brother who owned me as his beloved but personal punching bag, He never forgot Quentin's name.

Flash forward to Pearl Harbor, My brud was in the Navy. So was Quentin. Just so happened they were both in boxing classes, same weight. In what was called the Mid Pacific Eliminations for the championship they met in the ring.

You guessed it. Russell remembered the name. True story. Quentin met a furious whirlwind of flying fists and hollered uncle after going down three times in the first round.

He told me that story when he got out of the Navy.