imaginary rat characters and their world

        With all the external rat activities i enjoyed with my small, cuddly, forever curious friends, there were also inward rat imaginings manifesting in such series as

• The Sportin' Rats (including any sort of activity, not just athletics)

• News For Rats (precursor to the ratville times (?!) )

• Ratmobiles and Ratjets of the Space Age

• My Rats Inventions (an unfinished work)

• and the story of "Rat Power, and How it Will Succeed," an Original "Tall Tale".

        The above five expressions of rat'ness reflect aspects of the imaginary world i inhabited as a kid. Creating the Sportin' Rats was great fun and established a foundation of rat characters employed in News For Rats. Then the interest shifted more to the machines and gadgets that rats wood create and use than any specific personalities. The tale of Rat Power brought things back to a very personal level.
        i'm guessing the Original "Tall Tale" of Rat Power was written in the fifth or the sixth grade -- Miss Coyne and Mrs. Goodell respectively, were both caring, supportive, and enthusiastic teachers so either one cood have written the "Excellent -- Especially the illustrations because they fit the story" comment. This was an homage to Trash who was with me in that time-frame. i had climbed Mt. Whitney with my Dad and brothers in the summer of 1964. (July 11, 1964: i'm in the foreground, Steve is directly behind me, Bruce is to my right, and our most precious lab, Pingo, is in front of me.)
        Considering i was raised in fairly sheltered middle-class home environs, there's a curious sort of reflection of the world i found myself alive in during that time mixed into this tale:   the plight of Native People's of America, dualistic either-or thinking ("try and get them on his side"), people being drunk and off-guard on Christmas Eve (no one in my fam'blee got drunk), and a better world being one where humans other than Indians were moved to Mars and all cities and everything else man-made besides farms destroyed, so Indians, rats and all the other animals of the world cood roam freely.