Odd Numbers

Shorty McCabe, ex-lightweight champion of the world, keeps a Physical Culture Studio on 42d Street and works the kinks out of the well-off New Yorkers who pay for his instruction. He narrates all nineteen episodes here himself, in his own dropped-g slang. Sewell Ford had been writing the character since 1906, and this 1912 gathering turns him loose on the city’s odd corners and odder people. The first chapter sets the range: a wheat-rich Iowa widower stands at a millinery window, still buying every spring the stylish hat his wife wanted and never got before typhoid took her. Sentiment sits right next to the joshing. The stories ran in magazines first, and the pull is less the plots than the telling, American vernacular set down while it was still being spoken.