“The Fish,” and the often-frantic, blunderbuss-toting Miss Scrimmage. He also developed a whack of quirky schoolmates for the central characters – awkward, science-obsessed Elmer Drimsdale, snooty rich kid George Wexford Smith III, easily-annoyed gymnast Perry Elbert, and across the street at Miss Scrimmage’s Finishing School for Young Ladies, Bruno and Boots’ eager co-conspirators Cathy Burton and Diane Grant. Rounding out the main cast: Macdonald Hall headmaster (and taskmaster) William Sturgeon aka. Taking his track-turned-English-teacher up on his offer to “work on whatever we wanted for the rest of the year,” preteen Korman spent the next four months concocting the tale of Bruno and Boots and their campaign to remain roommates at the fictional Macdonald Hall despite their lengthy record of adolescent shenanigans. (This resonates with me because one of my earliest music teachers and my longest-serving piano instructor, Billy Digout, was a Phys Ed teacher who suddenly became a music teacher in the early ’80s because he happened to know how to play the piano.) During his seventh-grade year at German Mills Public School in Thornhill, Ontario, Korman didn’t have an actual English teacher – he had a track and field coach who, in early 1975, was suddenly thrust into teaching English.
“Boots” O’Neal is the fact that, in a sense, it reached the rest of the world by accident. Now, to me, one of the most amazing things about the tale of trouble-making private-school buddies Bruno Walton and Melvin P.
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