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     Ouiji Needs & The Teddy Devil
Ouiji Needs & The Angel Bear


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Once Upon A Time, When The World Was Almost Young,
When Boys & Girls had not yet Grown,
Into Woman & Man
...Children Ruled, and it was always Spring.
  Always Sun.

Enter The Moon.
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Ouiji Needs
[on his fifth birthday]
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When Ouiji turned four years old on the 10th of June,     
             the year was 1951; and his parents                       
  had just volunteered to attend the Korean War for the special
enlistment period of one year.
   
          The soldiers needed Doctors & Nurses,                
                        and this Mr. & Mrs. Needs were.

         Ouiji was sure to miss them dearly;
 but he had the company of his teddy bears,
     a large library of kids books, and
  the neat going away gift of a 1946 version of
 

          The New Winston Dictionary for Children

The dark green tome had
                         1100 Pictorial Illustrations
    and was published by
                      The John C. Winston Company
                       Chicago       Philadelphia       Toronto

The dictionary was to be a one year primer,
630 pages learning paced over 364 days 'til his parents return.

***
  As they locked the last door of their real home, Ouiji's parents
  promised to return to their only child, and their lovely
Landover, Maryland home by birthday number five.
 
     It was intimated that that celebration would be enormous;
                    candles lit, cakes and accouterments.

  Until then, Ouiji was to reside in South Baltimore,
to be cared for by his only relative, Zara LaBroome.
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[And so, on his birthday eve morn, they had set off to the place he
would live; Aunt Zara; her gabled two story home,
on the inner edge of downtown South Baltimore.

(Two days would be enough for Mr. & Mrs Needs to make a boy at home,
before they must fly to Korea.)
.
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It turned out that Zara did not believe in celebrating birthdays
and she never would approve of Teddy Bears.
She cared little for Winston Dictionaries,
and less for a youth who might wish to learn their words.

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<> Chapter 2:  Making The Haunted Upstairs Cozy <>

"I don't take tea with bears,"
Aunt Zara declined Ouiji's invitation.

"It'll just be my fourteen teddys, Mom & Dad & Me,"
Ouiji had offered.
"It is to be our 'Making The Upstairs Cozy'
Birthday Eve Party."

"Thank you, but no upstairs tea for me," Aunt Zara
firmly concluded as her many living room
grandfather clocks made a cacophony of noon.

"Since the downstairs and front yard provide more
than enough room for me;
the upstairs and back yard are to be yours.

"I never enter either place;
so you, dear nephew, may be assured of privacy."
.
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Zara had never been overly sociable, but Mrs. Needs
  knew her much older half-sister believed that the
sloping ceilings, tiny walls & cubbyholes of the upstairs contained haunts
...the back yard even more so.

[220 Banyon Street had been Mrs. Needs, and Aunt Zara's childhood home.]

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{Yards Moblier introduces Ouiji Needs}

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Foreshadowings
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