The Six Sousas

MY FAMILY, RIGHT OR WRONG--John Philip Sousa III--Doubleday, Doran ($2).

John Philip Sousa III (grandson of the late, great bandmaster John Philip Sousa) has written one of those hilarious life-with-father stories in which the day-to day doings of a respectable U.S. family suggest a quiet hour in bedlam.

To a ramshackle house in Chilapa, Calif, moved six Sousas:

> Author John Philip -- "the only entirely normal member of the family."

> Little Sister Nancy. Nancy "didn't bother much with the customary rules for the conduct of human beings," slept winter and summer clad in her raccoon coat.

> Brother Tommy-- a "kind of stooge or straight man for my father." Tommy kept a sparrow hawk in his bedroom, "and whenever he came through the door, it shrieked ecstatically and did knee bends, like a man trying to decide whether the crotch in his pants was too tight."

> Sister Susan. [She] lived in constant, dignified horror of all of us."

> Mother Sousa. Though she lay in bed most of the time, garbed in a tattered blue kimono, Mrs. Sousa nourished a secret passion for efficiency. Incapable of keeping the house clean, she never failed to mark letters to local stores AIR MAIL. Her favorite recreation: brooding over her own canceled checks. Her conviction: that hired help led lives that "were pretty drab and needed brightening." So hired help always left the Sousa home stewed to the gills.

> Father Sousa. He did more than anyone else to give "strangers the impression that we were engaged in a constant celebration of Bastille Day." Father was a sportsman, with "a special fondness for equipment." A trail of duffel bags and duck decoys filled the Sousa hallways. "All the best closets were quickly filled with sleeping bags, tents, canteens, fishing rods, tackle boxes. . . ." Father had a passion for the society of policemen, for presiding on committees. "After the first couple of months [he] virtually ran Chilapa, although not necessarily by consent of the inhabitants."

Father spent much of his time "enlarging at least twenty separate collections, ranging from duelling pistols to out-of-the-way specimens of trout flies." Most of the Sousa living-room was given over to a truckload of balsam wood, several barrels of paint. Out of these Father planned one day to fashion his own duck decoys. On the dining-room table stood his favorite Christmas present-- joint gift of the family--a bullet-loading machine. Father always slept with one to three loaded revolvers under his pillow, plus spare rounds of ammunition. His own room resembled "a merger between A. G. Spalding and Abercrombie & Fitch."

For the most part Father was satisfied with daily visits to the police station, where he set the captain right on the finer points of criminology and checked the mechanisms of the patrolmen's pistols. Ants worried him; he spent feverish hours tracking them through the house, out into the tomato patch, over the wall into the rose bed of the Women's Club. There he destroyed ants' nests and tea roses in one immense conflagration of gasoline-soaked rags. When not invited to take the chair of a particular committee, Father was likely to turn up and take it anyway.

Father succeeded in diverting county funds for the construction of a new road to eliminate a dangerous mountain pass to the building of tennis courts. Soon Chilapa consisted almost exclusively of tennis courts. Once a year Father made use of the courts in a tennis tournament. It was well organized. First Father intimidated the sporting-goods dealers by declaring their balls were too full of felt and the wrong color. He had the balls dyed robin's-egg blue for better visibility. On the day of the tournament he put on his white ducks and special hat (it had "large squares of rustproof screening on it for ventilation"), took over the jobs of checker, referee, games announcer, scorer. Since he liked crowds and policemen, the tournament presented Father with "an ideal problem . . . the crowds would come to watch the match and the police would come to watch the crowds."

Father had one unfortunate tendency--a deep hatred of small boys. He was always threatening to shoot them, "had converted the police department into an agency whose sole occupation seemed to be the jailing of these children." When Halloween came around, children vengefully hurled vegetables at the Sousa windows. One Halloween Father decided to put a stop to it.

"[He] emerged from his room after dinner, wearing a hunting cap and carrying the shotgun, which was slung casually under one arm, as if he were going after deer.

" 'What's he doing. . . ?' asked my mother suspiciously.

" 'He's going to shoot the boys,' [said] my little sister.

" 'What?' screamed my mother.

"[Father] was hiding in a clump of bushes . . . much as if he were in a duck blind. . . . Every few minutes he would rise slowly on his knees and, bringing his eyes just above the tops of the plants, peer slyly down the road. . . ."

Out of nowhere appeared three terrified small boys. With a quavering cry of "Mr. Sousa!" they spit, as one man, on the sidewalk and fled for their lives.

"Instantly the sky blazed with flame. My father . . . fired and reloaded and fired again. . . . My mother . . . screamed frantically." Dropping his empty gun, father leaped into a police car, "zigzagged wildly from curb to curb" in hot pursuit. The screaming made Mrs. Sousa tense, as she lay in bed drinking bottled beer. Father tossed the captured children on to the grass "as if they were bags of mail." "These kids ought to be in Sing Sing," he snarled. "Won't you children come in for a little ice cream?" called Mrs. Sousa from her window.

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