Sag Harbor, NY: Permanent Press, (1997) dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - The author's first novel, set in 1934 during the Depression - the story of a "quixotic road trip to the Chicago World's Fair, recalled by a curmudgeonly retiree who learns of love and loss when the adventure turns sour. Hoping to glimpse the wonders of the modern era, Ace Gilbert and Will Randall, two fatherless 18-year-old buddies, take off from Bennett's Corners, Ohio, in a Model T equipped with faux airplane wings and a propeller mounted on the radiator. . . . Gilbert, the narrator, is the son of a WW I fighter pilot and imagines himself soaring above the flat, forlorn landscape of the Depression-era Middle West until the trio meets up with the smartly dressed, shotgun-toting highway- robber Gus Gillis and his comely moll, Gladys Bartholomew. Gus is obsessed with the legend of recently murdered Texas highwayman Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie and Clyde fame) and has set off on his own comically inept journey into crime, hoping to achieve immortality by dying in a hail of bullets while Gladys trusts that her as yet unlaunched career as a radio star will benefit from Gus's nascent notoriety." (Kirkus Reviews) SIGNED on the title page. 207 pp. ISBN: 1-877946982.