“Had I continued to live in West Town at Owosso, I might have become a genius, but Fate determined a change was advisable when I was six years old.”
The city of Owosso today is far removed from what it was in the childhood days of James Oliver Curwood. Today luxurious homes line the paved streets and tall buildings dot the skyline where once stood low flat ones. Beautiful homes have filled up the empty spaces that were once wide within the city limits, but that same feeling and general atmosphere of drowsiness persists just as it did fifty years ago.
Tall, stately trees line the smooth streets and many automobiles traverse these thoroughfares where once the old horse and buggy moved slowly along.
Today Owosso is in the very heart of the Michigan vacationland. Running practically through the very center of the city is the smooth flowing Shiawassee river, better known as “Sparkling Waters.”
Although Owosso has grown in population from eight to fifteen thousand since Jim Curwood’s birth and boyhood days, her people remain very much the same as they were then.
West Town! A haven for growing children and a headache for grownups. It was here in West Town that Jimmie Curwood grew up and also where he all but drove his very patient parents insane with his juvenile rascality.
With his chum, Charlie Miller, it seems that there was hardly anything the pair of them would not attempt to do. Stealing fruit and playing “hookey” from school were just a few among the many items that always kept the good citizens of Owosso on the constant alert.
They fished, hunted and trapped all along the banks of the Shiawassee, which flows through the city in a great sweeping bend (when they really should have been in school). The river is flanked on either side by some of the most perfectly shaped trees that man has ever looked upon.
Jimmie and Charlie often staged and executed raids upon the fruit stands of old Mike Gazzera. Then as they would run away with their plunder tucked safely beneath their dirty blouses they would glance back and see the grey-headed old Italian shaking his fist at them and threatening them with all types of punishment. Fortunately enough for both, old Mike thought far too much of them and never actually carried out his plans of chastisement.
Probably the one outstanding characteristic of Jim Curwood as a young boy was the fact that he was seldom if ever clean of face or clothing. Try as she might to keep her bewildering offspring clean, his dear old mother seldom succeeded for much more than an hour or two at a time. For immediately after having been thoroughly cleaned up young Jimmie would head for the nearest schoolboy fight or the dirtiest part of West Town and proceed to get himself dirty again. Indeed he was a child prodigy and therein lies the reason for the old saying, which is sad but true: “why mothers get gray.” It is indeed no wonder that the townspeople would oft-times shake their heads and sigh: