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Show BROADWAY AND MAIN STREET Uncle Charlie's Luck Is Bad, Bandit Crosses Him Up By BILLY ROSE i Last Friday night on the way home from his weekly pinochle ' session, my Uncle Charlie was held up a few blocks from his home on Allen Street and a wallet containing $13 was taken from him. This misadventure, strangely enough, has made my Aunt Frieda very happy, and with your leave and license, I'd like to tell you why ... To begin with, to hear my uncle tell it, Frieda is crazy like a fox about most things, but when it comes to fortune telling and allied superstitions super-stitions she's crazy like a crazy. This, of course, in Charlie's own words "drives him to destruction," particularly when my aunt shells out good money for such charms and amulets as lucky horse-tail hairs and pieces of string with seven magic knots. I can't understand," I once heard him tell her, "how a distinct twenty - century type like you could potsky around with such superstitions." "Century, schmen-tury," schmen-tury," Frieda answered. an-swered. "What was good enough by my grandmother is good enough by me." "So why didn't v i V ? v y , t WELL, AS IT turned out, my uncle won ten dollars which, added to the three he started out with, gave him a take-home total of thirteen. thir-teen. Reluctant to face gloating Frieda, he took a roundabout way home. A few doors from a drugstore on Rivington Street, a hoodlum stepped step-ped out of an alley and stuck him up. "Could you return, please, the pocketbook?" said Charlie "Is genuine gen-uine alligator leather." "Scram," said the hold-up man, "or I'll bust in your head." "A pleasure," said my uncle politely. po-litely. "Cherry-ho." When Charlie got home, Frieda was considerably shaken by the story of the stick-up, and was forced to admit that the brass gee-gaw gee-gaw was a flop. But the next morning morn-ing she gave my uncle the horse laugh when the mailman dropped off a small parcel with the wallet in it, its contents intact. There was also an unsigned note. "Dear Mister When I set you got the Fish of Zoroaster, I decide to send everything hack because I have dealings with such fishes before and don't want no part of them. Besides, when 1 count up the money I find 13 dollars exactly. 1 know when I'm licked." "See?" said my aunt. "On account ac-count of the brass fish, everything is turning out hunky-totsy." j "Maybe," said my uncle, "but to 1 me it still smells from herring." anteed to make a party healthy, wealthy and wise, and also rich." Charlie examined the brass object. ob-ject. "To me it looks like a tin herring," he said. "Where is living this Gypsy?" "In the back of a store on Suffolk Suf-folk street, and her 1 am trusting trust-ing complete," said Frieda. "F'rinstance, when Mrs. FeiteU son was expecting, the Gypsy told her to sew up the stuffed derma with black thread for a boy and white thread for a girl, and when she used the black, you saw what happened a boy." "It occasional takes place," said my uncle patiently, "that a boy comes in the world without black thread in the stuffed derma." The upshot of the argument was a decision to put the magical fish to a practical test, and when Charlie Char-lie went out that night for his weekly week-ly pinochle session, the good-luck charm was in his wallet. If he lost, it was agreed Frieda would stop patronizing Gypsy establishments; if he made a killing, however, he was to have more faith in her theories. you marry your Bl"y Kose grandfather?" "So when I look at you, that's who I'm thinking I married.'' THE MATTER CAME to a crisis last Friday when Charlie arrived home from the shop and Frieda asked him for 10 dollars. "Only last week I am giving you 10 dollars," he exploded. "What you making, a down payment on a Cadillac?" "A catalogue I am not needing." Frieda sassed back. "Today I am purchasing from a certain Gypsy a brass fish with the sign from Zoroaster which is absolute guar- |