Rhubarb

En route to a dentist's appointment as a teen-ager, I discovered a paperback edition of this screwy novel, and it lead me eventually to read everything by H. Allen Smith I could get my hands upon. The premise: a belligerent, zag-tailed feral tomcat is adopted by an elderly millionaire, gets named "Rhubarb" for his fierce cantankerousness, and inherits an ailing New York baseball team that just natcherally rises to pennant contention under the unlikely circumstances attending upon their change in ownership. With no attempt whatsoever to prettify the character of the most un-Disneyesque animal protagonist in the history of popular fiction, *Rhubarb* tickled the hell out of me back then -- so much so that the dentist thought there was a leak in his nitrous oxide system. It's worth reading no matter how long it takes to find a copy. Anyone who can't take delight from this representative slice of America in the '50s is so much in need of a prescription for mood-elevating pharmaceuticals that obliging a patient to read the first chapter of *Rhubarb* and watching his reaction could probably serve as a better assessment of depression than the Beck scale.