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He loved the Fourth of July block party, when the whole East End converged for a day and night of games and music and grilled chicken and ribs and sweet-potato pie and dancing until the last firecracker, and then some.

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And so hot, the fire hydrant at Green and Chestnut was gushing like Niagara Falls (courtesy of somebody wrenching off the cap.)

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He learned how to jump in front of the gusher and let it propel him halfway across the street.

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And the man was croaking, ranting, not to Maniac now but to the people.  “What happens when we go over there?”

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Well, he went ahead and did it, and if business didn’t exactly boom, it must have at least peeped a little, because eons later, when Maniac Magee came to town, Cobble’s Corner was still there.

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It was made of string, but it had more contortions, ins and outs, twists and turns and dips and doodles than the brain of Albert Einstein himself.

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When the seconds became minutes, they started to get antsy, and before ten minutes had passed, they were zooming off in search of somebody to terrorize.

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He would need the touch of a surgeon, the alertness of an owl, the cunning of three foxes, and the foresight of a grand master in chess.

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Like some fairytale tailor, he threaded the end through the maze, dipping and doodling through openings the way he squiggled a football through a defense.