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So one Sunday morning Katz and a kid named Jake Bekins drove downtown, parked beside a boxcar, and knocked off its padlock with a sledgehammer. They slid open the boxcar door and discovered that it was filled solid with cases of beer. Wordlessly they filled Bekins’s car with boxes of beer, shut the boxcar door, and drove to the house of a third party, Art Froelich, whose parents were known to be out of town at a funeral. There, with Froelich’s help, they carried the beer down to the basement. Then the three of them went back to the boxcar and repeated the process. They spent the whole of Sunday transferring beer from the boxcar to Froelich’s basement until they had emptied the one and filled the other.

Froelich’s parents were due home on Tuesday, so on Monday Katz and Bekins got twenty-five friends to put up five dollars each and they rented a furnished apartment in an easygoing area of town known as Dogtown near Drake University. Then they transferred all the beer by car from Froelich’s basement to the new apartment. There Katz and Bekins drank seven evenings a week and the rest of us dropped in for a Schlitz cocktail after school and for more prolonged sessions at weekends.

Three months later all the beer was gone and Katz and a small corps of henchmen returned downtown and spent another Sunday emptying out another boxcar from another distributor. When, three months after that, they ran out of beer again, they ventured downtown once more, but more cautiously this time because they were certain that after two big robberies somebody would be keeping a closer watch on the beer warehouses.

Remarkably, this seemed not to be so. This time there were no boxcars, so they knocked a panel out of one of the warehouse delivery bay doors, and slipped through the hole. Inside was more beer than they had ever seen at once—stacks and stacks of it standing on pallets and ready to be delivered to bars and stores all over central Iowa on Monday.

Working nonstop, and drafting in many willing assistants, they spent the weekend loading cars one after another with beer and slowly emptying the warehouse. Froelich expertly worked a forklift and Katz directed traffic. For a whole miraculous weekend, a couple of dozen high-school kids could be seen—if anyone had bothered to look—moving loads of beer out of the warehouse, driving it across town, and carrying it in relays into a slightly sagging and decrepit apartment house on Twenty-third Street and Forest Avenue. As word got around, other kids from other high schools began turning up, asking if they could take a couple of cases.

“Sure,” Katz said generously. “There’s plenty for all. Just pull your car up over there and try not to leave any fingerprints.”

It was the biggest heist in Des Moines in years, possibly ever. Unfortunately so many people became involved that everyone in town under the age of twenty knew who was responsible for it. No one knows who tipped off the police, but they arrested twelve principal conspirators in a dawn raid three days after the theft and took them all downtown in handcuffs for questioning. Katz was of course among them.

These were good kids from good homes. Their parents were mortified that their offspring could be so willfully unlawful. They called in expensive lawyers, who swiftly cut deals with the prosecutor to drop charges if they named names. Only Katz’s parents wouldn’t come to an arrangement. They couldn’t comfortably afford to and anyway they didn’t believe it was right. Besides, somebody had to take the rap—you can’t just let every guilty person go or what kind of criminal justice system would you have, for goodness’ sake?—so it was necessary to elect a fall guy and everyone agreed that Katz should be that person. He was charged with grand theft, a felony, and sent to reform school for two years. It was the last we saw of him till college.

I got through high school by the skin of my teeth. It was my slightly proud boast that I led the school in absences all three years and in my junior