Ralph Makes Good

by Wally Cox

From the back cover of the original hardcover edition:

This is the heart-warming story of a typical American boy of forty who quits the farm and licks the big town.

In the great American tradition of Horatio Alger, Jr., our hero rises from grass-cutter and leaf-raker to High Office, helped only by his innocence, his determination, and the grudging advice of a sagacious barber.

Ralph enters politics during the leaf-raking off season and is unanimously elected Dogcatcher—by the only vote cast, his own. Taking office, he institutes wide-reaching (and expensive) reforms, only to discover that the city is ruled by the superlatively corrupt mayor, nefarious Knuckles Knugent, and his black-suited, blackjacked gang.

Despite these overwhelming odds, Ralph triumphs over the forces of darkness, foils their fiendish plot to saturate the city with man-eating monster dogs, and survives the fury of a lynch mob to become Mayor by popular acclaim and win the love of a dance-hall cutie.

Here, indeed, is a Success Story of the Sixties.

Genres: Fiction

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

Reviews

[Rod · Rating 3 out of 5]

Supremely, good-naturedly silly, in a satirical vein. Reads not unlike an adult(ish) version of the Total TeleVision cartoons for which Wally Cox provided the voice of Underdog. Cox is actually a pretty good writer, despite the aforementioned tendency toward supreme silliness. Witness this passage from the first page, which was enough to make me buy the book:

Time alone, among the four most famous dimensions, marches on. Length, width and height, if you’ve noticed, just sit there. You can walk up to them with a ruler, and they wait patiently while you measure them. But time, the only nasty dimension, makes you wait instead. If you want to measure it, you must wait until some of it marches on, and even then you can't use your ruler. You can’t even really measure it then; you must content yourself with counting little things that happen while it’s going on, like the ticks of a clock, or the hairs in a comb. And, as Ralph learned on Thursday, time only runs in one direction. You could build a clock that ran backwards, but it would be lying.

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wally Cox, the voice of ‘Underdog’ cartoons wrote a book! (Actually, he wrote 2.) When I saw this at a book sale I had to read it. Very enjoyable. Classic Wally Cox.