Billy Gogan, American (ePub)

Roger Higgins was born in England, in the County Cheshire, where he learned early of the Cheshire cat, whose grin, full of teeth and gums, lingers as the orange-striped cat slowly disappears. Roger emigrated with his parents and younger brother to the United States when he was 6 ¿-there were more than two months until his birthday, you know. When his mother registered him at Sweetbriar Elementary School, he saw fit to wear his English grammar school uniform, which looked a lot like Harry Potter's, except his cap was gray with purple piping and a purple button at the top, and he wore gray short trousers, gray knee socks and a purple clip-on tie with his dark gray blazer. After his mother finished registering him for school, the principal gently asked whether he would like to leave the tie and cap with her for the day and pick them up after school. Roger demurred, and he thereafter engaged in three tussles during that morning's ten-minute recess.

At the advanced age of ten, Roger taught himself the art of swearing, a skill he found useful in his thirty-odd years of playing rugby, where he was noted for his stone hands, his lack of size for certain positions and lack of speed for all the rest. As a young United States naval officer serving on a near-obsolescent guided-missile destroyer many years ago, he also learned, as did Captain Horatio Hornblower two centuries earlier, that sometimes having fifty-five oaths at your command can be entirely inadequate to the occasion.

Roger learned the art of leadership from his second commanding officer and the ship's executive officer, who together took the tired, old ship, which was a bit of a laughing-stock along the waterfront, and won the Arleigh Burke award a year later as the best surface ship in all of the Pacific Fleet. Roger served another fifteen years after that, having had during that time the privilege of being in 1985 the fire control officer for the U.S.S. Missouri's 16-inch guns, and thus the only naval

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