Double Cross (ePub)

Paul B. Janeczko (1945–2019) was a poet and teacher who edited numerous award-winning poetry anthologies for young people, including A Poke in the I, A Kick in the Head, A Foot in the Mouth, and The Death of the Hat, all of which were illustrated by Chris Raschka; Firefly July, illustrated by Melissa Sweet; and The Proper Way to Meet a Hedgehog and Other How-To Poems, illustrated by Richard Jones. He also wrote Worlds Afire; Requiem: Poems of the Terezín Ghetto; Top Secret: A Handbook of Codes, Ciphers, and Secret Writing; Double Cross: Deception Techniques in War; The Dark Game: True Spy Stories from Invisible Ink to CIA Moles, a finalist for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults; and Secret Soldiers: How the U.S. Twenty-Third Special Troops Fooled the Nazis.


I didn't start out to be a writer. I started out as a kid in New Jersey who had two major goals in life: (1) survive one more year of delivering newspapers without being attacked by Ike, the one-eyed, crazed cur that lurked in the forsythia bushes at the top of the hill; and (2) become more than a weak-hitting, third-string catcher on our sorry Little League team. I failed at both.
Had I announced at the dinner table, "Mom, Dad, I've decided to be a poet," my parents—especially my mother—would have been thrilled. In truth, they would have been thrilled that I'd decided to be anything other than a Top 40 disc jockey, Edsel salesman, or bullpen catcher I constantly talked about becoming in junior high.

But at that point in my life, poetry—and school, in general, for that matter—meant no more to me than gerunds, the Belgian Congo, or George Washington's wooden teeth. I was only "gifted" on Christmas and my birthday. I didn't like school. I did as little homework as possible. I participated in class only under duress from the nuns. Before sixth grade, I wasn't even much of a reader. My reading was limited largely to baseball magazines, the

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