By Rachel Haynie

Mickey Burriss, 1944

Columbia's most recent release could easily have been set in Olympia. Mickey Burriss, in his first published chapbook, called his fictitious mill village Tugaloo, but the dirt streets down, which the protagonist runs barefooted, could have been Whaley or Kentucky Street, or the beginning of Bluff Road.

Burriss's 30- page chapbook, just out from Blue Cubicle Press, is a coming- of- age story. In it Nicky, an innocent young boy, learns the community's unwritten rules that segregate black from white, and linthead from townsman.

The fire under Nicky's emerging work ethic is stoked by the desire to buy a bicycle of his own or to win a bb gun for selling the most newspaper subscriptions.

During Saturday's Olympia Community Festival, Burriss will demonstrate, with copies of The Columbia Star , how little boys used to fold newspapers to make them aerodynamic. A square fold allowed them to throw papers on subscribers' porches with great accuracy. Burriss, with a stack of Columbia Stars and copies of his chapbook, will be on the piazza of the Granby Mills Apartments.

The namesake of Burriss's chapbook is a multi- talented mill worker. Hosey Hitchcock worked in the weave room; Nicky noted "couldn't just anybody get in there." With so many men from the village off at war, Nicky looks up to Hosey and wants to be just like him when he gets big.

Nicky has Hosey on a pedestal because the man can fix anything, even the busted, "borrowed" bicycle with brakes you have to pedal backwards to make it stop. But the young boy is purely fascinated by the way Hosey curls his tongue into a funnel for the peanuts he's dropped down in his Pepsi Cola.

"Hosey leveled the cola with one swig. The peanuts came up to meet the Pepsi, before it left his lips. Gripping the soda tight at the neck with his little finger and thumb, he dangled the bottle down like a bell clapper. When he drank, Hosey controlled the flow of Pepsi and goobers by putting his tongue in the bottle. When he removed his tongue, the peanuts poured out. I drank mine like that, too."

Nicky picked up on the subtlest nuances of Hosey's modus operandi. "When I start wearing shoes, I plan on rolling my socks down low on my ankles, and wearing nothing but clean overalls," Nicky told himself. "The world needed gauze, and Hosey knew how to make it. He was my hero."

For his chapbook Burriss pulled Nicky's story out of a completed novel, Face to Face , currently in the hands of an editor.

Burriss will sign his new chapbook, I Wish I Was Hosey Hitchcock , at Happy Bookseller at 5 pm, Wednesday, April 25. He will demonstrate the aerodynamic folds used by 1940s paperboys during the festival.