The Laughing Man Summary

The narrator is an adult, telling about a time when he was nine years old in 1928 in New York City and belonged to a group of boys who called themselves the Comanche Club. These boys are picked up every day after school in a rickety old bus driven by their Chief, a stocky young man who is employed by the boys' parents to watch and entertain them after school. The Chief, as the boys called him, drives them to Central Park to play games, or if the weather is bad, to a museum. On Saturdays and holidays, the Chief picks up the boys in the mornings and they spend the day camping or go to larger playing fields.

The Chief's real name is John Gedsudski, and he is an athletic young man from Staten Island. To the boys, he...