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...      Dad was like that. The time I told him I wanted to buy a bicycle he said, "Go right ahead," without even glancing up-so I had gone to the money basket in the dining room, intending to take enough for a bicycle. But there had been only eleven dollars and forty-three cents in it, so about a thousand miles of mowed lawns later I bought a bicycle. I hadn't said anymore to Dad because if money wasn't in the basket, it wasn't anywhere; Dad didn't bother with banks-just the money basket and one next to it marked "UNCLE SAM," the contents of which he bundled up and mailed to the government once a year. This caused the Internal Revenue Service considerable headache and once they sent a man to remonstrate with him.

     First the man demanded, then he pleaded. "But, Dr. Russell, we know your background. You've no excuse for not keeping proper records."

     "But I do," Dad told him. "Up here." He tapped his forehead.

     "The law requires written records."

     "Look again," Dad advised him. "The law can't even require a man to read and write. More coffee?"

     The man tried to get Dad to pay by check or money order. Dad read him the fine print on a dollar bill, the part about "legal tender for all debts, public and private."

     In a despairing effort to get something out of the trip he asked Dad please not to fill in the space marked "occupation" with "Spy."

     "Why not?"

     "What? Why, because you aren't-and it upsets people."

     "Have you checked with the F.B.I.?"

     "Eh? No."

     "They probably wouldn't answer. But you've been very polite. I'll mark it 'Unemployed Spy.' Okay?"

     The tax man almost forgot his brief case. Nothing fazed Dad, he meant what he said, he wouldn't argue and he never gave in.