On her 16th birthday, my uncle, William Bailey, walked 3 miles to give his sweetheart a single red rose, but when he reached her house, he found her with another fellow, so he walked back home, picked up his father's .38 revolver, returned to the girl's house, waved the weapon wildly and ranted about her two-timing him; fortunately he didn't fire the weapon, but he did have to appear in juvenile court; needless to say, he didn't marry that girl.
My Aunt Eleanora Fagan divorced my Uncle Tim 9 months after they were married; incredibly, years later she confided in me that every day of their brief marriage had seemed to her like a holiday.
One of my best friends in the seventh grade, Peter G. Hernandez, said he knew in 1957, with the Soviet launching of Sputnik, that America would send some sort of exploratory spacecraft to Mars before 2025; he expected it be manned.
I often teased my roommate in my senior year that he had a prep-school kind of name: Archibald Alexander Leach; in 1972 he was awarded a grant to study the effects of forest fragmentation on Dendroica species, eventually earning 3 degrees in the natural sciences.
Another delight of my high-school days was to cruise down Main Street in the black 1958 Lincoln Continental Mark III convertible that my friend Thomas Mapother IV got to drive every Friday night--though his dad imposed a 20-mile per week limit on his son's use of the car, so the rides were sweet but brief.
While working on our bachelor's degrees, my friend Ernest Evans and I drove Checker cabs in the summers; we each earned about $1500 per summer, a small fortune in those days.
The craziest thing I ever did as a teenager was to agree to ride between my 2 classmates in a '59 Corvette with the hardtop removed; Jerome Silberman drove it 90 mph down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, and I feared I was going to get blown off the area behind--and above!--the bucket seats; Jerome's antics in college, I later heard, were even wilder, and he eventually totaled the Vette.
When my niece, Frances Gumm, threw a no-hitter to win the Morgan County, WV, softball title in 2010, she struck out 13 batters, hit a bases-clearing triple, and burst into tears when her teammates placed around her neck a garland of 13 ping-pong balls transformed into miniature softballs by a red felt pen.
When I was a boy, bats were made of wood and girls were cheerleaders, not athletes, but a classmate, Natasha Gurdin, boasted she could strike out the varsity baseball team's best hitter; in front of more than a hundred students (and a few coaches), she made good on her boast!
One summer afternoon as Arthur Jefferson, my neighbor and dear friend, and I looked on helplessly, our grandmothers began heatedly arguing about the stench of Arthur's 3 hounds, whose houses took up about half the Jefferson backyard; before we knew how angry our grandmothers had become, they were pulling each other's hair out, and Arthur and I hurried to pull these elderly women apart--but before we could stop the fracas, a Laurel police officer happened by, stopped his car, and threatened to run both our grandmothers in!
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.