The Adventures of Will Walker: My Uncle Bill Wrote Down the Good Old Days

My Uncle Bill wrote a book.

William Wuckert Jr, former tattoo artist and letterpress printer, origami engineer, classically trained barber and now a high-end hair stylist. He is the most warmly bombastic storyteller in a family full of them, and he sat down to put his childhood on paper. The Adventures of Will Walker is the result: under 50 pages of small-town boyhood from the 1960s and 70s, told through anecdotes about abandoned houses, farm chores, playing in the basement, a barn that did not survive the adventure, and the eternal moral question of whether or not to become a thief at the dime store.

It costs you about an hour of reading, and it pays you back in your own memories!

First, the author

To me, he was always Uncle Bill: perpetually fun-loving, quick-witted, always a little bit subversive, a rebel with a big heart and a supply of stories and nostalgic memories he could only recall while laughing. Growing up, he worked with my dad in our family letterpress printing business, so my earliest memories of him and the family play out against that backdrop, with the air compressors grabbing sheets of paper in the rhythm of a military march, great music playing on the stereo, and their stories yelled over the ruckus of it all.

This is something of a family trait for the men in my family. My own dad, and their father, my grandpa Bill, were similar storytellers: commanding, respectable, ever-manly, but never fully serious.

The Wuckert men always have a touch of mischief in everything they (we) say or do.

My first memories of Uncle Bill are of a heavily tattooed, long-haired tough guy who was warm, inviting, took good care of himself, and loved to play. He doodled on everything, leaving little notes, drawings and caricatures on the work tables, on sheets of press proofs, on his drinking cup. He had tremendous skill with origami, folding all kinds of animals and shapes as gifts for me and my brother, and he crafted little toys like rubber-band guns out of leftover stuff from around the shop (a rubber-band gun built from print-shop scrap is serious engineering to a seven-year-old).

Looking back, he was a major inspiration for my sense of humor and my storytelling. Listening to him and my dad tell stories of their childhood, I was always curious what it would have been like to be a kid with them in the 60s and 70s.

So when he told me he was writing a book about exactly that childhood, I was excited to read it. When my copy finally arrived, I was on a business trip in the Philippines, anxious to get home and get started.

So is the book any good?

It is.

The whole thing is a quick read, about an hour front to back, and for me it was surreal, because I grew up visiting my grandparents in the town where the stories take place, and the neighborhood still has touches of the small-town flavor it had back then. I have seen those train tracks. I have walked past that police station. I have been in that bakery!

That was extra fun for me, but the narrative needs no inside knowledge to be enjoyable.

The fun of the book is the mix: a narrative told through the eyes of a boy and, at the same time, from the perspective of the adult he became, blended without missing a beat. You get the internal monologue of a kid exploring abandoned houses, doing farm work, accidentally burning down a barn, or standing in the dime store deciding whether or not to be a thief because the pocket-knife in the glass case is just so perfect, and it is peppered with the adult's thoughts on his own young state of mind.

It reads a bit like In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd, the brilliant radio raconteur who only wrote his childhood stories down after his friend Shel Silverstein spent years pushing him to put them on paper in his own voice. Most people know Shepherd through the film adaptation of that book, A Christmas Story, which Shepherd himself narrates: Ralphie's story, told through the memories of an older, wiser, and far more sarcastic version of himself. Like Shepherd's work, The Adventures of Will Walker is a children's book written, at least in part, for adults, so they can spend a good hour in a moment of nostalgia for a time they remember fondly, with a touch of fuzziness on the details and a spoonful of the wisdom that only comes with age.

I am a child of the 80s and 90s, which makes mine probably the last American generation that experienced true outdoor adventure: bikes until the streetlights came on, creeks and train tracks, and no adult within shouting distance. I have already written a eulogy for the country that raised its kids that way, and reading Uncle Bill brought all of it back.

The family connection made the book more meaningful for me, obviously. But you do not need to share the blood to enjoy it: you just need to miss the good old days, or better yet, to have a curious, mischievous little kid to read it with.

My uncle was handed a boyhood that most kids will no longer get to experience, and instead of letting those stories fade away, he wrote them down and produced something lasting with the gift he was given. That is what you are supposed to do with a good story!

Buy it for the hour. Keep it for the memories.

And read it out loud to somebody small, because stories like these only stay alive if somebody keeps telling them.

Uncle Bill did his part.

Be good to each other.

Kurt Wuckert Jr. is the Chief Bitcoin Historian, founder of GorillaPool and Open Protocol Labs, and host of Kurt's Podcast. He writes weekly on Bitcoin, geopolitics, faith, and the long fight for human sovereignty at kurtwuckertjr.com. Catch him live every Tuesday at 2 PM EST.