Westinghouse Patent Pend. and Friends

The morning of his eighteen
birthday Westinghouse Patent Pend. Ainstruther hears his Ma say, “Wes, break a leg.”

He realizes it is carnie talk
telling him to leave the desolate homestead to go out in the world to make his
fortune and send it back, that the other eight kid’s ration of corn meal mush
and goat’s milk not be permanently interrupted.

Unschooled he is well read from
his Uncle Abernathy, an English Remittance Man’s, library.

He is then a Victorian minded
American youth dropped into the bucolic glitz of of the Thirties.

His first acquaintance is Alyse, rambunctious daughter of an oil tycoon. Smitten she
offers to help his quest but her mind is more on long white dresses and bridal
bouquets.

At Alyse’s
admission of her love of antiques they mine the defunct Ensenada
Hotel, once a posh beanery, of its furnishings as items to sell on Antique Row
in .

They are astonished to find in
the various armoires exotic birds and reptiles being smuggled in for the San
Diego Zoo, and finally a defunct Mafia gunman.

They over come to make it, in
Wes’ own words, “A typical American Horatio Aglae
(sic) Success story”.