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| Hunks, Mordecai (Mordy) |
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A boy who lived near Petoskey, Michigan [The Letter, the Witch and the Ring, 34]. He was the subject of a feud between Gert Bigger and Florence Zimmermann. When Zimmermann was 18, both she and Bigger fought to have Hunks as her boyfriend. Though Zimmermann won, her fling with Hunks was very brief, but Bigger held a grudge the rest of her life.
Nothing more of Hunks is known, though photos of the mysterious suitor appear during Zimmermann's visit to the Petoskey-area in the summer of 1950: in an unnamed town in the upper peninsula, Zimmermann and Rose Rita find a photograph dated from the summer of 1905:
It showed a woman in an old-fashioned floor-length dress. She was standing by the bank of a river, and she had a canoe paddle in her hand. Behind her a canoe was pulled upon the bank. A man in a striped jacket was sitting cross-legged next to the canoe. He hand a handlebar mustache, and he was playing a banjo. The man looked handsome, but it was impossible to tell what the lady looked like. Someone had scraped the face of the lady away with a knife or a razor blade [48].
On the back of the old photograph was written: "Florence and Mordecai. Summer, 1905." Later at Bigger's grocery store, Rose Rita finds another photograph of the same man with the handlebar mustache [98].
Hunks, like Bigger, is another descriptive name (that of an attractive man); had he married, can you imagine either "Gert Hunks" or "Florence Hunks" as their names?
In the Bible, Mordecai was the cousin and guardian of Esther, as seen in the Book of Esther. However, knowing Bellairs' penchant for baseball, one cannot help think of famed pitcher Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown.
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