Following their success as doled out in the serial magazine Student & Schoolmate during 1867, Horatio Alger’s tales of a pious, lucky newsboy named Ragged Dick were published together in May by the Boston publisher A. K. Loring. Alger would write at least 119 more stories about scrupulously strong boys like Dick, with titles like “Sink or Swim,” “Do and Dare,” “Facing the World,” and “Risen from the Ranks.” With their wicked stepfathers, timely benefactors, and clean message, the stories weren’t so far from Dickens, except in the writing and the temperament. The books proved a favorite with American boys for decades, selling more than seventeen million copies.

Alger, a former divinity student whose father was a Unitarian minister, had been called “Holy Horatio” as a child. He kept in touch with his subjects by frequenting the Newsboys’ Lodging House on the top floor of the New York Sun building, where some seventy-five boys between the ages of five and fifteen boarded and attended chapel for six cents a night. Alger visited the boys’ lodgings daily and eventually set up a writing room and bed for himself there. His stories of “Mark the Match Boy” and many others came out of his consultations with New York urchins and toughs named Jake the Oyster, Pickle Nose, Cranky Jim, and Soggy Pants. The street effects in his books were theirs; Alger cleaned up the murk and attached a payoff ending.

It wasn’t the “before” sections of his books that bothered his critics, though, so much as the “ever-after” parts: “The notion that yokels always succeed in the cities is a great delusion,” wrote H. L. Mencken. “The overwhelming majority of our rich men are city-born and city-bred. And the overwhelming majority of our elderly motormen, forlorn corner grocerymen, neighborhood carpenters, and such other blank cartridges are country-bred.” After years of guiltily handing out money to his newsboy friends at the lodging house, Alger spent his last years living with his sister in Massachusetts and was poor when he died there at the age of sixty-five, in 1899.

The renowned Australian fighting kangaroo “Miss Fitzsimmons” died in Chicago on May 14. “Miss Fitzsimmons’ style of attack,” the Police Gazette eulogized, “was to balance herself on the bone of her tail and jab her adversary in the shins with her two long and pointed feet. She had a way of shooting out and uppercutting a man on the knees. She also used her short upper legs with some effect in clinches and while in motion kept them paddling like an egg beater.” Miss Fitzsimmons’s promoters could take comfort, however, in the fact that they still had their regular fighters, as well as “a monkey that swims.”

On June 5, after accepting his triumph in the California primary and promising “on to Chicago” to his supporters, Robert Kennedy exited the Embassy Ballroom toward the serving pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and was shot by a young man with a .22-caliber pistol. The assailant, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, was a Jordanian by birth who later claimed that Kennedy’s strong statements in support of Israel had driven him to attack the senator. Twenty-five hours later Kennedy died in the early morning of June 6.

Reporters who had traveled with Bobby Kennedy through his clumsy, halting, and finally passionate run for the Democratic nomination in 1968 often spoke of him as the underwhelmed members of their profession seldom do: with excitement and more than a little affection. “It was not that he sought the danger,” wrote Loudon Wainwright in Life, “rather it was that he seemed very much to need the actual physical contact with great masses of people.” On college campuses women screamed for a chance to touch his hair; in Watts the wiry senator had to be held in place by three large bodyguards against the crowds surrounding his open convertible. “The smack of hands against Kennedy’s was constant,” recalled Wainwright, “and his body shook under the impacts.”

Robert Kennedy seemed to strike some nerve with nearly everyone—from youth opposed to the war to the admirers of his murdered brother the President, from critics who still called him ruthless to the young man who eventually shot him. “It frightened one to ride in the open car with him,” Theodore White wrote, “—the screaming, the ecstasy, the hands grabbing, pulling, tearing, snatching him apart. To them he was The Liberator.…His staff insisted that he cool it; they, too, were frightened by the emotions he raised.”

During the Indiana primary Kennedy rode through the streets of Gary flanked in his convertible by the town’s black mayor, Richard Hatcher, and the Slavic hometown hero Tony Zale, who had twice won the middleweight-boxing title. “The open cars rode through the white part of Gary,” recalled Jack Newfield, “and then the black part, and Kennedy said precisely the same thing to both races”—about welfare dependency and the dignity of work, about the need to be tough on crime and to negotiate an end to the war in Vietnam, and about the hopelessness of riots. “The reaction was equally enthusiastic in each half of the city.” In the California primary turnout for the Irish millionaire was greater in Watts than in Beverly Hills. “I’m going to chase Hubert’s [Humphrey’s] ass all over the country,” Kennedy bragged in private, flush with his California win. “I’ll go wherever he goes.”