The most heinous crime spree I can recall perpetrating is now a half century beyond the seven-year statute of limitations, so now at last it can be safely revealed.

But first I need to make clear that despicable acts were also being committed by my two eventual victims. Bucky Moore, a member of Kittanning Country Club who looked like a praying mantis, was manager of the G.C. Murphy five-and-ten-cent store on Market Street. There was another member named Lindbergh whose business I don't recall, but it probably had to do with evicting elderly widows who were late paying their heating bills.

And I was a 13-year-old caddy. This was in the late 1940s, when the standard caddy's tip at Oakmont was a dollar. At Kittanning it was a quarter, which would buy a hot fudge sundae, or a half dollar -- a banana split and ten cents change. But as all of us knew, if you had the misfortune to carry the clubs of Mr. Moore or Mr. Lindbergh, your tip was going to be a dime -- or maybe nothing.

Playing the Kittanning course, as golfers approach the third hole, they cross a footbridge, then go straight ahead, up to the tee. The caddies would veer left and go out along the woods, so they could retrieve errant golf balls that the members often hit into the trees.

Climbing the trunks of some of those trees were luxuriant growths of poison ivy. It was a temptation I could not resist, and all the other caddies soon followed my example: Holding a golf club by its metal shaft, you could stick the leather grip deep into the foliage. So day after day, for the three years I toiled in those vineyards, we would vigorously twist the grips of Lindbergh's and Moore's golf clubs in the juiciest clumps of poison ivy we could find.

All I can say in my own defense is that neither of them died of poison ivy, and that their itchy fingers and swollen palms were the appropriate stigmata for 10-cent tippers everywhere.