"Nettie Connet did just about everything. She was born in Sandy, Oregon, and homesteaded 80 acres there.

"She wore ridin' pants and a man's jacket, and a nice red felt hat. Now, she did put on a dress now and then, but see, she had false teeth very early in life, and she needed a place to put them.

"She was a great hunter, though a bit tricky that way. Sometimes she would go out just when hunting season opened, and she'd be the first one to ride through town with this big deer strapped across the Studebaker truck that she used to drive all the time. Folks that went up noticed that it looked like the same deer every year, and it was pretty cold, but they never told her.

"And she was a moonshiner. One day while driving into Portland she was stopped by a couple of policemen. They asked her if she knew where Nettie Connet lived. 'She's known to be a moonshiner and we want to catch her with the goods.' And Nettie, with a whole truckload of moonshine behind her, gave them precise directions to her house and kept on driving."

The day the bull got loose in Camp Washington, Yvonne Burt was wearing a red coat. Yvonne was eleven, and with her best friends, Cookie Lyons and Ruth Long, she did what everyone else in the neighborhood was doing that evening—they went out looking.

Twenty years ago, loose stock was not uncommon in the "Camp," as the residents have always called it. The neighborhood had been the center of the Cincinnati meatpacking industry for nearly a century, and if the occasional cow or pig escaped its fate for a few hours to roam the streets, the residents of the Camp liked the diversion.

That night, the girls stopped for a breather outside the block-long Kluener slaughterhouse. Ruth saw him first. "Here comes the bull," she said as calmly as she could manage. Neither Yvonne nor Cookie fell for that one.

"I got lots of stories to tell," says Johnny Fisch, 72 years old. "Been here on Eastern Avenue for fifty-four years and I've seen a lot going on from inside this shop."

Fisch tries his best now to remember to hang his American flag out in front of his barbershop. The red, white and blue symbol of America proudly flies next to his barber pole striped in the same patriotic colors.

Cleone Lyvonne leaned toward the mirror as she patted white makeup on her face.

She examined her pores, then continued to pat her face with her hands. She had been in front of the mirror for about thirty minutes doing this. "I am so fussy with my white," she said. "I've got to look good."

The pall of her face was unearthly, whiter than the whites of her eyes.

In the world of the clown, applying white makeup meant putting your "self" to death.