In the winter of 1952, Edward T. Frye’s father got a new job as an elementary school principal in the Penns Valley Area School District.

So the family left State College and moved 21 miles to Millheim.

They arrived between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and at first, the younger Frye was miserable.

The 7-year-old missed his friends. He wondered why their new home didn’t have a doorbell and concluded the whole town was odd. And he dreaded having to take a bus to his new elementary school in a place called Coburn.

So as his parents unpacked, he sat on a cardboard box, staring out the window, feeling sorry for himself.

“And then Bierly came shuffling through the snow, with Queeny’s nose at the back of his knee,” Frye writes in “Fools and Children,” a collection of stories.

Bierly was Herb Bierly, a boy his own age.

Queeny was an “off-white” mongrel who wasn’t “refined or dainty.”

And that was the day that Frye’s Tom Sawyer-esque adventures began.

Now a 66-year-old retired teacher and administrator living near Harrisburg, Frye says that as a child, he once tempted death in a pitch black cave, flooded a large section of Millheim, tried to become a peeping Tom, planned a bank robbery, hunted for one of the FBI’s most wanted criminals, set loose a prized horse, and saved a groundhog’s life.

“There are no heroes or villains in the book. We are what we are,” said Frye. “Some people look good in some stories and not so good in some others.”

Frye first published the book in 2002. But the new version contains several additional stories, new photographs and pseudonyms for almost all of the characters, with the exception of Bierly and a few others. He refers to it as a “constructed autobiography” — not a memoir.

“It reads like a memoir, it relates real stories, events, and characterizations like a memoir, and it is as close to the truth as my own faded and jaded memory allows,” he writes in the book’s preface, but goes on to note that he combines some characters and events in the tales. “So, it is all true, except for a little bit.”

The book — the title is a from a phrase his mother often used — covers his elementary school years, from the ages of 7 to 12.

“There will be no sequel. Because when you’re 12 or less people think your adventures are cute and funny,” said Frye. “But when you get to be 13, 14, 15 — people wouldn’t have liked us as much.”

But residents of Millheim continue to like Frye, and he’s received some kind feedback from his old neighbors.

“The people of Millheim have been great sports and have had good fun with it,” he said.

To order the book, published through iUniverse, visit www.foolsandchildren.com or search for it at Amazon.com or iUniverse.com.

Ed Mahon writes about news from the Penns and Brush Valley regions. He can be reached at 231- 4619 or emahon@centredaily.com.