Downtown Cowboy — Jean Blasiar

Young Brady Johnson, called the Downtown Cowboy by his friends, lives with his widowed mother in the tenement district of a mid-western city. A favorite haunt of Brady's is the city dump, one block away, where he spends most of his time rummaging through garbage, especially the garbage dumped on Thursdays from "uptown". One Thursday morning Brady discovers a diary written by a very depressed boy about his age. Hoping for a reward, Brady takes some of the money he has saved and rides the bus "uptown" to see if he can find the boy and return the diary. Follow Brady to the conclusion of this surprising uptown journey and into a world, he is sure, he will never belong.