 Penguin Random House Audio presents The Leopard is Loose by Stephen Harrigan, read for you by George Waddell. A note to readers. There really was a sensational leopard escape from the Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City in 1950. To take advantage of some of my own childhood memories, I have moved the event forward in time several years and have done some minor tinkering with the chronology of certain TV shows or all-star baseball games. I've also set this novel to some degree within the matrix of my own extended family at a time when I, like Grady McClarty, was five years old. But The Leopard is Loose is very much a fictional enterprise, and especially so when it comes to the depiction of the two uncles in this novel. Their relentless demands of dramatic structure have required me to invent characters and saddle them with various flaws and afflictions, but I'm anxious that these fictional presences never be confused with the uncles for them in real life, who were such steadfast and selfless figures in the lives of two fatherless boys. To them, Joe Burnie, Bob Burnie, Paul D.D. Burnie, and Mike Burnie, this book is lovingly dedicated. Chapter 1 To the Oklahoma Historical Society My name is Grady McClarty. I'm seventy years old, the retired general manager of Wolf Camp Chevrolet in Midland, Texas, where I have resided for most of my life. I'm writing in response to a request I received from one of your archivists, Marguerite Talking Thunder, to record an oral history of the Great Leopard Escape that occurred in Oklahoma City when I was living there as a young boy in the early 1950s. I hope it won't disappoint you if I provide a written reminiscence instead of an oral one. I ordered a little digital recorder from Amazon and did my best to tell this story into it, but I've always found it difficult to order my thoughts when speaking out loud, and even though I tried recording myself in the garage out of the hearing of my wife, Jeanette, I still felt too conspicuous and self-conscious. For one thing, this is an intimate story about a little boy in his family and trying to tell it out loud meant always having to resist the temptation to make it bigger, to inflate it with a meaning it didn't have then, and I assume does not have now. Although of course the Leopard Escape was at the time a very big deal, and I and my family played a part in it, which is the reason you asked for my memories in the first place. This might turn out to be a lengthy document. Your request had the effect of knocking the lid off a big box of memories and reminding me that despite or the cause of a lifetime in the car business, I've always imagined a parallel existence for myself as a writer. Sample complete. Ready to continue?