Word: kral
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...Armadillos," wrote Tommy Kral the other day, "are very old mammals. They have an armorlike covering formed by ossification of the greater part of the skin and of the union of bony scutes." Tommy is a 7½-year-old boy who lives on a farm near Hastings, Minn. He wrote his treatise, which he assembled from reference books, in legible longhand and in ink. The exercise was part of his schoolwork, but such assignments are hardly the usual fare for Minnesota second-graders. Neither are some of the topics the bright, assertive boy tackles with no apparent harm-parts...
Tommy's only trouble is that he does not go to school. His parents, Otto Kral, farmer-mathematician, and his wife Mary belong to the Council for Basic Education, whose members argue, often in luxuriantly polemical terms, that much of U.S. education is rotten with soft courses and "life adjustment" theories. After Tommy's first-grade year at the Lakeland-Afton public elementary school-where he got instruction in such matters as "language arts and social studies, whatever that means," Mary Krai recalls with scorn-his parents refused to send him back. Instead, they set up a stiff...
...Kral, says Moscow-trained Bureaucrat Matejka, is "a typical bourgeois liberal with leanings toward anarchism." Actually, what troubles Matejka is that Kral is not at all typical: he belongs to no party, spouts no doctrine, and (something that also troubles the U.S. consulate) includes men of all beliefs among his friends. The hero of Missing never appears in its pages. But, like an invisible magnet, Paul Kral draws its characters into his orbit, strengthening their humanity by his example of personal goodness...
...wavering Communist assigned to investigate Kral quits the party. A liberal newspaperman, fortified by Kral's friendship, gains courage to become an underground agent for democracy. A Roman Catholic priest goes to prison, braced by the thought of Kral. In short, though Krai is never seen doing or saying anything (and is never explicitly granted or denied a passport), he becomes a symbol transcending ideologies...
Neither saint nor leader, Kral, as the priest says, is "a volunteer in the service of Love." Such a man, merely by being alive, becomes an intolerable challenge to the totalitarian state...