a “Jerome the Ostrich” T-shirt – Salinger's first name is Jerome. Lionel's mother, "Boo Boo", employing great tact, succeeds in conveying to her son a simple and profound truth: fear and isolation can only be overcome through mutual support with other people. The tale also addresses the issue of anti-Semitism in the post-war period when the facts of fascist atrocities committed against minorities, including Jews, were becoming fully understood. Salinger had personally viewed a Nazi concentration camp as a US soldier. While attending Eastern upper-middle-class private schools as a boy, Salinger, half-Jewish, had been exposed to ethnic stereotyping by his mostly Anglo-Saxon classmates. "Down at the Dinghy" is not a reckoning of these personal and historical events, but rather a “reaffirmation of the faith in human connection” based upon Characters Boo Boo: Many allusions are made to Boo Boo throughout the Glass saga, although she is rarely encountered in any of the other stories, such as Franny and Zooey, or Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. She is referred to as the perpetual matron of the family, and this story brings this to the forefront. Lionel: This is the only story in which Lionel appears or is even mentioned. Uncle Webb: Referred to by Boo Boo when Lionel kicked goggles into the lake. Boo Boo told Lionel, her son, that the goggles belong to his Uncle Webb and that they once belonged to his Uncle Seymour. Uncle Webb is otherwise known as Buddy in the Glass family stories. Related works Other Glass Family stories include: Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, and Hapworth 16, 1924. References Bibliography Cited in footnotes Sallinger, Jerome D. 1949. Down at the Dinghy. Harper's Magazine, January 14, 1949 in Nine Stories. Little, Brown and Company. New York (1981). Slawenski, Kenneth. 2010. J.D. Salinger: A Life. Random House, New York. 1949 short stories Short stories by J. D. Salinger Works originally published in Harper's Magazine