Dave Ellas was also a character in a story called Ono. Ono was completely handwritten, whereas the other stories were typed. Comments from Joseph Heller were written in green and red pencil in the margins of some of the stories, but there were no comments on Ono. My best guess is that the story was written while my father was a student in Dr. Christie's class, who took over teaching English Composition after Heller started writing Catch-18 in 1953.

The year was 1952 and Dwight David Eisenhower was elected President of the United States in November, beating Governor Adlai Stevenson. My father, David Eskey, was a student at Penn State at the time, learning to write fiction from his English Composition teacher, Joseph Heller. Heller would later go on to write Catch-22.. Heller had by then introduced my father to his literary agent, Elizabeth McKee. Mavis McIntosh and Elizabeth McKee had started their own agency, and had advised my father to keep working on his stories, which showed promise, but were still too "fragmentary" to be marketable, in their estimation. The Madams McIntosh and McKee represented the likes of Flannery O’Connor, John Irving, John Steinbeck, and Edna O’Brien, so Heller and my father were in very good company.