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5
strange food, meeting strange people, and that was about it. On this trip, i met Cousin Peg Durham for the first time; she, being being three or four years older than I (I think), remembers it but I don't. I believe this was my father's first trip back home for a number of years and certainly the first since marriage. I'm sorry I can remember so little about this trip because it was my first great adventure but I presume I couldn't have been more than three or four years old at the most. During our stay on McClennan Avenue, I believe that we also took one or two vacations at Selkirk, a resort on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Salmon River some 25-30 miles north of Syracuse. There was a stone lighthouse at the river mouth, my first remembrance of a lighthouse, a two-story frame hotel running along the beach beyond the lighthouse, the hotel having a long, impressive, open porch traversing its entire length and looking out over the lake,a long line of cottages along the beach, and a smaller, more intimate kind of hotel very popular with a somewhat more affluent Syracuse clientele, right at the river mouth, known as Fitch's, and owned and operated by "Aunt Tisha" Fitch, a well-known matriarch, and her daughter, Hattie. I believe our first vacation at Selkirk we stayed at the hotel and the next one there, if there was such a one, we had a cottage along the beach. Then we graduated to Aunt Tisha's but that came after we'd moved from McLennan Ave. Of those first one or two vacations at Selkirk, I can remember little but I have a photo of my father and mother and me on the beach which I'll try to include in a picture gallery I'm thinking might make a good supplement to this whole account. On those first trips to Selkirk, before we had a car, we would go by train on the NYC to Pulaski, where we'd alight and go the remaining two or three miles by carriage. The roads were mostly sand and it was rugged going as we were to learn later when making the trip by car. 

As I look back upon what I can remember of my life when we lived on McLennon Avenue, however, I do not see a happy picture. Not only was the house a gloomy place but also the neighborhood was somewhat mediocre. It was an area of quite plain, frame houses, unpaved streets, wooden sidewalks, board fences in backyards, and yet it was a perfectly respectable place to live, and a lot of good people lived there; in fact, within a block or so on South Salina, there were some very sumptuous homes. But these details only provided the background for several incidents in my life during this period which I remember almost vividly compared to most of my recollections and all of them were unpleasant, and despite having occupied only a minute fraction of my total time during the time in question, they apparently were responsible for my overall unfavorable memory of the McLennan Avenue period of my life. I have saved these several experiences until the last of the McClennan Avenue Story just for this reason--they seem to demonstrate how much stronger the unfavorable were than the favorable in my memory of this period.