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11

Virginia, I had my first real crush on before either of us was ten years old. I thought she was the most adorable girl I had ever seen or ever would see if I lived to be a hundred. More of her later. The Reimers had an attractive daughter in her teens named Altamae but she was too old for me to be very conscious of. More of the Reimers later also.

That takes us the length of our block on Highland on the south side of the street. Now for the north side starting with the Dey's living across from us on the corner. They were old and affluent, Mr. Dey being a partner in Dey Bros., perhaps the top drygoods store in town. Their children were grown up and married. They had a huge house on a huge lot, maybe 200x250 which included a sledding hill directly across the street from us, the hill starting at the sidewalk and going down into a big depression behind the Dey house. This was a beehive of activity about all winter because, in Syracuse in those days, we had real winters and seldom saw the ground between Thanksgiving and Easter.

Moving west up the hill on Highland Avenue from the Deys, we had Mrs. Buck, a widow, with two nearly-grown sons, Bennett and Parker, then Mrs. Hubbard, a widow living alone, then Mr. Smith, a widower who owned and operated a foundry and had a beautiful redheaded daughter, Katherine, in her late teens when we moved in. Mr. Smith was a very handsome, middle-aged man with a white moustache, one you'd hardly associate with a foundry business, and he finally married Madge Benedict, a widow friend of my mother's. Then came the Beldens, a childless couple, and then the Sanfords at the top of the hill across from Southworths. Mr. Sanford was a bank president and they had a son, Durston, whom we called Joe, who became a good friend of mine. However, according to the latest word I had on Joe a few years ago, he was owner and operator of a gas station. Next to Sanfords was Wades, another childless couple, who, however, encouraged the neighborhood kids to come and play at their house, a bit pathetic in a way. Soon after we moved in, some people named Swartz built a house next to Wades; they were in the fur business and had an attractive daughter, Marian, who was popular with the boys of the neighborhood. In the next house, lived a widower named Blumer, also in the fur business, and with an attractive daughter, Marian, whom some of us were sweet on; then Mr. Blumer remarried, a widow named Emerick with a son, Arthur, who was absolutely brilliant and whom I knew very well. Art and I became rivals in publishing neighborhood newspapers in the late teens (1918-1919) and I shall relate this in more detail later but I regret to say here that Art never amounted to much, got into the Skaneateles Boat Co. who made very good Lightnings, got to drinking and finally died young of acute alcoholism. When Art was young, it was said that one of his favorite relaxations was reading the dictionary.