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19

I think the foregoing covers quite well my contemporaries when we lived on Highland Avenue. In considering just what seems most logical to cover next, it seems that perhaps an account of my life with these children might fit pretty well, then tackling my life with my parents, their lives, what little I know of them, school, vacations, relatives, awakening girl interests.

IV

As best I can figure it out, I didn't begin my schooling until the spring term of 1910 or almost two years after we moved to Highland Avenue. I did not go to kindergarten but began in the equivalent of the l/l, starting in Miss Fanny Baldwins private school on Oak Street.  So I had about two years of uninterrupted playing time before school began to demand any of my attention. This chapter will have to do with these two years as well as the recreational portion of my life after I started to attend school. It must be appreciated that all this took place over a seven-year period, and I didn't begin at age 5 to do all these things at once.  However, I'm not going to attempt to get all this down necessarily in chronological order.

Winter was a great time for us kids in Syracuse and I don't think that tany of us resented its coming. The snow usually began to fall around Thanksgiving and, because the winters were cold, very little melted and we had snow on the ground right through until la te March or early April. The streets weren't cleared of snow like they are today because there were few automobiles and at the first heavy snow, most vehicles converted to or were substituted for by vehicles on runners. One of the popular pastimes in winter was hitching rides on sleighs which, of course, were horse-drawn. We'd stand along the curb somewhere and when a promising sleigh passed, we'd dash out into the street and hop onto one of its runner supports and get a free ride. Sometimes you could get a ride lasting for blocks say on James Street, then hop off and get the same kind of ride back to where you started from. We did a lot of sledding and tobogganing on Deys Hill and Holden Hill. There were trees at the foot of Deys Hill and once in a while a toboggan would get out of control and crash into a tree, resulting in minor injuries for those aboard. A few boys in the neighborhood had bobsleds, which were the ultimate, and if you had sufficient influence, maybe you could get a ride on one of them occasionally. Making snowmen and snowforts was popular, the latter serving as protection during snowball fights, piles of snowballs having been stored in the forts. Perhaps the most fun with the snow was making snow houses by throwing up a huge pile of snow, packing it down pretty solid and then hollowing out the inside starting with an entrance passage and then widening out into a chamber like an Esquimo's igloo. Most of the neighborhood families