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24

The foregoing will indicate my propensities for drawing and writing and I wouldn't be surprised that if my father had lived, and I hadn't felt such pressing reasons for becoming self-supporting as soon as possible, I might well have pursued one or the other of these activities as a way to earn a living. An interesting little sidelight on the writing angle, and the drawing too, for that matter, is that I always had a fascination for pads to write and draw on and I used to spend my good money from my allowance to accumulate various sizes of pads which I kept in storage in a special drawer in my room.

On what might be called the Cultural—Educational front, we listened to records on the Halsted's $200 Victrola which was the largest one available (we got a $150 one later) and I believe picked up a little music appreciation thereby, young as we were.  Occasionally they'd have a very special movie presentation at the Weiting Theater, the earliest ones I can remember being Burton Holmes travel pictures which included the first animated cartoons I can recall, which seemed absolutely super and most mysterious. I think the first feature length movie I saw at the Weiting, normally a legitimate theater, was Jack London's "The Sea Wolf" starring Hobart Bosworth. Also saw "The Birth of a Nation" there but think that must have been later. And perhaps raising rabbits might be called educational. At any rate we obtained a pair of rabbits from a rabbit raiser on Helen Street named Taylor and set them up housekeeping in a huge packing crate out behind our grape arbor. We then waited for them to produce little rabbits but for some reason, they failed to do so and died instead. It was a bad introduction to pets and we never had another pet except a pair of lovebirds who steadfastly failed to produce offspring although they obviously tried hard -- except I didn't know what they were doing, and was told they were "playing."

The Halsteds had a tremendous porch which ran most of the way across the front of their house and around one corner and halfway down one side; it must have been nearly a hundred feet long and its outer edge rested on a brick wall which had one small opening in it from the outside. This opening was just big enough for Jimmie and me to crawl through and thus enter this dungeon-like space. After you'd been inside it for a few moments, your eyes became accustomed to the dim light and you could navigate around in the gloom. It had a strange fascination for us somehow to get into this gloomy place with its rough, dirt floor, and walk around in it, for we were small enough to be able to stand up in it as I reca11.  This must prove something but I don't know just what. I do remember that we always hag a nagging fear that maybe we wouldn't be able to get back out of the place again and would be trapped forever unless someone saw fit to batter a hole in the brick wall -- for the entrance hole was just big enough to get through and that was all.