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One fixture in the neighborhood life was Charlie Desamone, the Italian vegetable man, who came around every day or so in the fresh vegetable season, in his big vegetable wagon drawn by a massive dray horse. It was an open wagon with a roof but no sides and various shelves to facilitate the accessibility of the vegetables. Charlie was very popular with the neighborhood kids because he'd occasionally give us an apple or an orange or pear and we, in turn, would sometimes have a penny with which to buy a banana —- it sounds incredible but I'm quite sure that was the price of one banana. Charlie was a big, swarthy man with a huge black moustache who spoke somewhat broken English and was always in a good mood with us kids; I suppose he had a family of a dozen kids of his own. I don't know what Charlie did in the winter. Today, he would probably go to Florida.

There was one group who visited the neighborhood periodically who threw a sense of utter awe all wrapped up in a kind of morbid fascination, into us kids. This group composed of three or four men came around to clean the sewer through a manhole at the corner of Highland and Dewitt. The manhole was in the sidewalk and they drew up a horsedrawn dump truck at the curb, removed the manhole cover, and then a man descended into the hole and disappeared. Presently a man or men on the surface began pulling big cans of black, slimy, odorous mud up out of the hole and dumping it into the truck or wagon would be a better term. There was something about the man going down into that black, mysterious, menacing hole filled with muck and slime that simply fascinated us in a morbid way and kept us in the vicinity until the job was finished and the man, in hip boots and smeared with filth from head to foot, surfaced again and they packed up and moved on.

The nearest thing to a "shopping center” in the neighborhood, was the corner of Oak and Park Streets, a couple of blocks away. When we moved in, there was a grocery on this corner called Kenleins as I recall it, and back of the grocery in a separate shop, was a butcher named Schenkenberger. I have a vague recollection there was also a barber shop close by. This was it. But then a new building was erected next to the grocery and occupied by a drugstore called Carey's, complete with soda fountain and quite neat and modern. Then the butcher moved across the street into a much larger establishment he had built; I remember that he had a dog, a small light-brown terrier, who spent most of his time in the shop and grew so fat that his belly literally rubbed on the floor. Kenlein sold out to a Mr. Warner who continued to run the grocery. I remember how little packaged food there was. For instance, practically all cookies were kept in big tins and weighed out by the pound and put into bags. I can still see the Nabisco Oreo biscuit tin full of hindreds [sic] of those delectable Oreos, and they tasted the same then as they do today and look the same too.