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27

an allowance of maybe a quarter a week which doesn't sound like much but would buy a good deal of pop and candy, and I used to supplement this income by betting my father every morning that I could get dressed before he could which picked me up another nickel every day or so. My father always had a big pile of change on his dressed because he did a lot of his work at the office on a cash basis. To return to the Club, it served as a jumping-off place for expeditions across the fields and one of the favorite objectives was Durston Pond, maybe a half mile away on Durston Avenue, the first street you came to. The pond wasn't much but in the summer, we'd see frogs there and we felt as though we'd really explored far afield when we went that far. In the spring, the fields back of the Club were often flooded when the big snows finally melted and we'd make rafts out of any scrap lumber that came to hand and float around on the transcient ponds, none of which were more than a couple of feet deep, I'd judge, but were sometimes quite extensive. In this same area, we'd play baseball and football sometimes as it was relatively limitless compared to the Tracy yard. The Club was a popular place for the young social set in town and we kids would see a good deal of these people in connection with skating and tennis activities. In fact, the tennis tournaments were beg events and drew good crowds from among the socially inclined. I remember seeing my cousin Eleanor Crouse, who was president of the Syracuse Junior League, riding into the Club sitting on the folded down top of a big car as if she were a queen or something of the kind. At the Club, many of us enjoyed a junior edition of this sort of thing by attending there Miss Scroeppel's dancing school once a week and this afforded the pleasure of seeing and being close to some of the more attractive little girls, for me, Virginia Kingsbury in particular. We danced in the upstairs ballroom as they called it, to piano music and Miss Scroeppel's castanets kept time as she, a huge, busty, homely woman you'd never pick for a dancing teacher, kept a critical eye on all of us. And thus we led our carefree lives and thought little or nothing about even the possibility that life could be anything but an irresponsible trip through pleasant surroundings with generally pleasant friends and relatives and provided for and watched over by loving parents. That was the kind of childhood I had on Highland Avenue and that is why the impression I have of it as I look back over sixty years or so, is one of a happy segment of my life. I was to have other happy periods but never again one just like this.

V

This chapter will cover my home life, my parents and their lives although I'm beginning to realize that they must have done a great many things with a great many people that I wasn't aware of; otherwise, their social life must have been very simple.