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43

VIII

One chapter devoted entirely to vacations seems appropriate because vacations were high spots, particularly when they involved trips to faraway places -- and in those days a place didn't have to be very many miles distant to qualify for "faraway".  Of course, vacation from school was a joyful time under any circumstances and I remember so well the day we "passed" in June to the next grade, and went home in the morning early with our report cards, and school was over until September. I really think those were among the most joyful moments that I've ever experienced. There was a short cut through a vacant lot that we used to take going and coming from school, and for some strange reason, my recollection of that ecstatic walk home when school was recessed for the summer, always seems to focus on a bunch of us walking along the path through the vacant lot. Perhaps it has something do with a feel for the great open spaces you envision for vacations as contrasted with the confinement of city streets. Anyhow, "that's the way it was" as Walter Cronkite, the famed CBS news announcer,might say. As far as the activities at home during vacation were concerned, they were largely the same as those carried on after school except more of it. What I want to do here is primarily to cover the various out-of-town experiences insofar as I can remember them and that will be pretty brief and fuzzy for the first few years.

The first vacation trip that I have any record of, and that is a photograph, took place as best I can estimate from my apparent age in the photo as well as a few other deductions and eliminations, in the year 1906. The place is Selkirk, N.Y. and the picture shows my parents and me on the beach in front of the hotel. My parents are sitting on a beached rowboat looking pensively at the water while I am standing near them looking at the camera, a shovel in one hand and a pail slung over my shoulder, and clad in a long-sleeved, striped suit with knickers or bloomers and a dark belt around my waist but hanging low in front below my belly, making me look as though I had a small bay window. My father has on a business suit with stiff collar and tie and a straw hat and doesn't look much like the man of today on vacation. Mother is attired in a full-coverage black dress which sweeps the sand and is wearing a huge black hat. I forgot to say that I am wearing a tremendous, wide-brimmed straw hat, so large in diameter that it must have served as an effective umbrella. In the background is the hotel, where I think we stayed this first trip to Selkirk and which I can remember very vaguely, the ivy-covered lighthouse, and in the near distance is Aunt Tisha Fitch's place. Neither of my parents look at all happy in this photo, in fact, they look positively dejected. Perhaps they'd just arrived and were badly disillusioned by the hotel. I know not who took the picture but it's a good one and still looks excellent after 65 years or so. I believe that the only trip we'd taken before this one was the visit south to see my father's family probably in 1905, which I have already alluded to.