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63

Mother point out Mr. DeWolfe to me on the street downtown occasionally and he sure looked like a souse with a big, red, bulbous nose, shambling along in sloppy old clothes. This was one more incident in my initiation to the seamier side of life.

I think that covers the added friends I achieved when we moved to Douglas Street, that is, the neighborhood friends. At North High I was to find a few more, particularly Louise Neale and Nelda Pfohl, both of whom were to mean a great deal to me over a short span and then fade away, Louie not entirely but Nedla, I fear, forever.

XII

As I moved up into my teens on Douglas Street, I got into some new activities as well as continuations of the old. Socially, the Montgomery affair was probably the biggest innovation. That portion of the Montgomery gang that I was active with consisted of: John and Helen Montgomery (and to a small extent, Margaret), Helen Nurnberger, Frances Gilman, Beth Anable, Dave Traub, Jack Persse and Caroline Gere. In the warm weather, the ample front porch of the Montgomerys was the meeting place where we'd just sit around and chew the rag largely. John was aspiring to become the pitcher for the North High baseball team and with this in view, he liked to practice pitching by the hour in the Montgomery driveway and I used to be his principal catcher for these sessions. Monty, as we called John, was considerably more worldly-wise than any of the rest of us and I recall that he was the first person I ever heard tell a dirty story, which I can still remember but wont set forth here. In the inclement weather, the scene shifted to the Montgomery kitchen, which was enormous and provided plenty of room to dance to phonograph music. And we did dance a good deal in there during the winter months in particular. The Montgomery parents seldom showed while all this was going on, retiring, I assume, to some inner sanctum of their own. But despite being in the Montgomery house many, many times in the five years we lived on Douglas, I don't ever recall having seen anything inside the house except the front parlor and the kitchen; what the bedrooms were like, how many of them, just where located, or the bathroom, were complete mysteries to me -- and yet six Montgomerys lived on that mysterious lower floor of the house somehow and I used to wonder just how they did it. But it was my first taste of what I suppose might be called today, a sort of swinging life although it was all pretty innocent and before the days when any of us, as far as I know, had even yet tried smoking or had so much as a bottle of beer. But the companionship of the girls and the budding proximity to them while dancing, the kidding, the music, the often dimly-lighted kitchen with the intimacy of being together this way, all these things made one feel that life was in the process of change and for the good.