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My first and only brush with the law occurred while living on Douglas Street. The older I got, the more extended my bicycling trips became. We'd race against time out to Greenways and return, Greenways being the eastern city limit on James Street and maybe 1 1/2 miles away. I had a double-bar Columbia with box handlebars, a really nice bike, and I enjoyed riding. I was also interested in trains, and the two interests combined to get me riding all the way to East Syracuse, perhaps five miles each way, to stand on the highway bridge over the west end of the New York Central's DeWitt Yards and watch the trains. Then I extended this trip to a couple of miles further to the middle of the yard where there was a highway bridge which crossed the entire yard, this being the location of the two humps, one eastbound and one westbound. On the occasion in question, Jack Persse had accompanied me on a ride to this middle bridge and we decided to slip down into the yard and do a little car hopping. So we stashed our bikes nearby and descended to the tracks. We walked around between seemingly endless strings of freight cars but had no luck finding anything moving. All of a sudden, we heard a man hail us and turned to find a guy approaching us at a fast walk down between two lines of cars. When he reached us, he inquired what we were doing in the yard. We told him we were just down there to watch the operations -- that we were interested in trains and that was all there was to it. The man then wanted to know if we'd been in any boxcars. We told him no. He pressed us on this point and finally told us something had been stolen out of a boxcar in this area and he'd have to ask us to report to the magistrate in East Syracuse, explaining that he was a railroad detective. We were petrified, picturing ourselves spending the night in jail. We protested our innocence as far as any theft was concerned and finally the detective merely took our names and addresses and gave us each a summons to appear the following morning before a certain magistrate in East Syracuse. Then he let us go and we hightailed it for home, dreading the denouement awaiting us there. My mother was very upset over this matter, as I expected she would be, but, as I remember it, she looked the magistrate up in the phone book and found that he lived, not in East Syracuse, but only a couple of blocks away from us. So I believe that she called him up that evening and explained the situation and the magistrate, presumably recognizing that we weren't crooks, advised her that she wouldn't be obliged to accompany me to the hearing the next day and not to worry about the outcome. So, as I remember it, Jack and I went alone to the hearing, told our story to the magistrate, were duly lectured by him, principally about avoiding trespassing as well as the danger of fooling around in freight yards, and the case was dismissed. But it was a blot on my record and I suppose at least half a dozen times when requesting clearances of the FBI, applying for passports, etc., I've listed this affair under the answer to the question, "Have you ever been arrested?"