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68

   When we first moved to Douglas Street, I was still making the "films" about which I've already written. There was a store on Butternut Street close to our route to and from North High, where they sold a movie-theater operators magazine. Those were the days when there were dozens of small neighborhood movie theaters scattered all over town, whose shows were composed of a number of short films, one and two-reelers, with such famed stars of the day as Fatty Arbuckle, Chester Conklin, Charlie Chaplin, Bronco Billy Anderson, the Keystone Cops, Mabel Normand, Anita Stewart, Francis X. Bushman and so on. Also, these theaters showed serials like "The Perils of Pauline," "Lucille Love," and "The Million Dollar Mystery," having a two-reel episode each week. Well, the magazine mentioned above was primarily for the exhibitors and was full of ads for all these various films. It also included a section giving synopses of all the current films and it was these that I read avidly to get ideas for my own "films." I spent a lot of time drawing these films. Also, I enjoyed copying cartoons such as Mutt & Jeff, Jiggs & Maggie and so on and I got so I could draw a fair cartoon, good enough so I got some cartoons in the Syracuse University comic magazine, The Orange Peel, a few years later. I'd give a lot to have these now but somehow, as I've said, Bill Dyer acquired them and I don't have one for the record. As for the real movies, we used to attend quite regularly the little theater on Park Street a few blocks away, particularly to see the great "Million Dollar Mystery" serial starring Florence Labadie, James Cruze and Sidney Bracy. The theater was named The Park as I recall. I think when I was a high school senior, we went to a performance of the Princeton Triangle Club around holiday time at the old Kieth's vaudeville theater on East Genesee Street and I was much impressed. Little did I dream that my son would someday head up the University of Pennsylvania's Mask & Wig Club and appear in their shows including performances on Ed Sullivan's show on TV.

  On the athletic front was tennis at Schiller Park, a furtive swim a few times at a swimming hole out near the DeWitt freight yards, long bicycle rides as I've already outlined, and such childish sports as marbles; I recall that for a couple of seasons, we played marbles feverishly, getting a great kick out of it. I got some good workouts catching John Montgomery while he practiced pitching in their driveway. The Misses Huntington moved away and a family named Ammerman moved into the upstairs flat and Pete Ammerman introduced roller skating, which he used to practice in the basement. For ice skating, we'd go to the Arena out on South Salina, an indoor rink, public, but where you could really skate to your heart's content regardless of weather and I think I improved my skating a great deal there. Another incident I'd forgotten was playing hide-and-seek at our old home on Highland and breaking my arm when I rushed in to touch the "bye." Dr. Wynkoop set it, giving me a whiff of chloroform. Also, I did some swimming at the YMCA pool.