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100

   Although I'm getting a little ahead of my story, for the sake of continuity regarding Louie, I'll complete this part of my account now. After being initiated into Phi Delta Theta, I met Louie and another girl on the corner outside the Phi Delt house one day and Louie asked to see my fraternity pin, that is, she wanted me to remove it and let her examine it closely. So I did this and she promptly dropped it on the sidewalk. I was extremely proud of the pin despite the agonizing two years I'd experienced achieving it, and to have her carelessly drop it on the concrete walk irked me beyond measure, and I thought, gave me an insight into Louie's character I'd not appreciated. I decided first, that Louie was more interested in my now belonging to a top fraternity than she was in me, and second, that she was both thoughtless and careless. If any particular moment marked the turn in my affection for Louie, this was it. I'd taken Louie to a university dance not long before that, where we'd exchanged dances with Rog Casler, and Rog took quite a shine to Louie and it wasn't long before he was inviting her to Deke dances and she was reciprocating by having him to Alpha Phi affairs. I can't blame either of them for this alliance because Louie was extremely attractive as I had good reason to know, and Rog was about as charming as they come besides being a Deke, which I'm sure appealed to Louie. About this time I met Doris Moore and the break with Louie from that point on way very painless. She went her way and I went mine and we got completely out of touch with each other even before I graduated. It was several years before I heard anything about Louie and then, to my considerable surprise, I discovered she'd married Jack Persse, my old friend of Douglas Street days. I don't want to sound like a snob and I don't think I am one, in fact, have no reason to be, but this marriage was entirely what I'd not have expected of Louie. She was an Episcopalian and Jack a Roman Catholic; she was from the Syracuse upper social strata and Jack was not; while Jack was a charming guy, he really never bore any great promise of success and, as far as I can judge, never amounted to a whole lot. They lived in a modest home in Fayetteville, where we stopped for lunch in 1965 when it was already obvious that Louie was dying of cancer. She had worked in the Syracuse Public Library for years, maybe to give her something to do because they never had any children, or maybe to supplement their income, or maybe both. It seemed that by marrying Jack, Louie had switched from the Margaret Pierce-Priscilla Marvel circle into the Montgomery circle -- it was sort of like what had happened to Fred Thalman's mother except Louie didn't have a lot of money to go along with it. We had two other contacts besides the lunch I mentioned above -- the abortive dinner with Jack and Louie and the Montgomery clan with Bab and Tom along, and the time when Louie and Jack stopped stopped overnight in Erie around 1950 and we had a big wing-ding in the Brightmans' backyard as recorded by a photo taken by Jack; I think the Persses must have stayed with us but neither Willie nor I can recall -- maybe we drank too much.