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address and I sent Rog a Christmas card, getting a card in return with a note on it. Rog was very cordial, said he was just retired from a "partnership" he'd been in since 1943, I think, and to drop in on him and his wife at their home in Washington, Conn. anytime -- he'd love to see me; I'd also suggested he do the same with us sometime. So maybe we'll get together some day before it's too late. But it's staggering to realize that the times I'm writing about were almost [[underline]] half a century[[/underline]] ago! Actually, many of the experiences seem as though they'd occurred quite recently, in fact, are much clearer in my recollection than a lot of things which happened a relatively few years ago.

XXIII

Now I shall backtrack again, this time to the summer of 1923. As an indication of my activity in the young group at the Unitarian church, I was chosen to be one of the delegates to a church conference in August at Star Island, N.H., the other two delegates being Gladys Timmerman and Bill McClennan. I don't know who made the decision but probably Mother; at any rate, I didn't try to get a job at all that summer and we made a sort of of circle tour that was without doubt, one of the high spots of my life. We first went to Buena Vista to visit Aunt Mary and Uncle Robert Durham at Southern Seminary, of which Uncle Robert was president. We spent maybe three weeks there, then went to Norfolk, where we boarded a Merchants & Miners ship on which we sailed to Boston. At Boston, we spent several days sightseeing and visiting with Aunt Sally Patrick, a New England cousin of Mother's, and then I went on to Star Island for two weeks while Mother remained in Boston. At the end of the conference, we returned to Syracuse. The trip was probably much more exciting to me than sailing around the world some forty-odd years later. It was really my first real adventure in travel since becoming old enough to even remember it to say nothing of appreciating it.

  We went to New York on the New York Central, spent the day there and the took a Pennsylvania-Norfolk & Western sleeper from there to Buena Vista. It seemed to me like taking off into the great-unknown when we pulled out of Penn Station in a sleeping car which ran from New York to Winston-Salem, N.C., being switched off the Pennsy main line at Harrisburg, running on a branch line to Hagerstown Md., and there being attached to a Norfolk & Western train for the long run down the Shenandoah Valley. I don't think I slept much that night for looking out the window. I remember waking in the early morning to find the train standing very quietly in a small station marked "Shenandoah" and thrilling at the thought that I was now in the South, my fathers native country. for I'd always taken a great deal of pride in being "half southern". Of course, this actually was my second trip south but on the first one, I was so young that I remembered almost nothing about it.