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107

   We arrived in Buena Vista about 7:30 a.m. to be met by Cousin Peg and her new husband of less than a year, Russell Robey, and were driven to the Seminary in a huge Studebaker touring car. By this time, I was taking pictures and accumulated quite a collection by which to remember the whole trip. As I remember it, there was scarcely a dull moment for the whole three weeks we were there. We did sightseeing, visiting Natural Bridge and Lexington with Washington & Lee and Virginia Military Institute. I was introduced to horseback riding and loved it and we'd ride around the environs of Buena Vista. There was an old swimming hole in the town where everybody went swimming, this being before the gym with its indoor pool was built at the Seminary. We played tennis. We climbed the mountain behind Peg's house. We went on picnics. We dined out at various famed restaurants in Lexington and Natural Bridge. We stayed in the Seminary but Peg had a houseguest, Mary Peck, of suitable age for me, a Sem graduate and close friend of the family from somewhere south, and they did whatever they could to pair me off with Mary Peck, hoping, I presume, that something might come of it, something like Peg's designs on Rog in connection with Martha Lou Robey. Mary Peck was a cute girl and nice to have around but she failed to ring my bell very loud and nothing ever even started to come of it. I reveled in the southern cooking and all the black characters who served the Seminary in various capacities such as Jean and Hard Times. And I thought that Russell was the most amusing, in fact, absolutely side-splitting guy I'd ever met -- and he still is, pretty much, almost 50 years later. We'd drive over to Natural Bridge in the big Studebaker and I couldn't get over having to traverse fords in the road at several points. I never tired of just looking at the mountains stretching away to the north and south and seeing the sun set over the Alleghenies. It was a beautiful country and far less spoiled than it is today. Buena Vista hasn't changed a whole lot however. In those days Russell knew everybody in town and still does, I guess. Uncle Robert was very active then physically and mentally. He'd take me on at tennis and we'd have some great struggles in spite of his being about 40 years older than I. Robert was a very versatile man who'd made Phi Beta Kappa, acquired a law degree, practiced law, failed to click at it and so went into educational work at which he proved to be very good. Moreover, he was an aspiring inventor something like Thomas Jefferson and had various evidences of his inventive bent in evidence here and there such as a non-skid driveway at the south entrance of the Seminary grounds, achieved by the odd shaping of the wheel-ways and the way it curved and sloped. Knowing that I was studying engineering, Robert liked to get my opinion on various ideas of his regarding various schemes he'd conceived for doing various things -- and as the years went on and I really became an engineer in practice, he'd do more and more of this, frequently getting me involved in things I knew little or nothing about and had a problem gracefully avoiding judging. He was also a