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boys with whom he played at times and their names were Herman, Verman and Sherman, and they became famous.

This was the period of great fiction magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Everybody's, Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, Leslie's, Munsey's, Ladies Home Journal, Harper's, Scribners, Century, and many more, one famous one being McClure's. Most of these magazines had their stories illustrated and there were a group of world famous artists supplying the pictures. I can remember so well the names of many of them and their styles: Charles Dana Gibson, Howard Chandler Christy, James Montgomery Flagg, C.E. Chambers, Franklin Booth, Harrison Fisher (Cosmopolitan covers), George Gibbs, Norman Rockwell, Leyendecker, John LaGatta, Maxfield Parrish, Coles Phillips, Jessie Smith, George Plan, Arthur William Brown and Reginald Birch. And there were the humor magazines, Life and Judge, that were famous and with a list of famous contributors. For instance, Charles Dana Gibson was a regular contributor to Life, and James Montgomery Flagg to Judge. Those were the days when you could really enjoy a magazine and understand what the hell they were talking about. It was before radio and later TV began to muscle them out of business. It was worth the nickel price of the Saturday Evening Post just to look at the ads and sometimes an issue would have over 200 pages. Ah, them were the good old days in some respects at least.

On one or two trips to New York with my parents, they took me to the Hippodrome which was really just a giant variety or vaudeville show plus a few circus acts thrown in and greatly impressed me. One act I shall always remember involved some gaudily dressed Roman or Egyptian soldiers weighted down with armor and weapons, marching across stage and then down a flight of steps into a huge tank of water to disappear and not be seen again! It was miraculous. Another miracle was Tinker Bell flying away in "Peter Pan", simply taking off through the air and vanishing -- or was it Peter Pan? I guess Tinker Bell was a spot of light. I remember see Maude Adams in "Peter Pan" at the Waiting Theater in Syracuse, where I saw my first opera, "La Gioconda" put on by the San Carlo Opera Company.

Great events were children's parties, usually birthdays, where a group would be invited to someone's house for a celebration and if a birthday, you would take a present. And the group would play games, duck for apples, pin the tail on the donkey blindfolded and finally wind up eating ice cream and cake. It seems to me that somewhere along the line as we grew up, the famed game called "postoffice" came into the act, involving somehow meeting a girl in a dark room and kissing her under certain circumstances, although I can't remember if this was a punishment or a reward; I suppose that would depend upon the ages involved.