Viewing page 39 of 99

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

34

profitable business. Bert told us he would be taking a couple of the signal men out to dinner that evening and invited us to go along. We were glad to accept, not having done much out of the ordinary for several days or more. One of the signal fellows drove and they picked us up at our hotel around 7 p.m. Bert hadn't mentioned where they intended to eat but we weren't concerned because Bert could be counted on to do things the right way. However, when it appeared that we were headed for the railroad yard district, we began to wonder. I can just about see us driving along a dirt road which ran right along one side of the Lackawanna freight yard until we pulled up at a very large but shabby-looking frame house badly in need of paint, where we pulled into the driveway and drove around to the rear and parked. I wondered what kind of a dump this might be where Bert was entertaining his customers. We alighted from the car and entered the house through the back door. We wound up in a very large room like a dining room with a huge table in its center. Two or three women, extremely ordinary, greeted us. As I recall it, one of them was maybe forty and the other two somewhere in their late twenties. Bert and his two friends evidently knew the "girls" very well. We all sat down and I guess we had dinner after a few rounds of drinks around the big table. The dinner was like you'd get served to you in a boarding house where a big group sits around one large table such as Mrs. Webster's in Lawrence Park when I was on test. While all this was going on, Bert and the two signal men and the three women were having a great time, joshing each other, telling dirty stories, and being on the most intimate and informal terms imaginable. Incidentally, I believe the women served the dinner--no one else was present. After dinner was completed, it must have been around 10 p.m and Bert proposed that we play a little poker, in fact, that we make it a strip-poker game because the girls would enjoy it and would participate also. So this is what was done. I recall that my luck was terrible and I finally got down to my shorts. Bert and his friends did better and it seems to me that Bert hadn't had to remove anything when we terminated the game. However, the 40-year woman had encountered bad luck also and sat at the end of the table completely bare above the table top--and she wasn't much to look at either. The other two women were slightly disrobed but not at all sensationally. When the game was concluded around midnight, I judge, we all got dressed, had a nightcap and departed. I never found out just what kind of a place it was--a bawdy-house, boarding house. half-baked night club or what. As far as the former is concerned, there was no solicitation or suspicious disappearances during the evening. It appeared to be just what it looked most like, a boarding house where some of the boarders had the run of the place to entertain their friends. But I never found out and I guess I was too proud to ask Bert and display my ignorance of such spots. I never got into anything remotely approaching it again. 

Transcription Notes:
Reviewed