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call to work for the day delivering telephone books.

It was the place where I met Reggie Douthit and the Linton brothers, who pledged me for Sigma, my college fraternity. It was the place where I met Gordon Parks and Cecil Layne, the two guys who introduced me to photography. It was from that same ninth floor that Booker Brown lived and he worked for the Amsterdam News, the Black newspaper owned by C.B. Powell, a P.M. Savory, two doctors turned businessmen. It was the place I learned to shoot pool and met Romere Bearden, then a struggling artist, who left to go to Europe to seek his fortune. It was the place where Jimmy Lunceford housed his famous band and would not allow his musicians to walk up to the corner without him. It was the place where Doctors Leslie Alexander, Sam Brisbane and Charlie Hunt hung out and played basketball and acquired enough skills at the game to play for Lincoln University and Morris Brown College. 

It was the place where I fell in with Percy Johnson, Vernon Hoyt and the members of the Ashanti Student and Newman Catholic Clubs, which were the Negro clubs at City College of New York where most of us went to school in the evenings until we got and accepted some scholarships to Negro colleges down South. It was the street on which at 101 West 135th Street a guy, whose name I forget, taught us to build crystal sets to listen to WEVD on the radio. It was also the street which housed the 135th Street Library, from where Abe Hill used to stage his plays for the Negro theatre; One of which was "Anna Lucasta" and another "On Strivers Row". It was at this library they housed the famed Schomburg collection.

135th Street across Seventh Avenue was a bar & grill called the Big Apple and it was from this spot, Mr. Shannon, a local dignitarian made enough money to send his daughter Lerline to Spellman College.

It was on this street that I met Percy Ifill and Conrad Johnson who studied architecture and designed the State Office Building, the Swimming Pool in Mount Morris Park; Community settlement houses for St. Phillips and Salem Churches; as well as numerous housing projects around town. The street and the Y spawned such great athletes as Stanley Thomas, Charles Isle, great swimmers

DO YOU RECOGNIZE ANY [[continued on next page]]

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