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Mann: Well, there were still horses and carriages.  It was a small town.  There were various boarding houses and cafeterias where we ate, and there was always a long line outside.  There was a place with very nice food called Allies Inn, and if you wanted to stand in line for an hour, you could get in there for a meal.  [Laughter]  The place was crowded of course; when I first arrived, I had trouble finding a place to stay.

Henson: Where did you live?

Mann: I stayed the first week or two with a friend who had gotten me this job on account of my fluent Italian.  [Laughter]  She had been a school teacher, and she knew Miss [Lucy] Madeira at Miss Madeira's school. So until the school opened, I had a room at Miss Madeira's school, which in those days was just off Dupont Circle.  I met another girl there who had been a pupil at Miss Madeira's school, and she and I became friends.  Eventually, when we had to move out of school when the students were coming back, we found an apartment...no, first we had a room in a boarding house.  That was quite an experience.  We went through that famous 1918 flu epidemic.  She was quite ill, and then two of her friends moved into the same boarding house and had a room there, and they came down with the flu.  I managed to escape it, so I was always the one who had to call the doctor, and go out and get prescriptions filled, and that sort of thing.  The boarding house was really pretty grim. It was a rooming house really, we got no meals there. So