Diptych: Tales of Two

By Mary Anne Miller

The diptych is an artists device for portraying two equally notable persons or places on two canvases in one frame because they relate so closely to each other. Diptych: Tales of Two portrays two personsDorothy St. John and Charles Thomas Milleras they developed separately in their youth. They went to Argentina together in the thirties and slept in jungle camps inside tent-cabins and cottages built by the big oil company he worked for. They merged their lives with a veritable United Nations of fellow workers and laid the foundation for lives in the civilized world that they rejoined when they went home, full of tall tales and great pictures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524550738

Book preview

Contents

Foreword

Part One    Charlie’s Story

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Part Two    Dorothy’s Tale

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Afterword

FOREWORD

Why a diptych?

For an artist working in oil paint on canvas, there are ways to finesse the images as they come to you.

First, there is size. If your canvas is very large, you need a secondary set of braces to hold the supporting wood frame from twisting out of square. If you choose two smaller canvasses, however, and make two paintings, then you can join them together as a diptych. The framework of one helps to support the other and vice versa. It’s a doubling of the structure. That’s how a diptych works.

Most importantly, the subjects of the paintings must have a certain similarity and relate to each other as if they were one subject, one painting. Each must be separate, and justify its existence and be complete, separately. This is why the artist employs the double canvasses of the diptych. The two parts have equal standing, but joined together, they are twice as strong.

That is how Dorothy and Charlie are recreated in this little history. Each one is individually drawn as a complete human being. However, joined side to side in a diptych, they are mutually enhancing, two persons in one frame in one time. As two in one, they invite your attention and appreciation. Charles Thomas Miller is the author of Charlie’s Story and Mary Anne Miller is the author of Dorothy’s Tale.

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PART ONE

Charlie’s Story

Memories of Argentina

1925 to 1943

by

Charles Thomas Miller

INTRODUCTION

The petacas, little trunks full of treasure, take up places on my father’s desk and on his shelves. Originally part of a nesting set, the smallest trunk is only one and a half inches by three inches, and the largest the size of a shoebox. Their graduated sizes fit into each other like little Russian dolls when they were purchased in Argentina in the 1930’s. When I first began to notice them on my father’s workbench, desk and shelves, the petacas no longer nested together, one within the other. They had been separated and each was full of odd treasure, buttons, letters, chess pieces, foreign coins, nails and tacks and tubes of glue. They are made of rawhide, thick, tough sides of cowhide, sometimes with the hair still on the hide, stitched together with large, decorative, cross-stitched rawhide lacings.

Besides these desk-top sizes, there were large petacas too, and these were filled with folded garments from my mother and father’s years in Argentina. There were brightly dyed woolen weavings from Bolivia, deep reds and purples, yellows, black and blue-greys, vivid striped bands of color. The garments were ponchos, two lengths of tightly woven rough-textured wool stitched together with an opening in the center, so that the poncho could be slipped over the head. Some of them had short puffy tassels at the four corners.

This book is a whole petaca-full of prizes. When you open it, brightly colored objects of all shapes and colors tumble out. You reach inside to retrieve the memorabilia of your parents’ years and your years with them, and a vivid stream of stories and trinkets appears, as the adventure in Argentina is reassembled before your very eyes. In Part One, Charlie, my father, begins the tales.

Mary Anne Miller

December 1990

CHAPTER ONE

In my home town there were no mountains within easy walking distance that a youngster could climb, so I climbed every other prominence that I could find. Chief among these was a pear tree, planted conveniently close to our house so that I could shinny up and dismount at an upper story, gaining access to my bedroom without anyone knowing I was home. Besides using that stout limb to reach the upper window, I considered the sheltering structure of the pear tree a perfect hideout, a place to eat a forbidden snack or avoid a bidden chore.

One day, my father found me standing at the peak of our house roof with no visible means of getting back down on the ground. I don’t recall today how I got up there, but then I never mapped out my route in advance, like a mountain climber getting ready for an assault, but just went directly there by acrobatic feat.

Another favorite stunt of mine was climbing into attics with only a booster shove from below. I remember Aunt Ella sending me into the attic of my Grandfather Segar’s house to retrieve the bundles of paper money that had been stored there. It bothered my aunt to know the stuff was up there and she wanted to burn it before anyone tried to pass it off as legal tender.

At this time, there was an extreme shortage of small change available in coins, and some merchants had their own version of paper money printed so they could make change. In my grandfather’s case, he had printed small slips stating TWO CENTS, and below, Redeemable in U.S. Postage Currency; on the reverse, he printed an advertisement for Window Shades, Card and Job Printing, available, among other things, at his store, No. 2 Fayette Street, Utica, New York.

* * * * *

I was born on Inauguration Day, March 4, 1902, in Utica, New York and lived there with my parents, George K. Miller and Ella Maria Segar Miller, in a house on South Street. I believe that number 817 South Street must have been constructed with the idea of using the front part as a store. There were two large windows reaching almost to the floor on the inside, and a door that opened only a few feet from the sidewalk. A side door with a glassed-in storm shelter gave access to the living quarters beyond, without having to go through the store. Above the store were the bedrooms; as we added to our family, new bedrooms were added by building a second floor over the living room and the kitchen.

My mother bought out the interest in her father’s store in order to operate it herself in l888. John Wesley Segar had sold window shades, wallpaper, artist’s materials, hardware and a variety of household articles at this location since 1880. When my mother took over his stock in trade, she was able to operate the store and add to the family income only as long as her family was small. By the time I was born, Mother had had to give up the store for the full-time job of taking care of her children who had been coming along approximately every two years: Stella was born in 1888, Jimmy in 1889, Ruth in 1891, Clarence in 1897, Georgie in 1899. After I was born in 1902, then came Johnnie in 1904 and Esther (the last) in 1906.

When Mother discontinued the operation of the variety store, this front part of the house was converted into a large living room, the parlor we called it. Unlike a lot of parlors that were used just for company, ours was used constantly. Here we gathered to play games, to read, and to sing with Mother at the piano.

The cellar of our house had a dirt floor and was used mostly to store vegetables, jars of preserves and jugs of pickles. Discards were relegated to the cellar, too, such as the old organ that gave way to the piano. My father broke up the organ for firewood. For years afterwards, we kids would collect the small brass holders of tone tongues that vibrated and we would amuse ourselves blowing through them to obtain a single note from each.

One thing more about our house: it had no heat in the bedrooms. In the winter, coal-burning stoves in the living room and parlor sent their heat upstairs through registers in the floor of the upstairs hall. When we were sent to bed, we did not immediately climb into bed but spent a few minutes warming ourselves around the registers. As there was no connection between stoves and registers, we could hear the conversations below. In this way, we got grown-up talk as well as heat!

In my mother’s vegetable garden, tomatoes were always a big success and it was traditional to eat them with vinegar and sugar. Just after the first light frost, we would pick the remaining green ones and mother would then concoct the greatest green tomato pickles. She grew beans, as well, and corn, but I remember that the corn was always a disappointment and did not ever do well in our yard.

From a black currant bush, mother made jelly and we kids would take on the time-consuming chore of picking these tiny fruits for her. Close to the currant bush grew horseradish roots which my father would ask us to dig for him so that he could savor fresh horseradish on his meat. Concord grapes from the vine that stretched halfway across our backyard were good to eat out-of-hand or in the form of home-made jelly.

The fine pear tree which I loved to climb bore a fine crop of pears which we picked in the Fall and placed in barrels in the cellar. We all eagerly helped with the task of picking them, they were such delicious pears. My father wrapped each pear carefully in paper while they were still green so that they lasted almost the whole winter.

My mother was an excellent cook. She made the most tasty kuchen, a recipe handed down through my father’s German family, which was served instead of fruitcake on Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, as our traditional holiday bread. Mother baked all of her own bread, of course, and sometimes from the left-over dough, she deep-fried a batch of keeklies, strangely shaped, hand-pulled dough shapes which emerged from the hot lard light-brown and sizzling, ready to be lathered with butter and sugar and eaten hot in the hand. Rather like giving names to cloud forms that passed in the summer sky, we would give names to the forms of the keeklies and call out, This one looks like a pig! This one looks like the head of a horse! This one looks like Europe! (or Italy, the boot! and so on)"

Accompanied by Johnnie Cake, the upstate New York name for cornbread, we always had baked beans for supper on Saturday night. In the traditional manner, the beans were prepared for cooking by an overnight soak and then several hunks of salt pork would be added to the earthenware crock before the beans were baked.

When I was a kid, Utica, New York was a city of about one hundred thousand people located in the Mohawk Valley about 70 miles west of the capitol, Albany. The early commercial developement of the town was fostered by the construction of the Erie Canal, the vital link that permitted transfer of goods from the Hudson River by horse-drawn barge to the Great Lakes, in an era before railroads, horseless wagons and superhighways. Because of the availability of water power, by the mid-nineteenth century the Utica area was known as a textile manufacturing center and retained this pre-eminence until the textile mills moved south in the mid-twentieth century.

When I was young, the Erie Canal flowed through the center of downtown Utica and several bridges crossed it. Along its banks were scattered warehouses at which the canal boats, pulled by mules or horses, were loaded or unloaded of the merchandise they had hauled from all points along the Albany to Buffalo route. The canal route was cheaper than rail and there was still no through road system to support truck transport. It was at the Genesee Street Bridge crossing over the canal that my Uncle William is presumed to have drowned. According to the Observer newspaper, the body of William K. Miller was taken from the Erie Canal on October 20, l908, a victim of drowning, the police declared, but foul play was not ruled out, because his wallet and his watch were missing.

The Erie Canal in those days was a hazard to pedestrians, wagons and carriages, and as the city had grown enormously since its inception, it was just a matter of time before it would be closed, relocated to a less congested area than the downtown and filled in with soil. While I was growing up, street traffic was always held up while the bridges were raised to give clearance to the barges flowing by on the canal below. It was a diversion for a young lad to watch the barges being drawn through the Schuyler Street lock of the canal by horses walking on the bankside towing path. But by 1917 when the Canal was relocated north of the city and motorized boats replaced the mule-drawn vessels on the new Barge Canal, the romance of barging and the rough and tumble characters disappeared from the scene.

Utica was a beautiful city, noted for its main street, Genesee, whose entire length from downtown past the scores of fine mansions leading to the next town, New Hartford, was lined with towering elm trees which overreached the street and formed a Gothic archway. As a member of the Boy Scouts, I remember being enlisted to help save the elm trees from the ravages of the gypsy moth. By hand we picked off the cocoons, from the tree trunks mainly, because we could not reach the outermost branches, but our efforts were in vain and did not stem the caterpillar infestation.

F. W. Woolworth’s first store was opened in Utica in 1879. Woolworth’s began as a five-cent store and then expanded to sell articles for ten cents. From the merchandising lessons learned in its beginnings in our town, Woolworth’s Five-and-Dime Store became an institution on every American Main Street.

When I was old enough to be trusted not to get lost walking the mile from our house on South Street to Woolworth’s near the busy corner on Genesee, on Saturday mornings I would go to Woolworth’s and buy five cents’ worth of salted peanuts. Five cents’ worth was a generous scoop weighing about a pound, and I would proceed to eat them all. Despite feeling sick from the overdose of those delicious peanuts, I did the same thing all over again the next Saturday.

Not far from Woolworth’s was the Arcade Building where my Uncle John K. Miller had a printing business; next to the Savings Bank on Genesee, my father managed a printing office. If I include my Uncle William (who drowned in the Erie Canal), there were three brothers who were printers on that side of the family. Uncle William had been a compositor in the Government Printing Office in Washington, D. C.

On the other side of the family, my mother’s father, John Wesley Segar, published Utica’s first penny daily newspaper in 1865. In his editorial on the date of first issue, July 1, 1865, he advocated the eight-hour day and hailed the great strides made by the mechanics of our nation. He wrote, in part:

The publisher of this Journal is a mechanic and manufacturer, and in full sympathy with mechanics generally. With Roger Sherman to represent the shoemakers, Benjamin Franklin the printers, and Elihu Burrit the blacksmiths, American mechanics are claiming a place and consideration in society, unprecedented in other countries and in previous ages, and are taking an honorable and influential part in all the great movements of the times.

In about 1907, my father went to Oakland, California on the heels of his brother, John, to look into the possibility of moving there with the entire family. Evidently, he did not find good prospects for work so the plan fell through. While my father decided to return to Utica, Uncle John remained in California, but our families lost touch and we have never heard any news of them from that day to this.

* * * * *

I attended Utica Public Schools and later, high school at the Utica Free Academy. I was a member of a Boy Scout Troop and also joined the Y.M.C.A., where I indulged my interest in sports and in physical education. Eventually, I was asked to join the Cabinet and Leaders Club of the Y.M.C.A. and served as an assistant to the Physical Instructor. In this job, I received calls from some of the knitting mills in the neighboring towns of Clayville and Sauquoit to instruct their physical training classes. For the most part, this meant set-up exercises and games supervision, but a big event for the local boys was a challenge match in wrestling: they would offer their best wrestler in a challenge match with me. Before I’d even had a chance to start my lesson to them, these tough mill-hands wanted to give me a lesson, in wrestling. This seemed a poor way to start my teaching career, but I couldn’t see a way to refuse the challenge to wrestle, without losing face and getting battered and bloodied. I accepted these matches and sometimes I won, but the local boys, I’m sure, were better pleased when I lost.

I was anxious to join the Marines as a bugle boy. I wanted to get into the war effort in 1918, but Clarence, my older brother, had already been called up and my Mother’s response was simply that one boy in the Army was enough. Because of Allied losses in the early stages of World War I and the need to supply more troops in Europe, a program of military instruction was instituted by the New York Military Training Commission. With my physical training experience at the Y, when I was called up, I was a prime candidate for an appointment to the post of Physical Instructor in my regiment. Consequently, I served as both Physical Instructor and Cadet Captain of my company in the Fourth Regiment, Infantry, Corps of Cadets. My training was all done in the Utica Armory and I never left home, unlike my brother, Clarence, who was sent to Europe to fight. My budding military career was cut short by the signing of the peace accords and the end of the war.

My first real job in Utica was with the Mohawk Valley Cap Factory as assistant to the Office Manager. One of my responsibilities was to look up the credit ratings of firms whose orders had been received for caps and underwear. I consulted huge volumes of Dun and Bradstreet and other credit rating sources and marked my findings on the order forms before they were filled. Thus, I helped the company find out how good a new customer would be in paying his bills, before setting the knitting machines to work in filling the order.

In May, 1920 the former Secretary of the Utica Y.M.C.A. asked me if I wanted to come to New York City! He had just been appointed Secretary of the Institute Branch of the Y.M.C.A. on the Bowery in New York and he wanted me to serve as one of his Assistant Secretaries. Thrilled, I accepted without hesitation.

A friend of mine from Utica who visited relatives in New York City had told me about the wonders there: ocean liners as long as city blocks, skyscrapers, parks as long as most cities, the Hudson and the East Rivers, flowing on each side of Manhattan Island, the Battery at the tip of the Island, pointing to the gigantic Statue of Liberty in the harbor, and so on. The prospect of going to work for the Y.M.C.A. was incidental to my decision. The real pull was the desire to see for myself all the marvelous things in New York which had been described by my friend.

CHAPTER TWO

When I first arrived from Utica, I was met at the 125th Street Station of the New York Central Railroad and escorted to the branch of the Y.M.C.A. at 125th street in Harlem, where I stayed for a few days before moving on to my assignment in the Bowery.

Just as today, Harlem has a heavy concentration of blacks, but at the time, 125th Street marked the southernmost boundary of black Harlem. Whether this was a written or unwritten code, the simple fact of it was that in 1920, south of that boundary there were no blacks residing, and north of that line there were no whites. If you were white, it was considered to be worth your life to venture into black Harlem. I did so a few times, figuring that I might have immunity as an employee of the Y which has goals of public service to all races. But I found that the lines were drawn: a street-corner black would call the occasional passing white a poison viper white and whites tossed back the hateful word nigger.

My assignment at the Bowery Y.M.C.A. was not very taxing but it lasted about three months, long enough for me to get my bearings and see the sights of New York City.

The Bowery offered some fascinating spectacles. To see diamond brokers displaying their wares right on the sidewalk from pocket packets of precious stones, amazed me. Cut and un-cut diamonds were sold right then and there to clients who came to this part of the city because it was the traditional market-place for these unset gems. Most types of business had their special venue in New York: wholesalers of jewelry concentrated their business houses on Maiden Lane; stockbrokers plied their trade at addresses near the U.S. Treasury on Wall Street; steamship companies congregated around the Battery, not far from the old Custom House; garment workers were midtown; exotic woods were uptown in the Bronx, and so on.

Just as New York businesses migrated to specific districts that were congenial to them, the Bowery became known as the place where there was a heavy concentration of bums. The police rarely moved them on their way (where would they go?) as they were not considered a threat to public safety. The bums, soused to the gills, sleeping in corners and doorways of vacant buildings during the day, found their way to low-cost lofts at night. Next day, most would resume their panhandling while a few earned some money by casual labor, enough for drink and the next night’s lodging. When some of them would come begging to the Y, we would often stake them to a night’s lodging in one of the Bowery lofts that offered little more than a bed to sleep in. Incidentally, I never heard of a diamond merchant being held up by a Bowery bum.

Problems sometimes occurred, such as the drug users who entered the Y to use our downstairs rest rooms and give themselves a fix, but this was just an occasional nuisance rather than a big deal. In 1920, there was no drug problem, and far from being fashionable (there were no recreational users), drug users were looked upon with disfavor. The stressful society we see about us today had not yet evidenced a need for tranquilizers. The pharmaceutical manufacturers had not yet begun their enticing offerings of ever more powerful pain killers to soothe the ever more distressful headache. Some theories connect the casual use of so many pain killers today to the eventual need for the big fix.

At the end of three months, I had become thoroughly disenchanted with Y.M.C.A. work. Stevenson, one of the older Secretaries who had chosen the Y.M.C.A. as his career and gotten stuck at the Institute Branch where I worked, thought it no place for a young man like me, and he told me so. He had a relative, Eddie Schumann, who worked in the Accounting Department at the Standard Oil Company, and Stevenson arranged for me to meet him. Eddie Schumann introduced me to the head of the department and in no time I was offered a job with the West India Oil Company, an affiliate of Standard Oil, as a Safeguard Ledger Clerk. I was more than pleased to accept.

On August 3, 1920 (I remember the date without hesitation), I began my long career with Standard Oil. For a few days only I worked at the handsome 26 Broadway building in the heart of lower Manhattan. Walking through the lobby doors of this building was always a pleasure. At the lower floors, the facade has a proud Renaissance-style base with the appearance of cut stone, curved to match the curve of Broadway. But instead of following the curve of the base of the building, the tower floors above are squared to follow the uptown skyline of New York which has an east-west orientation. Unfortunately, the building was undergoing a major face-lifting, and so I was transported along with the entire Accounting Section to 44 Beaver Street, just around the corner.

As a fledgling accountant at Standard Oil, I learned to use the so-called Safeguard Ledger, touted as a self-balancing, mistake-proof volume. It was a huge, heavy, leather-bound volume of many pages to accommodate the numerous accounts of the consignment agencies in South and Central America and the West Indies which handled company products, mainly gasoline, kerosene and lubricating oils. Gasoline was delivered either in 50-gallon drums or in ten-gallon tins. Because the drums were made of heavy-gauge steel and cost more than their contents, they were returnable to the refineries and had to be accounted for separately. The ten-gallon tins were sold with their contents but these were not wasted either. In South and Central America, their purchasers used them later as water containers, or flattened them and applied them as siding or roofing to their houses.

The consignment account papers that came to my desk were written most often in English, although some were in French and Spanish. There were agencies in Tegucigalpa, San Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, Managua, San Jose, Fort-de-France, St. Lucia, Port of Spain, Barbados, Point-a-Pitre, Camaguey, Barahona, Habana; just reading these names was stuff to dream on. Rarely was the monthly accounting report typewritten, but reading the different languages in the accompanying handwritten letters was exciting, even in their mundane detail, to someone interested in Latin America as I was. The expressions were quite different from commercial phrases used in American transactions. For instance, the agencies that wrote in Spanish would qualify their accounts by adding a footnote, S.e.u.o., an abbreviation for Salvo error u omisión (error or omission excepted). The closing of their letters bore the initials S.S.S., for Su seguro servidor (your sure servant), which is a variation on Your obedient servant, but it sounds more intriguing in Spanish.

If we had a question to ask an agency, to clarify an accounting report or correct a discrepancy, we wrote our inquiry on an Inquiry Memorandum with an indelible pencil. Space was provided on the memorandum for the agency’s reply (which was also written in indelible pencil) so that when it was complete, the whole story of the transaction was right before us. The reason that everything was handwritten in indelible pencil was that the agencies all had copybooks in which to record the messages, which could be tranferred to the copybook page by moistening the memo. Voila, the agencies had their permanent record in purple ink. For our part, once the question was answered, we discarded the whole communication. What a simple way to conduct a correspondence, without the need for a secretary to type it, the boss to sign it, or a clerk to file it!

Towards the end of the pay period, my funds would often run low and I could not afford even my modest Coffee House so I had to be content with the Exchange Buffet’s fare. The Exchange Buffet was a unique eating place where one stood at various elevated counter spaces to eat a sandwich or a bowl of soup which cost nickels and dimes. Even with a dessert, the cost was under a dollar. The way we paid was to sing out to the cashier on the way out the total amount of our bill. The only check on this honor system was a spotter who would roam around the place and take note of what certain people were eating so that he could correct anybody who called out a false number to the cashier. Fear of being spotted caused most people to be honest. Eating at the Buffet took only ten or fifteen minutes, leaving the bulk of lunch hour for exploring.

Frequently, I would walk to the Battery and the aquarium. After it ceased to be a military Battery and before it was used as an aquarium, Jenny Lind sang here.

Another good place to visit on my lunch hour was the Curb Exchange to watch the brokers’ clerks signal from the second floor of the building to their counterparts on the street below. This was the floor, so to speak, where the trading was done, but it was all a mystery to me. I really never learned how the trading was accomplished. Could an ordinary person like myself just go up to one of the traders on the street and say, Hey, good buddy, buy me one hundred shares of AT&T at 10, or, Sell my Standard Oil stock when it goes down to 100? I presume I would have had to go to a broker’s office somewhere and put in an order. But in those days I had no interest in actually buying stocks, just a curiosity about them. I had no money to spare, especially just before pay-day, when my pocket money was down to the point where coffee and doughnuts were the order of the day.

Horn and Hardarts Automat was a great place for a cup of coffee and an experience in what today would be called fast food. A cup of coffee cost a nickel. For another nickel or two, one could help oneself to a succession of dishes: baked beans, hot, in individual brown crocks (specialty of the house), doughnuts or other pastries, a slice of pie, a chicken or ham and cheese sandwich, or a small salad. One inserted one’s coins into a slot beside the desired item on display behind a little window, turned a knob, and the latch was released on the brass frame of the compartment door. One reached in and served oneself. It was said that a tramp could go to Horn and Hardart’s and for the nickel he had just cadged, get a cup of coffee, fill it to the brim with sugar and stoke up enough energy to last the day. I myself never tried it because I never got quite that low.

Concerts, trips to the museums, organ recitals at Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street, and at Wanamakers’ when shopping on Saturday, long walks all the way from the Battery to midtown, or midtown to Harlem, movies at a City of New York free theatre, visits to parks, cricket, soccer and baseball games, Goldman’s Band on the Mall, all were part of my entertainment program during the five years I stayed in New York. I knew most of the free shows and lectures and the best time to get a reduced rate at the theatres: for example, at the Radio City Music Hall or the Capitol Theatre, arriving just before 6 p.m., you could get in before they changed to the evening rates.

One of my favorite places to eat Sunday dinner was the top floor restaurant of the Hotel Therese, just a couple of blocks south of the 125th Street Y. Here was my idea of elegance, good food served on fine china with real silver place settings, a fabulous view of Central Park and the city to the south, and a clientele of good solid citizens. I understand that the Hotel Therese is in shambles today. It was already on its way out twenty years ago when Fidel Castro and his entourage of Cuban aides camped there, using the hotel’s rooms not only for sleeping, but for roasting their own chickens and eating them right there, too.

At one time I rented a room in an apartment on Riverside Drive and 109th Street, not far from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. While this was a very good address, I considered that there were too many arty characters around and all I wanted was a comfortable room with a bed, chair and desk and respectable neighbors. When I answered an ad and arrived at 27 West 95th Street, I found a large, three-story brownstone house owned by a couple named Titzell. The Titzells needed only the ground floor and basement for their own residence and they rented out the two top floors. I installed myself gratefully on the third floor. I think the Titzells were of German extraction as they prepared Philadelphia scrapple for Sunday breakfast and invited me on occasion. This was as much of a treat as the German keeklies my mother made back home in Utica.

Being a member of the A.A.U. (American Athletic Union), I did a bit of running in track and field events around New York City. My event was usually the mile race, and I trained by running around the reservoir in Central Park, a gorgeous run, where one’s view of the skyscrapers of the city is constantly framed in the foreground by a curtain of dense park forest. Sometimes our team trained on the Columbia University track at Baker Field.

At one point, my dentist, a medical officer in the Old 69th Regiment of the New York National Guard, induced me to join the regiment. I was in Company D (Machine Guns) under the command of my friend, Captain Kelly, who made me his Supply Sergeant. Since I was an accountant, Captain Kelly figured I could help keep better track of the equipment, some of which had been disappearing after every full-dress review. Invariably, we would come up with one short of the full supply of 45-caliber pistols, even with a couple of lieutenants checking the guns back in after each review.