Our house was half way between the Pulaski Heights Grammer / Junior High School complex and the trolley line on Kanvanaugh St.. I can't think of a better place to grow up. Pine street was on a hill of about 10 or 15 degrees slope. As a child, it seemed more like a 45 degree slope. It was a great hill for scooters, skates and bikes. This was a very stable neighborhood. People were just not as mobile then as they are today. With few exceptions, the same people lived in the houses on the street when I left home at seventeen as they did when I was very little. On our side of the street, running from North to South, were seven houses, a vacant lot and a Drug store/apartment building. Across the street were seven houses on larger lots. The vacant lot on our side was always called, "The old Hollow". It was pronounced "Holler". It was a great place to play. The vacant lot was level near the street but dropped off sharply just past a very climbable gum tree. We had a bag swing hanging from a large oak tree which swung out over the lowest part of the Old Hollow. Many's the hour we spent there taking turns on the swing. More than once the rope broke at the apex of the swinging arc sending the victim to a spine numbing stop. The Old Holler was loaded with big oak trees. Acorns were plentiful and made great ammunition for bean shooters. We'd fill our pockets with them and have wars. We didn't shoot at each other with the bean shooters but we did chunk them at one another. I'm not sure "chunk" is a word that is used these days. It means "to throw". Maybe its a word that Mabel taught me or possibly just a Southern word. The drugstore at the corner of the block was right across the street from the Junior High School front door. Alva Love Shovan lived in the house next to the Old Holler. Just North of the Shovan's lived the Jones'. They didn't have any kids. Next came the Robinsons and their three daughters; Mary Jane, Ruth and Betty Lou. Betty Lou was the youngest of the three girls and about Edward's age. Our house was next.

Home for My First Seventeen Years

Just to the north of us was Dr. Whitney's house. He died when I was quite little but I remember him. He delivered Edward in our back bedroom. His sister, Miss Bushnell, lived in the house after his death for a while but then the house was rented out. A number of families lived in the house after that. There was the Links famly with their three little boys; Carey, Watson and Cabanny. I'm not sure of that last spelling. The kids I remember best were the Stricklands. They had four kids. Virginia was the oldest. She was a pretty girl. She used to take sun baths out her backyard. She'd hang up blankets between the clothes lines and make a "private" place to do her sunning. It was rumored that she was in there naked but I never did verify that. I thought about it a lot. Next in line came Gene. After Gene was Bill and I can't remember the youngest boy's name. Mr. Strickland was a snuff salesman. He sold Dental Sweet snuff and Scotch snuff. He had lots of boxes of samples in his garage but I never was tempted to taste the nasty stuff. We use to sneak a few of the samples, pour out the snuff and substitute cocoa and sugar for the snuff. It was fun to play like we were "dipping". We would also throw real snuff on each other sometimes. Great sport! There was a large empty room over their garage where we played. It was open to all the kids in the neighborhood. It was kind of like a club house for us. When Dr. Whitney was alive, he used to do a lot of gardening. Right between our houses was a long line of fig trees. I never could develop a taste for figs but the trees were prolific. Right at Dr. Whitney's back door was a beautiful plum tree. It smelled so good when in blossum and I liked the plums. Back by the alley was a mulberry tree. I didn't like mulberrys either but the basket worms sure did.

The next house up the street was where Bobby Clift lived. Bobby was a bright kid and we were best friends all the way through Junior High School. Bobby's dad was dead and his mom worked down town for her brother, Dr. Livingston --- an optometrist. Bobby was what folks today would call a latch-key kid. We hungout at his house a lot. They had a big two story house. The Clifts lived upstairs and rented out the downstairs to a Mr. and Mrs. Spears who had no children. Bobby loved to draw. He spent hours making up stories and drawing action pictures like comic strips. He had tons of comic books. I think he used to steal them from the drug store. Toward the end of Junior high school, Bobby and I drifted apart. I started hanging out with girls and Bobby got into shop lifting. He got pretty bad. I don't ever remember seeing him in high school. By that time we traveled in a totally different groups. Several years ago, I got a telephone call from another neighborhood friend, Chuck Germmer, telling me that Bobby had become an alcoholic and couldn't keep a job. He died at a fairly young age. I remember the last time I ever saw Bobby. I was working for Dad and Bobby was a teller at Worthen's Bank. He never did make it as a commercial artist but he did submit cartoons to Trade Magazines with limited success. His sister, Ellen, was a tomboy. She wound up marrying a cowboy and followed the rodeo circuit for years.

The last house on our side of the street was orignally owned by the Robinson family until they moved in next door to us. The Tipton family bought the house from the Robinsons and started up a Florist Shop on the property. Across the street lived the Sprages, the Newberns, the Hefners, the Scholums, the Coxs, the Roarks and the Cruthurds. Mr. Cruthurd was a strange man with a "slow" child named Billy. Billy looked just like the boy in the movie, "Deliverance" who played played "Dualing Banjos". Mr. Cruthuds was my Jr. High shop teacher. I was afraid of him and never did like him. He gave me "D" in shop.

We had the run of the whole neighborhood. I spent a lot of time in the homes of the Newberns, Scholums, Coxs and Roarks. Summer evenings were so much fun. The air would cool down and all the neighhood kids would gather after supper and play games. Hide and seek, kick the can, hopscotch, sling the statue, dodge ball, devil in the ditch and lots of others. In the daytime we made mud pies, played jacks and did handicrafts. We made all kinds of toys. Stilts, skate wheel scooters, rubber guns, bean shooters, weaving spools, sail boats and bird traps, to name a few. Summer was a wonderful time. The day school let out for summer, we'd take off our shoes and shirts on the way home and not put them on again until fall.

I didn't get a bike until my sixth Christmas but I had learned to ride Edward's while he was in school. He had a small 24 inch bike that he had bought with his own money. My bike was a "Latonia". Tom Mix was a big cowboy star about then and his horse's name was Tony. It was only natural for my bike to be named "Tony". It didn't take me long to strip the fenders off of it and turn the handle bars upside down. I guess you'd call it "tricking out" your bike. We'd also take pop bottle caps and mount them on the spokes of the wheels by removing the cork liner and then reinserting the cork in the cap around a spoke. It made the wheels look pretty fancy.

Living only a half a block from the huge playground at the school, we never were at a loss for a place to play soft ball, fly kites or play on the school seesaws and monkey bars. Colonial St. ran north and south parallel to the school grounds. It was a steep hill over two blocks long. When it snowed, the street would be blocked off and we would slide down it on our ho-made sleds. I never owned a store-bought sled but mine worked just fine.