I HAD an inquiry from Dick Norton as to the fact that I went to the University of Michigan, which I did. And there I had an English professor who said, “You get more attentive audiences with an attention-getting topic.”   The title of what I’m going to talk about tonight was sort of thrust on me at one of the Cobleskill Historical Society Board of Directors meetings. We were joking around with topics and “notorious sinners and other colorful characters” sort of popped out. It stuck with me. But it must’ve been a good thing because looking at the crowd tonight, I see that most of the sinners are here and some of you are also quite colorful. I hope none of you are expecting deep dark history tonight. I’m going to approach this from my life’s experience and relate it to people and happenings in the Cobleskill area from the date of my birth until the time I went into the army.

First, I have here something that you may want to look at later. It’s Dr. John Beard’s day book from January 1, 1925, to May 1, 1929, with all the people he saw and what he charged them for this and that. On the second day of July, 1925, it’s noted that Schuyler Hills, who was my father, was charged $25.00, presumably for my delivery because that’s the day I was born. My father in later years said that was the worst day, and $25.00, he ever spent.

My first recollections date from 6 Park Place, the first house past the creek on Park Place. We lived upstairs. My first memory of almost anything there was a plumber’s shop run by a gentleman named Andy Finn at 4 Park Place.

Andy Finn lived upstairs over the plumber’s shop and had a parrot that sat on a perch upon the front porch next to the sidewalk. The parrot had apparently been owned by a sailor at one time and was really quite colorful in language. It scandalized my grandmother terribly. She would not walk past Andy Finn’s front porch if the parrot were out.

I’m going to wander about the streets as if I were about five years old, and relate what I remember from that time.

In that same building with Finn’s shop, and just to the left, was the town clerk’s office and in between was the Ford garage run by Fleming and Morrison. Next was John Stacy (now the Bull’s Head Inn). One of the first recollections I have of the Stacy house is that they were stuccoing it. I remember sitting up there as a small child, watching them put the stucco on the sides of this house and playing with small handfuls of rocks and pebbles or whatever they put in stucco.

Then the next thing up the line is the Park theater and whenever I see the Park theater, the thing that strikes my memory are the little boxes of candy they used to pass out at the Christmas movie. And the thing I remember more about the little boxes of candy than anything else, especially even more than the candy, was the little woven string handle over the top of the box and that generally one staple was tight and the other very loose, and all of a sudden the string handle would give way and the candy would spill!   On the other side of South Grand Street, on the south side of Main Street, was the Schaeffer grocery store run by a nice couple, Frank and Stella Barner. Frank was the son of Chester Barner who owned Barner’s farm. The thing I remember there was the counter, and one of those large-wheel coffee grinders. It’s strange to me how many of my recollections are triggered by smells. I can still remember the smell of the grinding of coffee in that large coffee mill.

I don’t remember much of what was next until we get up to Nick Panos’s store, which was called Candyland. For some reason or another my mother was prejudiced against people of Greek descent. She thought Nick Panos’s place was not sanitary and I was forbidden to eat anything that came from there. I tell you, as a young child I managed to go inside, and was awed by the look and smell of Nick Panos’s. It was all those mirrors behind the counter, and overhead fans, and this heavenly aroma of all the confections and whatever else was there. Nick had a daughter who was a dancer. I remember her name was Elaine and she gave lessons in the dance.

Then up the street a little way was another thing I remember, J.V.S. Eldredge’s grocery store. The thing I remember there, out of all the things in that store, was the fact that on the top shelf were items such as soap in boxes and Quaker Oats, and the thing (whatever you called it) that was used to reach up and pull down a box. If you were really handy you didn’t have to pull it, you just touched it and then caught it.

Next to that was Clark’s variety store. It must’ve been that I was a trustworthy little child at five or six years of age because my mother used to send me up there for things she needed, basically thread and notions. Apparently it was safe for a small child to walk the streets in those days. I remember notions used to cover a whole bunch of stuff. I always had a little list. I was always told as a child, when I was in that store and Newberry’s, to always walk with your hands behind you. There were two reasons for that — so they wouldn’t think you were stealing anything, and so you wouldn’t inadvertently knock anything off a counter.

Next was Joe Mitterer’s meat market. Of all the things I did there, I remember going up to get hamburger at two pounds for twenty-five cents, and soup bones. Why I remember those two things, of all the errands I was sent out to do, is a mystery. The thing I remember most from there are small boxes of Blue Ribbon potato chips that cost a nickel. We used to have those whenever we went on a class picnic, or something where we had to take our own lunches with us. To me, it was a thrill to have this little box of Blue Ribbon potato chips.

Getting back to 6 Park Place, people by the name of Osterhout lived downstairs. Next-door upstairs was Miss Grace Eaton, who was a teacher. You may remember her. Downstairs was a lady I only remember by her name because it was so unusual, Zula Martin. I don’t remember anything else about her excepting her name.

Next door was Jay Cross, who had been a grocer in times before and who was then the landlord for almost all the properties on Park Place. I also remember that on every Wednesday night, the bell rang at the Baptist church for prayer meeting. I could always tell when it was Wednesday.

Across the park we went over to Shafer’s market and I used to go over to Doc Stilson’s on the north side of Main Street. He had French doors in the front part of his shop and in good weather, he would sit there with the doors open and pass the time with everyone who walked up and down the street. The other thing I remember about Doc Stilson’s was that right next-door, by the creek, was the world’s largest horse chestnut tree. In the fall we used to collect the horse chestnuts and put them in sugar bags. What we ever did with them, I have no idea, but I’m sure somewhere in my collection I have horse chestnuts that date from the 1930s.

I have some other odd memories from that period which I can’t really equate with anything, but which are of peculiar things. Do you remember the card you used to have to put in the window for ice, which had the numbers 10, 25, 50 and 100, and you turned it in whichever direction to indicate to the iceman how much ice to deliver? You also put a card in your window when you had dry cleaning, and the cleaner appeared and met you at the door. I must’ve awakened in the night occasionally for I can remember that at either 1 or 2 in the morning, the streetlights were turned out. I’m sure they were saving electricity, and you could always tell if it were before or after the 2:00 o’clock hour by whether the streetlights were on or off.

The first thing I remember about school was kindergarten at the building that is now the Cobleskill library. The thing I recall most is that Miss Alfreda Golding **(1) played the piano and they had a kindergarten band. I always wanted to play the cymbal, but I was always stuck with the damned triangle. Other marginal memories from that time include the garbage man, Hiram Spooner, who drove an old Model T truck.    Things that sort of drift in and out of my mind are things like Gypsies, who appeared from time to time. You were supposed to be afraid of being stolen by the Gypsies but I never knew anyone who was actually stolen by them. I do remember street musicians though, during the Depression years. People with accordions playing on Main Street, or somebody with a grind organ or other entertainment appearing, apparently trying to earn some money and then moving on. I remember also there were tramps and my grandmother always swore the tramps had some way to mark the houses so they knew where to stop to get something to eat and where not to stop — where they would be abused.

I can remember they had paperboys who sold extras. From somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind (I think the circumstance was the Lindberg baby being kidnapped), I remember people on the street yelling “extra, extra” for that particular issue of the paper.

I came down with childhood tuberculosis contracted from milk that was not well pasteurized, and of course back in those days the only treatment for tuberculosis was fresh air. So my father built a little camp across Mineral Springs Road from where the knitting mill is now, up on Donat’s Mountain on the hill next to the wood line. When I was a child, our family stayed there excepting in the deepest winter months, when we would come back to Park Place. This continued for two and one-half years.

I can remember people walking from Mickle Hollow over Donat’s Mountain, coming diagonally on a path down the face of the mountain, and going up South Grand Street to Cobleskill. In the evening, they would go back the other direction. There was a lady who walked over the mountain who, according to my mother, was named Whitestockings. I never knew who she was or where she lived, but my mother would always say, “There goes Whitestockings again.”  

About the time I went into fourth grade, we moved to 40 South Grand Street (the house right next to the fairgrounds). The thing I remember distinctly is that it was a two-family house which had a common attic. The two people who used to run the Schaeffer store, Frank Barner and his wife Stella, lived in the side of the house next to the fairgrounds. There was no division in the attic and the Barners’ son, Don, had appropriated the whole attic floor for his model trains, which were Lionel standard gauge trains, and he had an extensive layout of them. I was so envious of that, that I couldn’t see straight. Everything evened out, because on the other side of the coin, his father had some attraction to alcohol. The cellar was divided with boards, Frank had a couple of bathtubs on his side and would make some sort of alcoholic beverage in them, and you could smell it through the wall. This was probably just after Prohibition, 1934-1935, and may have been a holdover due to personal economics. My mother, being a teetotaler, wouldn’t even go down cellar when they were making beverage there.

Next door up toward the railroad tracks was Mr. A.B. Ryder and Katherine Ryder. Across the street diagonally was where Dr. Wadsworth, the veterinarian, lived. The one thing I remember about his house was his son John, who was in college at that time (either in pre-med or in medical school), would come home in the summertime with college companions and they would play badminton on the side lawn wearing only sneakers and shorts. That scandalized my mother and grandmother. You can’t believe that would be so terrible just that short a time in the past.

Next door to Dr. Wadsworth, there was a nice gentleman named Mr. Williams. I have no idea what he had done or what he did. I remember him as a little pink-faced man who was very polite, very considerate and nice to everyone including small children.

To the left, where the Extension building is, (back to my recollections of smell) we had the G.L.F. agricultural supply store in half of a large building and Jay Cole’s lumberyard in the other side, and both of those were dominated by the smell of feed and molasses and grinding in the mill and, in the lumberyard, the smell of lumber. I was in the fourth grade, nine or ten years old, and Clyde Cole, Jay Cole’s son, drove the lumber truck. Every once in a while I would be invited to go with him with a load of lumber, hither and yon. Sometimes we even left the county for some place like Grand Gorge, the equivalent today of a trip to the moon.

Living that close to the Cobleskill fairgrounds, you could, as a small child, walk into the fair at any time and there would be no danger to you. I remember the strangest things about happenings on the fairgrounds. To the left to the fancy building ** (2) was a .22-caliber shooting gallery, and I was entranced by it. One could knock metal targets over or shoot through holes and make bells ring, and I just loved that. Another thing that fascinated me as a small child was the penny arcade. I don’t know if you remember a penny arcade, but they had things called Mutoscopes, machines where you could just put in a penny and turn the crank and see an imitation movie produced by cards flipping. Of course, you always had that crane with which you would grab something and, at the last minute before it went down the chute into your possession, the object would fall off. I also remember the wrestling sideshow at the fairgrounds. They always had someone named the “Masked Marvel” in the tent who would take on all comers. I remember Gypsy fortune tellers, too. I don’t think those exist at all anymore at fairs. One of the saddest things I ever saw at the fair was one of the attractions where they had someone stick his head through a canvas and people threw baseballs at him. There was an African-American gentleman by the name of Stormy Hilts who used to perform that duty. After I got older and thought back on that, I thought how cruel that must have been, because I will tell you, the people throwing baseballs at that gentleman were not lobbing the ball, they were cranking it. How people could do things like that is odd, but it happened.

On a lighter note, among the other things I recall was a glass blower in the fancy building and they did some great glass blowing work. I would stand there for hours watching that. These attractions seemed to be in the same place every year.

As you got near the midway, there were people with glass cutters who, with no effort at all, would cut fancy designs in glass trying to con you into buying one of the cutters which, when you got home, wouldn’t cut a stick of butter. One thing I remember about the glasscutters is that they would cut a spiral and the demonstrator would pick it up by the center section and the glass would separate into a descending coil.

And, do you remember the bird on the stick, which had the revolving feathers in the tail? There was also a group of people who sold a little aluminum thing consisting of two small saucer-shaped pieces joined together in clam-shell fashion, into which you hummed, and it was called a Hum-a-Tune. There was a group of three gentlemen who sold these things. One of them played a very small white piano and the other gentlemen worked the crowd playing the Hum-a-Tunes. I never hear the march, “Under the Double Eagle,” without being transported back to this time and place. I once went to a show in New York City called “Olsen and Johnson’s Hellzapoppin.” I went to the lobby during intermission and, son of a gun! Here were two of these same gentlemen, the one with the small white piano and the other with a Hum-a-Tune. I asked them if they ever played the Cobleskill fair and one of them replied, “I haven’t thought of Cobleskill in 15 years.” They were the same people.

I remember two things about the grandstand. During the performances in front of the grandstand, they always had a military-type band playing on the sub-stage. Under the grandstand, they generally had one of the local pancake flour mills giving away pancakes with maple syrup and butter served on little cardboard plates. If the pancake distributors weren’t too busy, a small child could keep going around, getting pancakes.

After the fair was over, those who lived close by were always looking for lost goodies. They had wooden bleachers, and you could crawl around on the ground hoping that somebody had dropped change out of their pockets when they were getting up and down out of their seats, and sometimes they had.

The first time I went back to school after I had TB, I was enrolled in the fourth grade in Lark Street school and I can remember the school desks still had ink wells and you dipped your pen in the ink well. I can remember spending hours doing Palmer method circles and lines. That, with a straight pen, was a difficult exercise to do. Some of the memorable teachers that I remember were Mrs. McNeil, and Cecil Bliss, a short red-haired lady who had a mind of her own.

I remember a boy named Charles Terpening in our class. He was sort of a recalcitrant student. (He eventually went on into the Navy and was killed in World War II in the same battle in which the five Sullivan brothers were killed. For a while, I thought he had been on that same ship, but one of his relatives later told me that he wasn’t on that ship, just in the same battle. Charlie was not an easy learner and he used to bait Cecil Bliss terribly. Miss Bliss would go back and grab him by the hair, yank him out of his seat, and boom, boom, boom. Charlie wasn’t so dumb. He got a Mohawk haircut. Cecil Bliss had nothing to grab on, so Charlie was grabbed by an ear. By the time he got out of the sixth grade he looked like a Buick sedan going down the street with both rear doors open.

Clyde Jones’s father was the janitor there. I can remember how that gentleman instilled respect for working people by his actions in that school. In the performance of his janitorial services, he was always dressed neatly and treated his duties with skill and willingness.

On the way back and forth from the school on Lark Street, we went up Union Street past Tinklepaugh Brothers, where they sold cars. Then, you could go in behind the buildings and see what the stores threw away into the alley. Sometimes, what the stores on Main Street threw away was very fascinating. Occasionally you would find a soda bottle with a deposit on it and you could make a little money there. If you went on Main Street (I used to go on the side over by Newberry’s) the Victory store had a gentleman whom everyone in Schoharie County knew, Willie Jay Hamm. I think if Willie Jay had left the Victory store, it would have closed its doors.

I remember going into Newberry’s and finding Big Little Books and Tootsie Toys, and they had a candy case about thirteen miles long. They had Rockwood chocolate in it, great big chunks of it.

Then, I would normally go down Division Street. The first place I stopped was Bradner’s, another “smell” place, with the smell of leather and canvas but I sometimes had an ulterior motive. They used to give away little sample cans of BPS paint in various colors. Once every month or so, I would stop and get a little sample paint in a different color and go home and paint all my metal toys. I probably ruined (at today’s prices) two or three thousand dollars worth of antique toys by painting them with 40 coats of BPS paint.

To the right of Bradner’s was Loy’s, a stationery store. The one thing I remember about that was that you could rent books from there for a whole week for five cents. That’s where I became enamored of Zane Grey westerns and Edgar Rice Burroughs books. On down the street was Mike Tanner’s print shop. You could smell the ink from the street. He had the press sitting right in the middle of the room and if you were quiet you could stand there and watch him print. I really enjoyed that.

Next to that was Shay’s bakery where my uncle, Alonzo Parslow, was one of the bakers. The thing I remember from there is that, for some reason or other, people took their Thanksgiving turkeys to the baker’s to bake in their ovens. Then you came and picked up your turkey, which you took home to your dinner table. Uncle Alonzo came back from World War I with a German war bride, which in Cobleskill was sort of unusual. My mother never forgave my uncle for marrying the German because her English was so broken my mother claimed she could never understand a word the woman was saying.

The Times-Journal was next. On the side of the building toward the railroad tracks, they used to throw out little type slugs. I don’t know why they threw them away; they were type metal. I still have some of those. Next-door was the Commercial Hotel. The only thing I remember about that, other than it being deserted, was a little shop on the first corner you reached past the Times-Journal. It was run by a man named “Ginger” Eilenberger who, I think, sold cigars. I have a small business sized card, on rather poor orange colored paper, which says “Ginger Eilenberger,” “Bon Vivant” and “Man of the Year for 1939.” (He was passing them out in 1939.)   I used to go down to the railroad station, mainly to stop and watch the telegrapher who sat in the front window, next to the railroad tracks, and I would stand there for hours while he sent and received messages. It was amazing to watch him, and to listen to the click of the sounder.

Now, I’ll tell you about two sinners. I’ll be a sinner and Doug Aker will be the other sinner. Off to the left of the railroad station, in those days, there was a turntable. It was there to turn around the engine that went to Cherry Valley on the Cherry Valley line.

In those days, the headlight was only on one end and in order to go to Cherry Valley, it had to be turned in a different direction. In use, people moved it and there were two handles on each end of this turntable, so that you could push it around. So Doug Aker and I, when we were about ten or eleven years old with nothing else to do, wanted to see if we could move this turntable. We could and did.

Unfortunately, we got the turntable moving quite rapidly. On one side of this turntable between the tracks was a lozenge-shaped piece of metal hooked to a lever to lock the turntable to the tracks so that when the engine was coming on, nothing would happen. So I said to Doug, “When it comes around, see if you can throw the lever and see if it stops the turntable.”   Well, this probably would never happen again in a million years, but he hit it absolutely perfectly and it locked between the rails and the rails went this way and Hills and Aker went that way. The next week they had more railroad cops in town than you can imagine. We never got caught, and this is the first time I’ve ever told that story in public. I hope the statute of limitations has expired.

There were many things to intrigue a small boy. On South Grand Street, there was a street level railroad crossing with gates and a little shanty. A man sat in it and pumped the gates up and down when the train passed. Nearby, I could watch them cut the gravestones at Smith Brothers’ monuments. I can relate that to the smell of the chisel on the stone. I used to go over and watch them load the coal trucks at Cobleskill Coal. Once again, the smell: wet coal.

Do you remember the days of coal chutes that used to go down into your basement and sometimes the trucks couldn’t get close enough to the chutes and the guys would carry canvas bags of coal and dump them in the chutes?   I am a born scavenger. Up between the Park theater and the Snow White laundry, the Park theater had a trash bin and they used to throw out things that were trash to them, but were precious to me. There were lobby cards that were pieces of cardboard, sometimes actual lobby photos. Occasionally, when a film broke, they would splice it there at the theatre and cut off the end pieces of film to make it match well and throw these ends away, so I had a collection of one frame from several movies. I still have those somewhere.

Sometimes when I went down across the railroad tracks, I went down Brookside. In the fall, you’d get an aroma from the cider mill that was there, on Florence Street across the creek.

We moved to Mineral Springs in 1937, still in the town of Cobleskill. From here on, I’ll relate more to the people I met in Mineral Springs.

Across the street from me was a farm owned by Herman Wilday. I got to meet a very unique gentleman who had no permanent place to live and just shuffled from relative to relative, staying with them until he’d seen enough or worn out his welcome or whatever. Apparently in those days this was not unusual. His name was Uncle Abe Mattice. Everybody called him Uncle Abe. He was a cooper, a barrel maker, and boy, did I love to watch Uncle Abe cooper. Every place he went, he brought his tool chest. Coopers had very specialized planes, and chisels and things of that nature. He was quite old at that time and didn’t get into any fancy coopering. He made a lot of tubs.

Another notorious person was Floyd Lawyer. He used to be called Fat Lawyer. He had a brother, Lloyd Lawyer. The one thing I remember about Floyd was that after a day in the summer when he’d been in the hay fields, all of us would go over to the Cobleskill swimming pool. Floyd could float so only the back pad of his back was in the water. He was just like a whale and all his hay chaff would cover the surface of the swimming pool.

As I said, the people across the street were named Wilday. The wife’s name was Claire Wilday and she was a “healer.” She had, by reputation, electricity in her hands. People came to her to have arthritic conditions and things of that nature treated, and apparently it worked. People kept coming back.

We had a parade of people routinely pass through Mineral Springs on their way to Cobleskill from the hinterlands. When I say the hinterlands, I mean the high ground of Greenbush and Patria. Mrs. Stanton, the mail lady from Patria, came through every other day. There was a gentleman named Mr. Snow who came through from Patria too. Jokes were more routine in those days, not quite as expansive. Somebody in the middle of August would always say, “I saw snow in the road today.”   A fellow named George Mickel lived in Patria, too. George had a love for John Barleycorn. I think it was on Thursday that they had auctions at the Cobleskill Sales stables. George always went to the auctions. He’d go over to the American hotel and get thoroughly ossified. He’d get in his wagon and the horse would take him all the way home through Mineral Springs, up Greenbush Hill, over to Patria, to George’s house. The horse would stand there patiently in his driveway until George was sober enough to realize he was home and unhitch the horse.

George had a daughter who’s name, I think, was Phyllis. She rode horseback and I can remember times she rode her horse through Mineral Springs. She always rode looking over her shoulder. I never could tell if she were looking to see if someone were following her or whether she was watching to make sure traffic didn’t overtake her. She was an excellent horsewoman. In those days, they had something at the Cobleskill fair called the Schoharie County free-for-all. This was a saddle horse race with no particular qualifications and no entry fee. She entered one day and won it. After that, they eliminated it as a mixed event: You had to be a male.

Something else that was unique in those days, that the Health Department wouldn’t allow nowadays: Kilts and Sidney used to run a little refrigerated truck from Schoharie which passed through to Mineral Springs. It came every Friday and I can still remember the taste of the hot dogs that my mother would buy from that little van.

We went to school on a bus, of course, and we bicycled to town for various activities like the Boy Scouts and things of that nature.

In those days, the Park theater put out handbills at each and every house in Cobleskill and a few of us were hired occasionally, just to go around and put out handbills. The guy who was in charge of that type activity was also the projectionist, I think. My mind is a little hazy but I’m sure his name was Stubby Lyons. We would get in Stubby’s car and go to places like Worcester and Schenevus and Central Bridge to pass out handbills and put up what were called one-sheets, movie advertisements. For all that, we’d get a free ticket to a movie.

On Main Street, you can’t forget Hoagland’s Pharmacy. Vebber Hoagland falls into my sinners’ category, a little bit. He was also a John Barleycorner. He would on occasion, at night, park his car on the sidewalk in front of his store. They used to sell firecrackers and fireworks of all sorts on long tables, right in the center of Hoagland’s. One Fourth of July night, Vebber had been celebrating at the United States Hotel and went back and got someone to assist him. They carried a fireworks table out under the stoplight at Main and Grand streets and set the thing off. It was a display that would be outstanding, even today.

There was a pool hall above Morlang’s meat market, run by a guy named Johnny Seeger. He had a crippling form of arthritis and ran a class establishment. He did not brook any foolishness by teenage boys or older men or anyone  at all. John could come up to you and grab you by the arm and it was like being caught in a vise. Once you were in the talons of Johnny, you got religion quickly.

I used to get my hair cut at “the corner in the middle of the block” **(3) across the street. Mayor Earl Karker held forth, cutting hair. He had a barber with him named Harold Goings, who had a daughter named Alfreda who danced. She did the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” so I’ve heard.

A Mr. Humphrey, who had been a pharmacist, used to walk around collecting coal on the railroad tracks, in the middle of the winter. He would just wear a white shirt, no tie, buttoned all the way up to the neck. He was a marvelous gentleman in his unique ways.

Above Jansen’s drug store, on the second or third floor, was an antique dealer named Phoebe Sherman. Mr. Sherman lived there with her. As Boy Scouts, we would sit on Jansen’s steps after Scout meetings and yell up the stairs to Phoebe Sherman, “Phoebe, Phoebe,” imitating the bird’s call. Phoebe would open the window and yell, “You boys get out of here!”   Do you remember Reverend John Brown, the “Arson Parson?” I don’t think his name is a total lie. He used to stop in the middle of a sermon to answer a fire call.

Father Keefe used to bring his dog into Hoagland’s pharmacy every night to buy him an ice cream cone. That dog ate more ice cream than I’ve had in my entire life.

I can remember Boy Scouts collecting paper for the war effort. We built a two-wheel cart and every Saturday we had a route all the way around town collecting papers for the war effort. When I went into the army in 1943, my mother discarded some things in the cause of the national defense. She gave away a lot of 78 RPM records. I don’t know what they were used for by the government. Those and pulp magazines went to defense — science fiction and detective magazines. The ones I valued most were Amazing Science Fiction and Doc Savage. I don’t know if those names ring a bell with anybody. I came home to read some of them again, but Mom had put them in the paper drive.

Since we’re in the World War II era, you remember the air raid warning shack on the corner of Maple Avenue and Washington Heights. I used to be an air raid warden there on Friday nights. My shift was at 10:00. I relieved Ben Freer and if I wasn’t five minutes early, Ben thought I was late.

Those of you who are Cobleskillians, do you remember what a big deal it was to go to Caroga Lake on a class picnic? I think we got more thrill out of going to Caroga Lake than the kids get out of going to Washington today. And, I can remember as a child my parents planning for months for a trip to Montgomery Ward in Menands.

There are many people I remember from school who are larger than life. I can remember Clyde Slocum, the principal, going down the hall with a boy on the end of each arm. Ham Acheson was also a disciplinarian par excellence. Helen Taylor, Miss Mead, Miss Newton and Miss White, even though quite strict, were some of my favorite teachers. Coach Carlson, whose favorite line was, “five laps” (around the track), and Frank Guyer, who conducted the band, were also disciplinarians.

Do you remember Cop Brown or Eddy Lingenfelter? Eddy was a gentleman who had studied mathematics by the sequence of the cards in a deck.

I know I’ve left people out, but this was basically something to jog your memory. I know in my lifetime I should’ve done things a little bit differently. I should really have kept a daily events diary, just to keep track of unusual events, and I did have some marvelous experiences. Probably in those days I didn’t think they were so marvelous. Looking back on them, I think they were quite unique. I should’ve asked more questions — why, who, what.

Ordinary people and ordinary events, as you look back at them from the perspective of age, are seldom ordinary.

1. Her family owned a house on Grove Street. At this point, I am not sure whether it is “Golding” or “Goldring.”

2. The cruciform fancywork building, colloquially called the fancy building.

3. The building on the north side of Main Street, aligned with buildings to the east but extending a few feet farther south of other buildings to the west. Its front façade and an angular corner protrude into the sidewalk.