chemistry. His Dad raised peppermint for the chewing gum companies and had his sons educated to help in the business. We had quite a few dates and I went to football games at Notre Dame with him. His folks were members of the Apostolic Christian Church but when they came home after church, their Dad would give out the beer and encouraged his unsaved son to drink. That was Sam's problem and I wasn't interested anymore. Several years later I invited Velma to my wedding. She had an opportunity to talk to me before the wedding and she said I was making a bad mistake. She said that Sam and I were meant for each other. You can imagine how I felt because I really didn't know Harold that well. After you're in the church, you're not allowed to date or really get acquainted that much. I never saw any of the Lemans again. I hear only the youngest daughter is living anymore. One time I really showed my ignorance. I worked for Dan Steffen in his hardware store on Saturdays. Naomi Maller and Minnie Gerber had steady jobs so they knew the merchandise. When a customer asks me for nuts and bolts I had no idea what they were, so I had to ask Naomi and Minnie. They thought that it was just hilarious that I was so dumb. I had to live and learn the hard way. I guess that's a pretty good teacher after all. It's sure hard to forget the boo-boos we make though. I discovered that I shouldn't judge people by what I thought I saw them doing. One time I saw my Mom and her friend, Rosy Sauly, talking after church. Rosy had her hand cupped leaning over to mother, and Rosy's eyes were roving around like she was gossiping about someone. When Mom got in the car I told her I didn't think it was right for her and Rosy to stand there and gossip right after church. She said she wasn't gossiping Rosie only wanted to know what that meant in the newspaper about "Gone With the Wind". While I was working at the Princess in Bluffton, my cousin Chris Gerber loaned me his car. It was a roadster that had a rumble seat. It was considered a sports car. I invited three girls to come along. Two were good friends (Jo Metts and Georgia Snyder) and the third girl was from Canada and was visiting Jo. Anyway, my glasses were cracked and I had pasted them together with tape. We had the top down and the tape melted and I couldn't see to drive. The girl from Canada was up front with me so I ask her if she could drive. "Oh, yes", she could drive, so when she got behind the steering wheel she started showing off and had the car going in circles. Well, we turned over and I was pinned under the car but I had presence of mind to turn off the ignition or we could have gone up in flames. We didn't have to wait long and fortunate for us it was people from Bluffton, the Ellenburgers. Dale got me out from under the car and took us up to a farmhouse. They had me lying on the grass and the other girls were in pretty good condition. The one from Canada was a mess, but wasn't hurt. We couldn't believe our eyes when Thomas' ambulance pulled up. It was Herman Thoma. From Bluffton, he took us to Fort Wayne to a hospital but no bones were broken so he took us to the Bluffton Clinic. Every time he saw me after that he would call me rubberneck. I had trouble with my left hip occasionally but it finally went away. I felt terrible about Christy's car. When he came to see me he was so concerned about my condition, didn't bother about the car. He was such a special cousin and I was so sorry I couldn't be there when he had open-heart surgery in 1972 and died. I was in Africa at the time. When I was working nights at the Nao-Bob confectionery in Bluffton, a few of us would go to the Psi Ote pool after work and take a swim. It's an old stone quarry they made into a nice swimming pool. This one night it was so hot about five of us decided to go. The moon was shining and we could see real good. I dove off the diving board and came up under a ledge. I could feel the top and I was standing on solid rock. It was pitch dark and I had no idea which way to push to get out of there. I think that was one of the most sincere prayers I have ever prayed. I prayed that God would guide me to the light and He did, and He has continued to answer that prayer from that day to this. When I hit the surface the others were there. One was Adrian Sprunger. I always gave him the credit for saving me. He was there ready to help me to shore. By that time I was really out of breath. I remember I bought a three-dollar bike from Betty French who lived in Villa North. That mile stretch through Villa North was all brick. We use to call it the brick road. Betty and I became friends and planned to become hobos and hop freight trains, but, of course, we never did. We loved to both roller and ice skate. I was better at roller. My sister, Em, was the ice skater. My Mom, Sister Em, my Granddad, Aunt Kate and I all lived in a duplex at 513 South Main Street. It was a nice neighborhood for kids. We had a lot of young kids all over the place. The Farlings had four children (Harold, Dort, Lois and Prunie). Also, Irenen Fishbourgh, Mag Morris, and a lot of them from different areas. Libby Fulton and her sister, Marg, lived down town but were in our gang. Libby lives in Los Angeles and we keep in touch. Libby has always been special to me. She's such a beautiful person. She recently sent me many wonderful poems that she had composed. The Mendenhalls, Hope and Faith, Joe Swisher, Francis Cole, Virginia Reaser, Dort Waugh, and the Parker sisters, Florence and Gert. We had innocent fun skating and playing "Go Sheepie, Go". I wonder if kids now days have as much fun as we had! I don't want to forget Bernice Smith. She was a little girl who was born without legs and she would keep up with us by sitting on a skateboard she was tied to. She was real sweet. Years later we saw her picture in the paper. She had married a tall man and joined a circus. She had children and was pictured with her daughter. She was in good health. The Farlings owned the Food Market and Meat Market. Their home on Main Street was a hang out. Their Mother, Edna Farling, made us feel so welcome. She would pop corn and we would sit on the floor with a big dishpan full of corn and make ourselves at home. Dort Farling married Carl Shewalter. After he was in an accident and died, Dort married again to Dwight Shady. Dort was a tap dancer and acrobat. She taught me to dive. She taught at Lancaster School for many years. We had a public swimming pool at Washington Park and kids from all over came to swim. One year everyone got the swimmer's itch from swimming there. It was awful. We had to use sulfur and lard to get rid of it. No one had much money but we could pass out movie ads. The theater would let kids do that and then they would give them free passes to the movies. We would do that and would get to go mostly Saturday afternoons. We liked western movies. Tom Mix, and sometimes spooky ones. The when I finally got to see "The Ten Commandments", and "The Sign of The Cross" those became my favorites. The really most exciting time for us was street fair. In those days we had pit barbecue sandwiches. They would barbecue fresh pork on those open pit grills and we could get a delicious sandwich for only ten cents. Those still make my mouth water. They would put a handful of slaw on the roast pork and that was good. Then the Mettlers always had a fish stand on the corner of Washington and Main on the southwest corner. Those were good, too. Then Halloween was another fun time. It was innocent fun except one time. I wasn't with them, but they told me that they had overturned Gert and Florence Parker's outhouse and their Dad was in it. They said you could hear him a block away. I never knew if that was exactly the way it happened or not. We all had outhouses and in winter it wasn't exactly to my liking. It never took us long to do what we had to do. This was in the nineteen twenties. I went into high school in 1929, the year of the stock market crash. There were so many rich families that lost everything and many of the men on Market Street committed suicide. That was a sad time. People lost their shirts. Course we that didn't have anything to lose kept on living. That all brought on the great depression. We had a Jewish family in town named Gitlin. Mr. Gitlin was a second hand dealer and drove around town with a horse and wagon collecting things. There were four girls and two sons and they were my friends. They had open house all the time. You were always welcome. When these rich men committed suicide, their widows had to sell their expensive possessions to get money to live on. When they had their sales, Mr. Gitlin would pull up in his wagon and buy a lot of their beautiful possessions. His dining room began to look like an expensive showroom. Beautiful china, crystal, silver, it was unbelievable the things he bought. He ended up putting all his children through college. His two sons became doctors and practiced in Bluffton for years. Ethel married a dentist from Seattle, Washington. Florence married a cigar manufacturer from Minnesota. Two of the girls, Lib and Sarah, worked in New Your City and had good important jobs. I'm sure there is a moral to this story somewhere. During the depression, the young people in town had no money and no place to hang out just to be together. The Gitlins opened their home. They had a big house on Market Street and we would have bridge games in their living room and dining room. One time they were going to celebrate Passover and they ask me to join them, so I did. At the end of the table there was an empty seat prepared for Elijah. They expect his return. We know that he has been here and gone. I was a sophomore in high school about that time. When I graduated in nineteen thirty-two, we couldn't have a retrospect (yearbook) because our class had to pay for the nineteen thirty-one class debt. I didn't think that was fair but there was nothing we could do so our class never had our own retrospect. I never even had one from the nineteen thirty-one class. I wonder if there is any way to get a copy? I probably wouldn't have had the money to get one anyway then. When I was a senior in high school, I was in the 4-H Club and Bess Sale was my home economics teacher. She wasn't too fond of the students that were from the Apostolic Christian Church. She said, "They feed their children noodles when they are small". So when they examined the students in her class for the annual health contest, she told me I shouldn't bother to be examined because I couldn't pass the exam and besides I wore glasses. I was downtown the day the doctors examined the students for the health contest. One of my friends encouraged me to get examined regardless of what Miss Sale had said, so I did. I won over Jane Williamson who had won in former years. The three doctors said I had the best heart they had ever tested in an eighteen-year-old girl. My son, Sid, who is a cardiologist, told me my heart is okay and I'm 83 years old, so I don't think my Mom's noodles did much damage to my health. So, I encourage young mothers to feed their children noodles - that is if they're as good as my Mom used to make! I knew why Bess Sale didn't approve of the Apostolic Christian Church. She had a hired girl that was an Apostolic and she thought she had been misjudged by the church. The girl had been excommunicated from the church and Bess thought that the girl had been an innocent victim of circumstances, so all of us who were raised Apostolic were on Bess' bad list. One time the firemen put on a contest and the one that would win could get fifty dollars or a radio. So I signed up and worked hard. I don't even remember what we had to sell, but I went to the small towns around Bluffton. I hit everybody I knew and I ended up winning. They tried to talk me into taking the radio, but I need the fifty dollars for graduation, so I told them the agreement was fifty dollars and that's what I want. I got it and it bought my prom dress. It was beautiful yellow with an aqua sash and a white bunny fur jacket. I was so happy and Bruce thought I looked wonderful so away we went to the prom. It wasn't like they do now days. Everything was decent, at least more than now. When I was younger my sister, Fan used to sell products from the Larkin Company. She had a catalog and her customers would order from that. Fan would let me sell too, so that's how I would get my roller skates and other things that Mom couldn't afford. Our neighbors were better off financially than we were and would throw away good stuff. So when I would see nice things in their trashcans, I would take it home to Mom. This one time I saw a beautiful vase. It was white hobnail and only had a chip at the brim that you couldn't see when there were flowers in it. Mom was real happy for it and had flowers in it sitting on the dining room table when Martha our neighbor came in. She saw the vase and said "Oh, we had one just like that but ours had a chip at the brim" and then she started walking over to show us where it had been. I got her out of there in a hurry. She never did know that it was their discarded treasure. I was a pretty bad tom boy and most of the boys were scared of me when I was eleven or twelve but when I got older I changed and acted like a lady and had a lot of friends. I use to climb trees and sit in the fork of the tree and read books. We didn't have radios and televisions so I would go to the library and bring stacks of books home. It wasn't too bad in those days come to think of it. We just enjoyed what we had. Mom let me have stands in the front yard to sell things. One time Marie and Ernie brought us several jugs of cherry juice from Michigan and we didn't know it but it started fermenting. I only charged a few cents a glass if I remember right and I had donuts too. Anyway, Gus Plessinger was the sheriff and he was our neighbor. Well, he came over and he bought a glass and he stood there and kept buying glass after glass. I thought he was a real good customer. We didn't know until later that we were selling wine and only getting a few cents a glass for it. Nice of Gus that he didn't arrest us for boot legging.