Well, it worked on Vic, or he said it did. But I wonder if he was pulling my leg.
I’ll have to ask him some day.
Except for dances and skating parties, my social life was mostly family and
neighborhood oriented. I often played cards or bingo with the folks at home or at
Aunt Maggie King’s or Aunt Marie Beaulieu’s or at the church hall. I went to
movies fairly often, sometimes with buddies, sometimes with Mother and her
friend, Foxie. Many Sunday afternoons I visited my Grandmother Rohrer and Aunt
Jeanette and usually stayed for supper.
Once in a great while, some of the 7-Up
Club boys gathered in our garage/club
house to “shoot the bull," but beyond
that, boyhood ties with Fayette Street
were dissolving fast.
Since that first box-step dance in
freshman year, I had taken to dancing
wholeheartedly and had gained a
reputation as a “good dancer." Girls
invited me to every Allegany girls’ club
dance that year and, although I was a
mere Junior, I got bids to both the
Ursuline Academy senior prom and the
Allegany senior prom. Suddenly, all this
attention from girls. It was wonderful!
The crowning event of the year,
for me, took place on May 20, 1938,
Allegany High School’s Junior-Senior
Prom. Ann was my date. For weeks I
had tried to get up nerve to ask her and I
finally did. Ours had been a most
juvenile relationship. I had a crush on her
but was too timid and fearful of refusal to ask her for a date. I could tell that she liked
me but there seemed to be other boys whom she liked better. So when she actually
accepted my bid, I hardly knew how to react. After the dance, I made a note of how it
affected me: “Phew! What an evening I’ve just experienced. Wow! What a time."
Junior year had been full and exciting. For the 189 days of the school year -
I didn’t miss even one - I had been up to my neck in school activities and I loved it.
Considering all this involvement, my final grades were surprisingly high: Three A’s
and two B’s. Next year I would be in even deeper. For one thing, I would be editor
of the yearbook - the class had elected me to that job earlier in the year. It didn’t
80
Francis “Penny“ Shaffer and Vic Malloy, 7-Up Club
members, above former garage used for
their clubhouse, 1937.
