occur to me then that this was an odd way to choose an editor! But I had noised
around that I wanted the job and now I had it.
Nut though I was about school, sleeping late on that first day of vacation was
blissful. But my summer’s work was cut out for me: I would again take over Bob
Reinhard’s paper route for the summer.
I would again be responsibile for keeping Grandma’s pride and joy, her back
yard and her little front yard, perpetually well-groomed. While the border flowers -
hollyhocks, peonies (she called them “pinies"), geraniums - were her own loving
responsibility, the lawn was my job - under her supervision. "Cut it once up and down,
then across." Clipping the front hedges was up to me, as well. I also had to trim the
grass on the family cemetery lot, which was only a couple of blocks away. Of course,
my tools were manually operated, which is what most people had in those days. I did
considerable interior painting for Grandma. Common sense tempered by trial and
error taught me how to paint -no one in the house seemed to know anything about it.
I think the only task I really hated was scrubbing the white wooden wall of the
upstairs back porch; the strong solution I was given to use made my hands raw. Poor
Billy. No, I was not overworked or taken advantage of. But I have to say that
Grandma was fortunate to have me for a helper, as Aunt Dorothy, who was her
principal helper, had a rather full workload already.
I started working for Mrs. Robert R. Henderson that summer. Remember, she
was the lady who let the “Fayette Street boys" use her garage and vacant lot. My
main job was cutting her sizeable lawn, which took about two hours. At twenty-five
cents an hour, that brought me the grand sum of a half buck every two weeks.
Luckily, Mrs. Henderson’s lawn needed weeding so I took on that job at the same
rate. Weeding is a slow job and I really weeded the H out of that lawn and managed
to earn quite a few additional quarters. Mrs. H. took a liking to me and I kept up with
her for a number of years. She was a nice lady.
Then the small-town boy finally had the opportunity to visit a big city for the
first time. Early one morning in early July, I boarded the Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad excursion train with my cousins John and WeeWee (Marie) King for the
three-and-a-half-hour trip to Washington, D.C. When I entered the main waiting
room of Union Station, I was awed by its immensity and heroic decor. In the men’s
room, through the open top of a window, I had my first unforgettable sight of the
city’s grandeur: the Capitol’s dome. So first we walked to the Capitol and inspected
its exterior but were unable to enter at that time. Off then on our tourist’s trek to the
other big attractions - the White House, the zoo, the Washington Monument, the
Lincoln Memorial (which impressed me profoundly) and the Smithsonian Museum
and in the evening we went to a movie at a spacious, ornate theatre. Quite late, we
returned to Union Station, footsore and exhausted. (WeeWee confessed that she had
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