Much Ado About Me

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

Much Ado About Me

By

FRED ALLEN

Much Ado About Me was originally published in 1956 as an Atlantic Monthly Press Book by Little, Brown and Company, Boston.

• • •

Again, to Portland

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

Foreword 4

1. My Aunt Lizzie 5

2. My Library Routine 15

3. Piano Movers 25

4. Amateur Nights 31

5. Scollay Square 46

6. Freddy James—The World’s 56

Worst Juggler 56

7. Mrs. Montfort’s Boardinghouse 67

8. Mark Leddy, Agent 74

9. The S.S. Sierra 81

10. Australian Comedy 87

11. Playing the Smalltime 102

12. A Monologue with Turnips 109

13. Pantages and the Shuberts 118

14. The Life and Death of Vaudeville 132

15. The Passing Show of 1922 144

16. The Greenwich Village Follies 156

17. Summers Back Home 164

18. Bert Yorke, Straight Man 175

19. Portland and I 187

20. June in January 196

Epilogue 202

Illustrations 204

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 213

Foreword

SOME years ago John Steinbeck offered to help me with a book. I didn’t know how to write a book. John listed some rudimentary suggestions for the beginner. I pass them on to you. John wrote:

Don’t start by trying to make the book chronological. Just take a period. Then try to remember it so clearly that you can see things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there. Then try to remember people. And then just tell what happened. It is important to tell what people looked like, how they walked, what they wore, what they ate. Put it all in. Don’t try to organize it. And put in all the details you can remember. You will find that in a very short time things will begin coming back to you, you thought you had forgotten. Do it for very short periods at first but kind of think of it when you aren’t doing it. Don’t think back over what you have done. Don’t think of literary form. Let it get out as it wants to. Over tell it in the matter of detail—cutting comes later. The form will develop in the telling. Don’t make the telling follow a form.

Fortified with John Steinbeck’s advice I am starting my autobiography.

1. My Aunt Lizzie

ON May 31, 1894, the population of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was increased by one. On that day a son was born to James Henry Sullivan and his wife Cecilia Herlihy of that city. In Irish homes in those days there was no idle talk about the stork. When babies arrived in Cambridge they were expected. Poor mothers, who could not afford the luxury of a hospital bed, had their babies at home. On the appointed day, a relative or a friendly neighbor came in to take over the housework. Then the doctor drove up in his buggy, hitched his horse, and hurried into the house with his little black bag. Some hours later, looking a mite disheveled, the doctor walked slowly out the front door and drove away in his buggy; a tiny cry was heard from within the confines of the house. A baby had been born. That was all there was to it.

On May 31, then, this performance was given; the result was John Florence Sullivan. Two years later, on June 27, 1896, the performance was repeated. The doctor drove away again, another tiny cry soiled the neighborhood acoustics, and a second son, Robert, had joined James Henry Sullivan and his wife Cecilia.

One year later Cecilia contracted pneumonia and died.

James Henry Sullivan was left to face the world with his two small sons. After the funeral the usual family councils were held; there was a noticeable lack of enthusiasm among my father’s brothers and sister when it was proposed that he and his brace of embryo males join one of their households. Our destiny was finally settled when one of my mother’s sisters offered to make a home for James Henry and the boys, as my brother and I were called.

I was not three years old. I knew that my name was John Florence Sullivan. I knew that my father, my brother Bob, and I were living with my Aunt Lizzie. All these early years are a montage of hazy memories: a house that had grapevines all over the place, another house with a great field in back to play in, and a parlor in which a coffin lay. Through the glass covering at one end of the coffin I could see a man’s face; the man was strangely still. Later I was told that the man was my Grandfather Herlihy.

The first thing I recall distinctly is a short walk I took with my Aunt Lizzie. As the walk started I was five years old, and we were living on Bayard Street in Allston. My aunt escorted me to the end of Bayard Street and pointed me towards a red brick building directly across the road. I scurried away, went through the open door, and disappeared into the bowels of the North Harvard Grammar School.

My life assumed a pattern. I was going to school. My teacher’s name was Miss Travis. Every morning brought pleasant surprises: new boys and girls to meet, new lessons to study, errands to run, a quota of play to consummate, a given number of meals to be eaten—and suddenly, when my back was turned, night would fall and, exhausted, I would be chased, or carried off, to bed.

I knew that James Henry Sullivan was my father; I didn’t remember my mother at all. Even when I tried I couldn’t remember what my mother looked like, what her voice sounded like, or anything at all about her. To me, it seemed that Aunt Lizzie had always been my mother. My father was a stranger. He was always in a hurry going off to work in the morning, and many nights he wouldn’t be home for supper. When my father came home late we would hear him ascending the front stairs; he seemed to have an impediment in his tread. When my brother and I ran out to greet him we noticed that his breath was dominated by a potent element with which we were not familiar. As my Aunt Lizzie would start to warm up the cold supper dishes we would hear her say, Henry’s been drinking again. Everybody called my father Henry.

My father was a bookbinder by trade, as were all of his brothers. In those days, many young Cambridge boys and girls who had to go to work at an early age went into the Riverside Press or one of the other binderies in that section. My father went all through life binding books and trying to make both ends meet. He was good at binding books. In appearance, he was thin and rather artistic-looking, with brown hair cut in a pompadour style, and his upper lip sporting a well-landscaped mustache. He dressed very simply. His one bid for ostentation was the heavy gold watch chain that hung across his vest, supporting a large elk’s tooth. .My father had a good sense of humor and enjoyed being the life of the party; when I grew older, people often told me how funny he was. At that time he didn’t seem funny to me. He squandered most of his fun away from home. In the house, he was always serious. On several occasions I heard my aunts say that it was after my mother died that he started to drink. When he was even mildly under the influence, if he heard the song Love Me, and the World Is Mine, my father would start to cry. My aunts used to say that the song reminded my father of Cecilia.

We lived, at that time, in a two-family house on Bayard Street. We lived upstairs, and on the second floor there was a parlor, a dining room, two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bath; in a sort of large attic right above this, there were four small bedrooms. Here, the ceilings slanted down with the roof. If you had to get up in the middle of the night, you had to get up in the middle of the room—or else.

The house was heated by a coal furnace, and lit by gas. Today, with the oil furnace, the thermostat, and electricity, light and heat are no problem, but circa 1900, things were different. The cellar had to be filled with coal to service the furnace, the furnace had to be adjusted and shaken down at certain hours of the day and night, ashes had to be sifted to salvage pieces of coal and coke that could be used again, and the ash barrels had to be filled and rolled out to the sidewalk to be emptied by the ashman. Then, for light, there were the gas jets and the kerosene lamps. Kerosene had to be transported from the grocery store; the grocer always stuck a small potato over the end of the spout on the can to keep the kerosene from joggling out on the way home. With the coming of the Welsbach mantle, lighting became an even greater problem. The mantle, placed over the gas jet, reduced the yellow glare to a soft white light; the only trouble was that replacing the mantle required a steady hand. The new mantle was set over the jet, and the gas was turned on and lighted. When the gauze of the mantle had burned off, the mantle itself was nothing but a fragile ash. A tiny zephyr or the slightest jarring of the hand would crumple the mantle completely. If you avoided both the zephyr and the jarring, the mantle ignited, and light was available. In those days, I was new at it, but life to me seemed terribly complicated.

Aunt Lizzie dominated the household, and ruled her domestic domain with quiet efficiency. Not so many years before, shortly after her marriage, her husband Mike, who was a plumber by profession, had been stricken with lead poisoning. This left him partly paralyzed and unable to work. To support herself, and to provide a home for her crippled husband, Aunt Lizzie kept house for her two sisters, Jane and Mary, and for her brother, Joe. It was a sort of community project, in which the boarders paid five dollars a week apiece. This princely sum entitled them to a breakfast, a lunch to be packed and taken to work, and a big supper at night. Washing, ironing, and housework were included, and Aunt Lizzie paid the rent. The money she had left was hers to keep. Aunt Lizzie had her hands full, and not with money.

When my father joined the household, he was working for the Boston Public Library Bindery at an annual salary of $1000. When you divided this by fifty-two weeks, you learned that my father’s take-home pay—if he was going home on pay day—was $19.23 a week. From this sum he paid Aunt Lizzie eight dollars a week for the three of us. It was a tribute to Aunt Lizzie’s skill that we all survived. There was always good wholesome food available. She baked her own bread, and on Saturday nights she made her own baked beans and brown bread. She would start off with a leg of lamb for Sunday dinner, and then, on successive days, there would be lamb chops, cold lamb, shepherd’s pie, lamb stew, lamb soup, and finally the lamb bone was turned over to some neighbor who was operating a dog. My Aunt Lizzie never heard of Fannie Farmer, but she could make nourishing dishes by using only a few scraps and the punctuation from one of Fannie’s recipes.

As I grew older I never could understand why my Aunt Lizzie took in my father, my brother, and me to further augment her cluttered existence. I felt that she should have turned my father away from her door and thrown his progeny at him. But this would never have occurred to Aunt Lizzie. She was born generous and charitable and had her own simple philosophy. She had implicit faith in the Lord and that He would provide. Aunt Lizzie never let the Lord down, and until the day she died it was vice versa.

With the three sisters living together there were occasional family crises; after a heated exchange my Aunt Mary or my Aunt Jane or perhaps both of them would move out of the house and take a room in town. With her budget curtailed Aunt Lizzie would carry on, sometimes owing a little to the grocer or the landlord. Weeks later, the departed sister would return to take her place in the family as though nothing had happened. Whether blood really was thicker than water, or whether the five-dollar weekly rate was the attraction, I never knew. Usually, in their disputes, the bone of contention was my Uncle Mike. Aunt Lizzie’s sisters resented Uncle Mike. They thought that he had ruined my Aunt Lizzie’s life, and that she was wearing herself out caring for him while none of his own relatives made any effort to contribute to his welfare. Aunt Lizzie never complained; she took care of Uncle Mike for forty years, the last eighteen of which he spent in bed. She was a wonderful woman.

During the early stages of his illness, Uncle Mike was able to walk. He would visit the shopkeepers in his neighborhood daily, and spend his hours posing as an authority on anything the other person didn’t understand. A candy salesman who liked my Uncle Mike thought that he could make some occasional money selling candy. The salesman, an optimist, left a supply of chocolates and hard candies at our house. Whenever my Uncle Mike got an order for candy, my brother and I would make the delivery. When the customers opened up the boxes of chocolates and hard candies, they found that the lower layers were missing. My brother and I had inspected the candy at home; we had decided that if we lifted the top two layers, we could eat most of the bottom layer and nobody would notice it. Uncle Mike wasn’t in the candy business long.

When my father first came to live with Aunt Lizzie, he brought a sewing machine and a piano along.. The piano was an Emerson: an upright model with panels of copper grillwork in the front. In time I was ordered to take piano lessons. My teacher was a woman named Louise Forest, who charged fifty cents a lesson, and who lived three miles from our house. I had to walk the three miles to Miss Forest’s, carrying the fifty cents and a roll of music; by the time I had walked back home, with all the distractions on the way, I had forgotten most of the notes, the scales, and the musical exercises which Miss Forest thought she had just taught me. Eventually I did master two pianoforte gems. One was Hiawatha and the other was Pitter, Patter, Little Rain Drops. Frequently, when company called, I would be asked to render half or all of my repertoire. As time wore on, either the company stopped coming or the requests fell off: I forget which. Today, all I know about the piano is that without it the world would never have heard of Liberace.

Life in Allston in those days was monotony broken by certain regular community high lights. One of these was the nightly still alarm drill at the firehouse. At eight o’clock sharp every weekday night the fire bells sounded, the firehouse doors flew open, and you could see the firemen sliding down the brass pole. The crowd would gather across the street, watching the firemen as they stoked the fire in the engine and hitched the horses just as though an actual alarm had come in. The air would be charged with excitement, and then, when everything was ready, the driver would grasp the reins, the steam whistle would rupture the night with an ungodly blast, and with bells ringing Engine 49 would streak out of the door, the three white horses straining and frothing, a shower of live sparks spewing from the engine as the bedlam on wheels shrieked its way into the distance. It did not go far. After a short run Engine 49 would return, the firemen would dismount, back the engine into the firehouse, and unhitch the horses. Suddenly the doors would close, the crowd would disperse, and all would be quiet again until the next night.

A juicy tidbit for the neighborhood gossips was always provided when the patrol wagon dashed down our street. The early paddy wagons were not covered, and the unfortunate person being arrested had no privacy. He sat by the side of the arresting officer, the center of all prying eyes. By the time the prisoner arrived at the police station the entire neighborhood knew who he was and what he had done.

The arrival of Mr. Harrington, the soap-grease man, was always a great and rancid event. Each week Aunt Lizzie saved all her fat and grease. On the appointed day, if the wind was right, you could anticipate Mr. Harrington and his pungent vehicle long before you could hear his shrill cry: S-o-o-a-p gr-e-e-e-z! Mr. Harrington would pull up his fragrant horse, weigh Aunt Lizzie’s fat and grease, give her some yellow laundry soap in exchange, and depart, leaving behind a medley of odors that hung over the street long after he was out of sight.

A sensation was caused in Allston by the first appearance of the college ice. Howes Drug Store introduced this innovation to the soda and straw set. The college ice was the prehistoric sundae, and in its first form was merely a ball of ice cream covered with syrup, fruit, or chopped nuts. On special occasions Aunt Jane or Aunt Mary would treat my brother and me to a college ice. After the ice cream was finished I would sit there with my empty plate and envy my stomach.

One afternoon a week, it was an experience to go over to Western Avenue to see the cattle being driven to the Brighton Abbatoir, where they were to be slaughtered. It was about this time that a doctor who examined my Uncle Mike thought that his paralysis might be helped if he drank warm blood, so for many weeks I walked to the abbatoir with my Uncle Mike and waited while he drank the steer or cattle blood. It didn’t help him. Doctors were puzzled by Uncle Mike’s condition and he was examined by a number of medical groups in Boston. One day he came home with a battery set that had two handles attached; the doctors thought that the electric current going through his body would restore life to his withered arms and hands. Another time the doctors wanted to burn the base of his spine. They said it would either cure him or kill him. It was an easy decision to make. Uncle Mike kept the base of his spine intact and outlived most of the doctors.

During the week, from Monday to Saturday, we didn’t see much of my father. He left the house early in the morning and would return from work at different hours in various states of exhilaration or depression. Our back yard ran into the back yard of a family named Dupee. The Dupees kept an enormous St. Bernard dog tied up in their yard. The St. Bernard never bothered anybody; he was content to lie around and doze off to dream about his younger days when, wearing his brandy lavaliere, he patrolled the snowy wastes of the Alps, burrowing into drifts to rescue lost monks and upended skiers. Some nights, when supper was finished and my father hadn’t come home, I would help my Aunt Lizzie with the dishes. The window at our kitchen sink overlooked the back yard, and as dusk fell on a routine evening the yard was quiet and serene. However, there were nights when we’d hear a crashing through the underbrush; the Dupees’ St. Bernard would then start baying and tugging at his chain, and in rebuttal we’d hear a human voice mumbling an assortment of oaths to augment the din. My Aunt Lizzie would raise her head from her soapy chore and say, Your father is taking the short cut again tonight. After Mr. Dupee had shouted out of a window to restore his St. Bernard’s confidence, and my father had emerged through a hole in the chicken-wire fence and made our back door safely, my Aunt Lizzie and I returned to the dishes, and all was quiet again.

Downstairs in our house there lived a family named Johnson. Mr. Johnson drove a hansom cab, and at night he met all trains coming from Boston at the Allston station. When my father left the city very late, he would take the train. If Mr. Johnson saw my father quitting the train in a variety of directions, he would assist him into the hansom cab, close the double-breasted doors in front, mount his high seat in the rear, brandish his whip, and drive off to deliver Father to our front door. Some nights I didn’t have to be psychic to sense that my father and Mr. Johnson had made a few stops on the way. The hansom would come clopping up Bayard Street with Mr. Johnson shouting encouragement to his horse and my father rendering a madrigal from a relaxed position inside the cab. One night, things were so hectic in and atop the hansom as it turned the corner of our street that it seemed the horse was the only one in the party who was sober. Suddenly Mr. Johnson seemed to master his vision, our house took dimension, he pulled the reins sharply, and the horse reared back; Mr. Johnson, shouting Whoa! tumbled back off his seat, clavicle over fritter, and lay inert in the street. I don’t know who helped my father into the house that night. It might have been the horse.

These were the week days; Sundays were different. Every Sunday my father had the same routine. After church and dinner at our house, he would take my brother and me to visit my grandfather and grandmother in Cambridge. Leaving our house in Allston, we would walk down North Harvard Street into Harvard Square, then through the Harvard Yard—the closest I ever came to going to Harvard—out past the Fogg Museum, up Emmons Street to Emmons Place. My grandfather and grandmother Sullivan lived here, in the last house on the right. Each week my father and his four brothers visited their father and mother; each boy brought a pint of whiskey to the old folks. They spent the day quietly, discussing the news and playing forty-fives, a game my grandmother liked to play while taking frequent pinches of snuff. The bottle was also passed around occasionally. My grandmother had open house on Sunday, and all of her sons were welcome to bring their friends to spend the day. These Sundays always came to an end with an early dinner, and as twilight set in, my brother and I knew that the time had come to prepare for our collective departure. We also knew that my father, having spent the day with his family and the bottles, would be a trifle loose-gaited on our way home. After the good-bys had been said, my brother and I would flank my father, and we’d start off. It was a long three-mile walk home, and if you had met the three of us along the road you would have seen a peculiar sight: we looked like two sardines guiding an unsteady Moby Dick into port.

It was in my grandmother’s house that I met my Aunt Mame. She was my father’s only sister, and a very religious woman. She went to Mass every morning at six o’clock, taking a short cut through a neighboring field; over the months and years she had worn a path through the tall grass in this field. As the years went on, Aunt Mame became increasingly religious, and took to leaving her bedroom window open a little at the top at night to enable the Blessed Virgin to enter and depart if she felt so inclined. Many years later, when my father died, my Aunt Mame managed to conceal his gold watch and to have his piano moved to another house to make sure that my Aunt Lizzie would not get this so-called estate. Religion affects some people strangely.

It was also in my grandmother’s house that I attended my first wake, when my grandfather Sullivan died. The wake was an Irish institution. When a member of the family died, the body was laid out in the front room and floral offerings were draped all around. Chairs were borrowed, and the neighbors supplied extra cups and saucers so that there would be plenty of tea and coffee available for the womenfolk. Great mounds of tobacco were piled up on the kitchen table, surrounded by clay pipes which were called T.D.’s. Also, there was plenty of whiskey for the male mourners. For the two days and nights the wake was in progress the members of the immediate family rarely slept. When the neighbors called, they first went into the front room to pay their respects to the deceased; then the men would gather in the kitchen, fill their clay pipes from the mounds of tobacco, take their glasses of caper juice, and join the general conversation. The exploits and achievements of the departed were embellished, his sense of humor was extolled, and his loss to the community was overly evaluated. As the night wore on, the tobacco fumes cast a blue haze over the kitchen, glasses were filled and refilled, the talk changed to other subjects, stories were told, occasional laughter rang out, and a good time generally was had by the many friends who had gathered to see the host off on his final journey. The women assembled in the dining room for tea and coffee and perhaps a snack. Memories, encomiums, and anecdotes involving the departed were exchanged and intermittent tears were shed. In every neighborhood there was a group of old women who thrived on wakes. They would descend on the house in their glory, sitting through the night swilling gallons of tea, stimulating the wailing and the mournful small talk. In the morning they would join the family for the church services, and if there was room available in a carriage, the old crones would go along to the cemetery for the ride.

Not only the women loved funerals. On our street we had a retired old gentleman named Tom Carpenter. Every time Tom saw a funeral wreath on a door he thought nothing of bursting into the house and taking over. It didn’t make any difference to Tom that the next of kin, or those who had assembled for the weeping, had no idea who he was. He would bustle around the stove making tea and coffee, send out for food if it was needed, wash the dishes, and keep things humming in general. Tom would stay on for two days and nights with no sleep, happy at his chores. He would be the last one out of the house. After the body had been taken to the church and the crowd had gone, Tom’s work was still not done: he would remain to give the rooms a few licks with the broom so that the family could return to a clean house. Every few weeks Tom would show up at our house to report to my aunt on his most recent ghoulish peccadillo. He would be exhausted, with long dark bags hanging under his eyes. Mrs. Lovely, he would tell my aunt, I don’t know what they’d have done without me. The widow went to pieces. I had to make forty pots of coffee and God knows how many sandwiches. When my aunt asked him whose funeral it was, Tom would answer, Gosh, I was so busy crying and working I didn’t find out!

On these Sundays in Allston, before we went to my grandmother’s house, we went to St. Anthony’s Church. After the Masses the priests always stood outside the church, ostensibly to greet the parishioners, but I am sure they also had another motive. They were always pouncing on the parents of small boys. After some nondescript talk about the weather, the parents were made aware of the opportunities available for their small fry as either altar boys or choirboys. One Sunday, Father McNamara stopped my Aunt Lizzie when she had me in tow. A few Sundays later I was wearing a cassock and a surplice and posing as a choirboy. For years I told a joke about this experience: The first Sunday I sang in the choir two hundred people changed their religion. It was not quite as bad as that. The congregation was protected; the choir boasted some twenty other raucous small vocalists who could easily smother my nasal soprano.

Shortly after my debut as a choirboy I made my first appearance as an actor. The church presented a Christmas pageant. I was cast as one of the Wise Men (I was then about seven) bringing gifts to the Christ child in the manger. Dressed in a toga my aunt had made which looked like a long mess jacket, I came on the stage, and I can still remember the first lines I ever spoke to an audience:

Myrrh is mine—its bitter perfume

Breathes a life of gathering gloom

Sorrow, sighing, bleeding, dying,

Sealed in a stone-cold tomb.

I didn’t stay up for the notices and consequently never learned the critics’ reaction to my first performance.

The church was also responsible for my second appearance as an actor. Before the coming of Bingo, the churches had to raise money by promoting lawn parties, bridge evenings, field days, travel talks with magic-lantern slides, and other forms of mild entertainment. As was its winter custom, St. Anthony’s announced that an annual minstrel show was to be given by the children of the parish. When the rehearsals started, I found that I was not cast as the star. I was an undersized nonentity, just a member of the chorus: my doubtful contribution was to be confined to ensemble singing. This minstrel show, however, made parish history. On the big night, some fifty parents delivered their children to the hall in which the show was to be held. This insured a full house, because the parents and relatives had to wait around to take the cast home, and instead of loitering around outside, they bought tickets and prepared to sit through the show. My Aunt Lizzie had made me a minstrel shirt with long pointed collars, and deposited me with the other kids in a large dressing room in the back of the hall. In order to make this a real minstrel show, the pastor had engaged a make-up man to blacken up the little minstrel girls and boys. This make-up man was a local smalltime actor who had seen better days. He had an overall bloodshot look, and appeared to be a hang-over with a suit on. After he had blackened up his last small charge, the minstrel show proceeded, and as soon as it did, the make-up man stepped out into the night and an adjacent saloon to test his non-existent will power. When the minstrel show was over and the parents came backstage to pick up their sprats, the make-up man was nowhere to be found. There were fifty-odd black-faced little minstrel kiddies and nobody knew how to remove the black. When, after a reasonable length of time, it became obvious that the make-up man was not planning to return, the parents started home with their soiled progeny. The trolley cars and the streets were filled with crying tiny troubadours who were convinced that they were destined to go through life in blackface.

Apparently the series of scrubbings required to restore my normal pasty hue cured me of any desire to invade the minstrel field again. Instead, I turned to music. Through a bit of snide bartering, I had come into possession of a harmonica.

With a little practice, I mastered a folio of Southern Folk Songs. Wind of my prowess spread through the grammar school like bad news at a pessimists’ convention, and I was tapped to appear in a variety show to be given by the school. The teacher, a Miss Bancroft, arranged my act for me. Miss Bancroft gave me a joke to tell, and some definite instructions. I was to walk out on the stage, tell this one joke, and then proceed with my harmonica. In her haste Miss Bancroft didn’t analyze the joke. It required two people to tell it. This forced me to walk on stage alone and start a conversation with myself. The joke was this: If the people in Poland are called Poles—why aren’t the people in Holland called Holes? If this joke had come off, I would have gotten my first laugh from an audience. I have often tried to recall how my harmonica concert was received that day. Memory has mercifully failed me on each occasion.

One other grammar school teacher I have tried to forget down through the years with no success was Miss Boynton. Miss Boynton was a mountainous spinster who, when she sat at her desk, looked as though she had just made a parachute landing and the parachute was all skin. Her pupils called her Sally Fat. Every morning Miss Boynton drove to school with