Another small recollection was a short period of time that my parents were in partnership with another man in a candy-making venture. Apparently Mother spent a lot of time helping in the production, since Jack and I played in the building, where the work was going on, a good deal of the time. I remember playing hide-and-sek amongst the barrels of chocolates, and when it was my turn to "seek" I found that if I was patient I'd discover where Jack was hiding by watching for a little hand reaching over the top of a barrel to sneak a chocolate. There was an empty building next doo which had an open connecting door to our building. The previous tenents had been a soda fountain, and possibly a drug store. Anyway, the fixtures were still in place at the soda fountain, and still contained various flavors of syrup, which Jack and I made good use of by concocting all sorts of drinks. Between that sweet syrup and all the candy consumed during those preschool days, is it any wonder that I wound up with thirteen fillings in my teeth at the age of seven?
Another event which sticks in my mind was something that happened when we were living in the two-story house , in Centralia, and this was the period when Dad was selling Essex cars. One night, after Jack and I had gone to bed, a friend of the folks showed up, very drunk, and he was seeing snakes crawling all over everything. He caused so much commotion that we awoke and stood at the top of the stairs to watch this unusually exciting "show". Mother was hurriedly trying to make a pot of coffee, and Dad was trying to calm the man down. At one point, the man grabbed a butcher knife and was going to chop the snake he thought was crawling on his leg, until Dad managed to pry it out of his hands. When the folks spied us taking all this in they ordered us back to bed, but we kept inching back down the stairs to watch. This went on for quite some time, then the man looked up at us and told us if we'd go back to bed he'd give us each a dollar. Well, that did it! We'd never had a whole dollar in our lives, so off we troted. Naturally, the man never remembered that he'd promised us a dolar, and I never forgot that promise unkept.