FINDING OLD FRIENDS ON THE INTERNET

Areal howler I had read a few years ago was lost to me until I thought to look for it on the Internet, not expecting to find it but stubbornly determined to try. It was called the Texas Chili Contest and had me doubled over as I had first read it, thrilled to find it again. As children, my sister and I sang about Lydia Pinkham's Compound. We had a few additional verses, but this one is pretty close to what we knew in the 1940s. A beautiful walk back to the nostalgic duets sung by my sister and me. How wonderful to be able to hear and watch Vladimir Horowitz playing in Moscow. What a thrill to be able to find people, long gone from this world, preserved to entertain us once again, by modern technology.

As a child, I grew up about a half mile away from the Fenno House, built in 1704. Grown and away from there for a few years, I moved to Chicago and for many years was away from where I grew up. In the mid-60s, when I returned to the East again, I found the house had been moved to Sturbridge Village. It had been changed to accommodate the tourist traffic pattern but it was the same house we crawled into as children and stood in awe of its sparseness and different world. Now I don't even have to leave home to see it again. It is nicely placed now with a fence in front of it, not on a sharp corner of the road with no fence to protect it.

Raised on a farm and hanging out with an older brother, and sister, who used to go fishing for pickerel in Ponkapoag Pond, I wore no flotation device (nor was even aware of such a lifesaver). I couldn't swim a stroke and luckily didn't fall out of that flat bottom boat my oldest brother had built. This was no small, shallow body of water but, as children, we were typically unaware of the dangers and were without fear.

Childhood book treasures that I thought were written by a woman named Laura Lee Hope, I later learned were really written by a man. The Bobbsey Twins, Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue, and many other series I learned to read on apparently were all written by pseudonyms of this same man. Some think he also wrote the Nancy Drew series and The Hardy Boys. He was Stratemeyer. However, he founded a syndicate. It produced books for children and young people until quite late in the 20th Century.

Internet surfing has never been a habit of mine. Nevertheless, when an answer to something is needed, it is the place to go to keep informed about the new and the old.