St. Mary's cont.

Most of the people I remember from my time at St. Mary's are from after we moved from 711 W Clark st. A friend name Guy is the only person I remember who lived in that area (sorry for telling everyone that guy in the dictionary meant 'a queer looking person' - at least you had Zorro). Across the street from us were the Prims - Marcia (in my class), Mark (a year behind), Mike - well, you see the pattern developing. All the kids had the initials M. P. and there were at least 5 of them. We were a pack and played all sorts of games; we had a raft on the 'lagoon' that was near the swimming pool (if you went swimming in the lagoon, they would not let you into the pool that day). There was a small woods on the other side of the lagoon where we would drag old christmas trees into a fort. On the street that lead down to the swimming pool was a dairy where we could get really fresh ice cream.

I remember playing British and Mau Mau as a kid; my brother and his friends were the British and us little ones were the Mau mau who were always slaughtered. Think about that for a moment - 1954, Livingston, MT the MauMau rebellion was the stuff of backyard cowboys and indians, cops and robbers play - I think the machine guns were what made them so popular; the "no Annie Oakley" rule did not apply to machine guns. Oh, yeah, the drive-in theatre was pretty close - I remember that we would sneak in under the fence and go to the front row and turn on all the speakers so we could lay out watch the movies. The owner would, at some whim, chase us away sometimes and sometimes not. His son was about our age so the only thing I can think of is that he was making sure we did not see certain types of movies.

The next house we moved to was up on the hill - I think I mentioned that we lived in the second house from the edge of civilization (so to speak). The walk from school to home now included crossing the railroad tracks. Livingston was some sort of rail town, I remember that we had to cross 4 or 5 sets of tracks. In the summers, we would open the ice carts and use the huge trident-like ice pick to break junks of ice off the blocks. We would put nickels, dimes, pennies and sometimes dimes on the tracks and they would get smushed out of shape. Once we put some oil on the tracks where there was a tiny hill on the way out of town. When the engines hit that spot, the driving wheels actually created enough friction heat to partially melt the track - never did that again. The Caseys lived just across the tracks on my way home but they lived on the base of the hill - they were railroad people. I remember running into one of the Casey boys at a train depot in Miles City about 10 years later.