The year that we opened the business on Eighth Street, the shopgirls got uniforms to wear. Every summer, our Aunt Ethel, mother's sister, would come from Wheeling, West Virginia to spend the summer with us. This summer, Aunt Ethel sat down and whipped up our uniforms. The dresses were aqua, and the aprons were lavender. They all had scallops on them, and the customers liked them. We each washed and ironed our own uniforms. We often walked to work from Second and Central. That summer, Aunt Ethel also made all four of us swimsuits. She may have gotten the material from a mill in Millville. It was either black or dark navy shot through with white warp threads. It was heavy. The suits were one piece, and Leo was very fussy that Mother and Leo rented a building on Eighth Street that had been the Sentinel Ledger building. She said that if the building was heavy enough to support the newspaper presses, it would be okay to move in their heavy ovens. The bakery had the shop in front, a little anteroom in the middle where the pies were made and the cakes were iced, and a big room in the back where the dough was made. On Saturdays, if sales were brisk, our dilemma was whether to make a second dough. If the second dough wasn't made, possible sales were lost, but if the second dough didn't sell out that was a loss also. We never sold stale goods. I can remember discussing back and forth the pros and cons of whether to make the dough. It wasn't until the public acceptance of frozen foods that our dilemma was put to rest. At the end of the day, we could freeze the unused dough to sell the next day. Thus, the whole business was made more profitable.

When we were on Asbury Avenue, I was allowed to have all of the Indian Head pennies that we took in. At the end of the day, I would eagerly count all the money from sales, and pick out the Indian Heads. I had a fairly large group when Uncle Lowell offered to buy them from me, and I think I was foolish to have sold them at face value.

The one winter that the bakery stayed open, my job was to ice cupcakes in the morning before school. I made so many with vanilla icing so many with chocolate, a few with lemon, and a few with maple nut. In order to make the maple nut, we put a few drops of maple extract in the vanilla icing. Apparently, I didn't wash my hands too carefully, and one day at school, a girlfriend said, "What is that funny smell?" The maple extract was strong.

If there was a spell of rainy weather, the customers in the shop would complain, and we couldn't understand why. We rather liked a good Nor'easter. Now I understand that they came to the shore mostly for a tan and had one week to get one. But when it rained, we used to bundle up in trench coats, put a towel around our necks, and walk along the boardwalk. We loved it, because it was unusually empty without the summer visitors, and the hot dog stands smelled so enticing. We would buy them, and they tasted especially good eating them in the rain.

The house on Third Street was a summer house. There were three floors. Each floor had a porch that extended across the front of the house. Naturally, it being a summer house, there was no indoor heat. There was an outside staircase to the upper floors, and the winter that we slept upstairs on the second floor, we had to go outside in the evening to get to our bedrooms. It was cold in the winter. We had a potbelly stove in the main room. We would warm our pillows and then run to our bedrooms, dive under the covers, and then undress for bed. The main room on the first floor had a plate rail around the wall.

In the winter, we had books on this shelf, and in the spring it was our job to carry the books up to the third floor and store them under the eaves. We devised a system with a basket that we lowered on ropes and pulled up. Not very efficient, I'm sure. But fun. I'm not sure of the years that Dana and I slept up on the second floor. I had discovered a lot of leaves that I thought were very pretty and I strung them on strings and put them diagonally across the ceiling. That is, I liked them until the day that I went to visit a friend and saw her bedroom-- all pink and white and ruffles. I came home and took my decorations down. During this time, I remember waiting for the Sunday paper because it had pictures of Tilly the Toiler and Winnie Winkle. I enjoyed these comic strips, and those names have stuck in my mind.

Mother had a second cousin who was having marital troubles, and she had a young daughter my age. She wanted to find a place for her daughter to live for a year, and my mother took her in. She was very pretty, and we went to school together. Everybody liked Muriel. She and I used to scour the magazines for offers of sample cosmetics. Some were free and some cost 25 cents. We eagerly awaited their delivery. Years later, the boys who admired Muriel in the seventh grade asked me about her.

We're not sure of the exact year that Mother and Leo bought the Knights of Columbus building on Central Avenue at Second Street. When you entered the building from the front, you were in a large room like a lobby, and across this lobby, there were two sets of French doors that led into the hall. Along both sides of the hall were raised platforms about five inches high and a chair-width wide. At the end of the hall, there was a semicircular raised platform. The ladies' restroom was on one side and the men's on the other. In one of them, they installed a tub. In the center of the hall, at the very back, was the kitchen. One side of the long hall was partitioned off into bedrooms. The partitions were made of thin plywood and were open at the top and the bottom as well.

This building naturally did not have central heat, so they installed a potbellied stove on the center dias. Mother used to sit near the stove doing her sewing or some kind of handwork. She would go to Philly to buy her fabric and small animal pelts for her fur trim, and she would sit and work on these projects. Once, she had men's suits from either Eben or Uncle Lowell. She meticulously cut them apart and made them into suits for Dana and myself. While she was working, Leo would be dispatched into town to buy her Benson and Hedges cigarettes, her bottled coke, top of the round ground, and thinly shaved ham for sandwiches. She was particular, but the food was always good. I think Leo enjoyed these excursions into town to chat with the townspeople.

Ocean City was founded by Methodists, and the block of land between Fifth and Sixth Streets was neither commercial nor residential. Starting in the East, there were tennis courts, then the High School, open space, then the Tabernacle, and finally open space toward the bay. The tabernacle was an interesting and historical wooden building, but today it has been razed, and a new modern structure is in its place. The avenues in Ocean City run North to South and the numbered streets run East to West. There was no traffic through the Tabernacle block; rather, traffic on Central Avenue had to detour around it.

On occasion, during the off-season, the police would close a two block area to traffic and allow roller skating on the street. We didn't have our wheels attached to our shoes rather we had a metal sole with wheels which we attached to the bottom of our shoes with a key. These evenings were enjoyable. Afterwards, it was dark when we walked home, but we always felt safe in Ocean City in those days. The block between Atlantic Avenue and Park Place was very long, a double block, and though we weren't fearful, it always felt good to see the lights of the one occupied house in the middle of the block. The other houses were all empty during the off-season. Ocean City is an island. There are two ways to reach the mainland. A bridge at 9th Street, and another bridge at 39th Street. Each of these large bridges led to a series of smaller bridges and a causeway. The larger bridges were drawbridges, because the bay is a part of the intercoastal waterway. Whenever a sailing ship with a tall mast went through, the bridge was drawn up. We moved to the building on 8th Street two blocks away from Bay Avenue and the bay. (This was the former Sentinel Ledger building.) From the windows on the bay side of this building, we could see when the bridge was up. For some reason, perhaps on a Saturday evening when everyone was trying to get home to the city, if the bridge should be up, we could see it, and a cry would go out "the bridge is up," and everyone had to go to the window to see it.

Before the bakery, times were hard. Mother and Leo went to Philly and bought fabrics. She packed them in a suitcase and gave Leo the task of going door-to-door to sell them. I don't know why she thought anybody would buy. However, in later years, when we had the bakery on Asbury Avenue, mother and Aunt Ethel rented a store on the Boardwalk. It was pretty far down, past Flanders. I guess the rents were cheaper there. They made up dresses and things to sell, but business was very slow. Mother had a good idea. She made up pie crust, and froze it in ice cream containers. She thought this would be good to sell. It would have, but it didn't take off. The only time I remember seeing Mother cry was when the labels she had printed wouldn't stick onto the containers. Her idea was ahead of its time.

Mother made us both skating outfits. Dana's was red wool with black fur trim. She still has the skirt. (She's a pack rat.) Mine was a black and white houndstooth check with green trim on the skirt. One weekend, I came down from New York to visit Dana and Fran. Uncle Lowell called us to tell us that Sunset Lake in Bridgeton was frozen and invited us to go skating with him. Of course, we went. It was a gorgeous day. Not another soul was on the ice. I would guess that Uncle Lowell was close to sixty, and he was a good skater. Recently, Dana and I were talking about these outfits and we couldn't figure out what we wore on our legs, because it was before pantyhose. Maybe we wore knee socks.

Abby was talking to a man at a show, and Abby mentioned that she had family from Ocean City. He said that his family went down every summer. He knew about the Dana pastry shop and its cinnamon buns. Every Sunday morning, it was his job to get up, put a basket on his bicycle, ride down to the bakery, and buy cinnamon buns. He did not like having to do this, and when he got home, he took that basket off of his bike as soon as he could, because he thought it made it look like a girl's bike.