Betty Louise Neugebauer and Dodo Kennedy and I were friends I guess, at least we played games together at school. St. Patrick's school was in a big red brick building called the Community Center. There was a swimming pool inside and a big football field behind the building.

On top of the building was a roof garden where we would go to play at recess. I was never sure why they called it a garden. There was nothing up there but concrete and brick. Our usual game was story-telling, using wooden popsicle and sucker sticks as people, and the mortared spaces between the bricks as places. We would take turns making up stories about families and animals and we drew lines on the bricks to set apart the rooms in the houses. Sometimes Sister Catherine Mary came and made us quit doing our stories and go play ball or something.

"You girls are not active enough", she used to scold, and we always ducked our heads and said, "Yes, Sister". Then as soon as she left for another part of the roof garden, we would go back to our stories, which were our favorite thing to do at recess and lunch time.

I didn't like to play ball, but jumping rope and playing jacks were things I did like. So did Dodo and Mary Louise. Dodo's name was really Dorothy, but nobody ever called her that.

In the summer, I used to live on roller skates, and my brother and I played a lot with the kids in our neighborhood after supper almost every night. "Kick the Can" was one of our favorites, and we would play for hours, until the resounding call of "Ollie, ollie oxen, all in free" signified the arrival of the ice cream truck, and we would all run back in the house to beg our parents for money to buy Milk Nickels with. Sometimes they would say no, but lots of times they would say yes, and tired, hot kids would sit on the curb in front of one of the houses and drip ice cream and chocolate all over their knees. Sometimes it was Popsicle juice.

Games at home with our parents and their friends were common also. We liked Monopoly and Chinese Checkers best of all, and I can remember some vicious games of double, triple (and even more) solitaire when we got a little older and had progressed from Old Maid and Go Fish.

My sister and I liked to play "office" with the two Garcia girls who lived next door to us on Montana Street. We would set up elaborate desks made of orange crates, and sometimes we would use them as sales counters where we would make out sales slips.