In the midst of preparations I've needed to make
for presentations in Moorhead, Minnesota, and Fowler, Indiana, next week and the week after, I have had time to work at typing the transcripts of my interviews for "Peter's Story." Total word count for the typed pages now comes to more than 29,000, about 35% of what I've got to type. I continue to tinker with a possible outline. And I continue to type such passages as this one about skinny-dipping in Lake Michigan:
My friend Joe and I would walk down and meet some of the boys and we'd go down to Lake Michigan and walk around. All of a sudden there'd be about 30 of us. We'd go hide our clothes someplace, maybe a block away from where we were going, and then we'd walk bare-assed, excuse my English, that's the way it was - boys, girls, everyone. We didn't pay attention to girls, what they had, what we had. And we'd swim in Lake Michigan.
There was a dirigible that passed above us - I think it made a second round - looking at all these bare-assed kids, some 35 of us. All of a sudden the cops were coming to chase us away from Lake Michigan. We'd swim as far as we could, then run to where we hid our clothes. We'd run to the shanties where the bums stayed - no, they were not bums. These were people in 1929, 1930 who made shanties to live in, and they would go around looking for jobs and food. We dressed there. The cops never caught us. We did this so many times.
The men in the shanties - these were people who had been in the stock business and lost all their business; their wives divorced them. They were very educated men. They'd come and want to cut wood, and do some errands, painting.
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