Dear Jerry Robinson:

I missed your column this week. Hope you are feeling O.K. I just want to tell you that as another 91 year old I really enjoy your reminiscing.

I, too, ate road tar as a kid in Alameda, California. We played hockey on roller skates on a road end by the bay. When it got too hot and the asphalt softened so we couldn’t skate we would scoop out a tar bubble.

As I recall we chewed it like gum. Two of those girls who played hockey I still keep in touch with. One I have known since we were five and the other moved to the neighborhood when in the third grade.

Like you, my father was a self-made man. His father, a printer, emigrated in 1882 from London to Chicago to make a better living.

Dad was two at the time and as the oldest boy of a family of six children had to go to work at the end of the eighth grade. He read the newspaper every day and I guess that rubbed off on me. I am an inveterate newspaper reader.

Your son’s article about printing interested me too. My Michigan daughter, as the keeper of the family history, has my grandfather’s indentured papers (actually, parchment). I can’t remember how old he was at the time he was indentured to the printer and went to live with his mentor’s family, but there was a list of the things he must and must not do--including, “he was not to commit fornication.” This must have been sometime in the 1830s and I am guessing he was twelve to fourteen.

I read an article about a man who was one hundred years old. I am wondering how much he gets around and if his joints ache like mine? He looked great but do we really want to live to one hundred?

Your reader,
Betty Haines