Dad's Story Part 9

Dressed for a "Tom Thumb Wedding"

                                                 Lewiston Years (continued)

One of my closest friends and schoolmate in Lewiston was Bob Bollinger.  His father was dead.  He had a younger sister named Betty.  His mother was a fine pianist and taught her children to love music.Betty Bollinger eventually became an opera singer, and Bob sang with the Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians before the Second World War.  Bob was killed in an airplane crash during the war. 

          Bob’s mother ran the Bollinger Hotel that had been left to her by her husband.  Bob occasionally took me into the hotel restaurant for a caramel sundae.  They made the best caramel sundaes I have ever tasted. Bob also taught me how to play the ukulele.  We sang together a lot at his house.  Two of the pieces I remember learning at his house were “Always” and “In a Little Spanish Town”.  

           It was popular in the early 1920s for people who were music teachers to travel from town to town spending two or three weeks in each town putting on a musical called “Tom Thumb’s Wedding”, using the local kids as the participants.  These traveling companies had the costumes, props, music, and all that was needed.  Bob and Betty Bollingers, my brother Frank and I were some of the performers.  We wore black dress suits with swallowtail coats.  One of the songs I sang was “When You and I Were Young, Maggie”. 

            As I mentioned before, the summers in Lewiston were very warm so we took advantage of the rivers and did a lot of swimming.  The Snake River was much larger than the Clearwater and also warmer so we did our swimming in the Snake.  On the Clarkston side of the river was a large sandy beach.  This was the most popular place to swim.  We occasionally swam on the Lewiston side where a dock and a high diving platform provided a good place to swim from.  I well remember my first attempt at diving from the high platform.  It was probably only ten to twelve feet high, but to me it seemed like twenty-five feet.  I stood up there for about ten minutes before mustering up enough courage to dive off.  The Snake River was about two hundred yards wide and had a rather swift current in the middle.  Some of the older, stronger swimmers used to swim across the river, but not many tried it, as it was very dangerous.