The section of town I lived in consisted mostly of small one and two story houses built between 1920 and 1950. It wasn’t suburban in the sense that you had a lot of people indulging in backyard barbecues or putting ornaments in their lawns and things like that, very plain. Most of the families were somewhere between blue collar and middle class, but there were a couple of people who were well off. Right across the street from my house was this row of very tall pine trees that made a natural fence and just to the left of them was a driveway and the driveway was really long and led up to a very big and very fancy house. An old lady lived there and I never knew her name, but I used to play with her housekeeper’s two sons, whose names were Hans and Manfred and they had come here from Germany. Sometimes they were nice and sometimes they were mean. Hans’ name kind of made sense to me because I’d heard it in the title of this book, "Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates," and I think in maybe another kids’ book. But the only time I ever heard the name Manfred was in this cartoon that used to come on in the mornings, "Tom Terrific" and his sidekick was a talking dog, Manfred the Wonder Dog. And I can never think of the house across the street without my mind doing that kind of zig zag memory thing where I go from remembering the pine trees to remembering the brothers to thinking about the name Manfred and then Manfred the Wonder Dog.