There were other characters in the village who remain vividly in my mind after half a century. One was old Mr. Brenner, enormously fat, who sat on the verandah of his hotel from morning to night, chewing tobacco and talking to his cronies, stirring from his out-size chair only to consume his meals. Then there was Cy Green, tough and salty fisherman, who fathered 18 or 20 children and was surrounded by innumerable grandchildren. If you met one of the young Greens pushing a baby carriage and asked if this was a new brother, he was quite likely to reply; "Nope, that's my uncle!"

And there was old Gus, a derelict Popeye, whose job it was to rent row-boats on the lakefront. He had a fund of stories about his early days on the Great Lakes, about storms and wrecks and drownings. At noon he would pull from his tattered coat pocket a large piece of cheese and a couple of Spanish onions which he would bite into as if they were apples, to our unfailing astonishment.