tasted liquor, but I was intimately in contact with drinkers and
drinking places. The only reason I did not drink was because I
didn't like the stuff. As the time passed, I worked as boy-helper
on an ice-wagon, set up pins in a bowling alley with a saloon
attached, and swept out saloons at Sunday picnic grounds.

Big jovial Josie Harper ran a road house at Telegraph Avenue and
Thirty-ninth Street. Here for a year I delivered an evening
paper, until my route was changed to the water-front and
tenderloin of Oakland. The first month, when I collected Josie
Harper's bill, she poured me a glass of wine. I was ashamed to
refuse, so I drank it. But after that I watched the chance when
she wasn't around so as to collect from her barkeeper.

The first day I worked in the bowling alley, the barkeeper,
according to custom, called us boys up to have a drink after we
had been setting up pins for several hours. The others asked for
beer. I said I'd take ginger ale. The boys snickered, and I
noticed the barkeeper favoured me with a strange, searching
scrutiny. Nevertheless, he opened a bottle of ginger ale.
Afterward, back in the alleys, in the pauses between games, the
boys enlightened me. I had offended the barkeeper. A bottle of
ginger ale cost the saloon ever so much more than a glass of steam
beer; and it was up to me, if I wanted to hold my job, to drink
beer. Besides, beer was food. I could work better on it. There
was no food in ginger ale. After that, when I couldn't sneak out
of it, I drank beer and wondered what men found in it that was so
good. I was always aware that I was missing something.

What I really liked in those days was candy. For five cents I