and see the dog eating at the table. I visited them occasionally. My father also knew Mrs. Dantz, and he sold her a ranch at Palm Springs one time.

I met Mrs. Dantz's son. He was about eighteen then. I forget his name for sure, but I believe it was Frank. He went to Hollywood High School and he worked after school in the nearby drug store as a soda jerker. He often waited on me. He was a very nice boy, or young man, as he seemed to me then. He was a sexy masculine vital type. Now I would say he was an occasional homosexual chap. He had many boy friends and many girl friends. He took the girl friends to football games. In those days they wore their hair around their ears in strange round doughnut. shapes, and carried "vanity cases" shaped like a small patent-leather suitcase. At the games they waved vari-colored pom-poms. Frank Dantz had an attractive face. and a nice head. His face was tan. his hair brown. He had a sensual look and attitude, and a pleasing body, well dressed. A little girl once told me in the drug store as he turned his back on us to get ice cream:

"Frank has a nice popo, hasn't he!"

There were many nice things about him. Frank also had a Model-T Ford roadster with jokes chalked on it. Later, Frank joined the Marines and got married when he came home on leave. He had a son, "Junior," right off.

At this time, however, Frank lived with another young man, then about 20 or 22 years of age. He was a nephew of Mrs. Dantz's late husband's sister-in-law, and his name was unusual; I remember it all these years as he was the first young man I knew with a girl's name-Marion. At the time I thought him quite as masculine as anyone else, but my mother giggled in disbelief when she was introduced to him one morning when he drove Mrs. Dantz over to see my father about the ranch. I liked Marion, and he was always nice to me. He was from the Deep South, and I liked the way he spoke with a pleasant Southern accent. Marion slept with Frank in the attic of the Dantz residence and I visited them there a few times with a group of other friends from the drug store.

Today I suppose we would call Frank Dantz a "drug store cowboy." And over the bridge of the years I see Marion as a quiet office clerk type. He later became a high school English teacher. Frank was the vital, extrovert type, and Marion was the dreamy introvert type that only pretends to be an extrovert.

Resuming the tragic part of my story-the young man, calling all the time, had reached and crossed the boulevard when I got to the drug store.

He stopped by an evergreen tree in the parkway in front of Frank Dantz's house. I approached within 50 feet of him, together with about 150 people.

An old man warned me back; he was a Mr. Tennett who had a real estate office on a lawn near there.

"Don't go too close, Sonny, he might kill someone!" Mr. Tennett himself was killed a year later at that very spot by a hit-and-run driver as he crossed the boulevard.

I saw the young man who cried out the name of his lost friend, or whoever "John" was. Could it have been his brother or cousin or nephew? Someone he loved, surely. Probably a friend. And someone who had gone out of his life as if forever. Probably after a quarrel? Evidently John left on foot and he walked after

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