Back to Plymouth Avenue

I was thinking about my old neighborhood again, where I said earlier that I ended up for 9^th through high school graduation. So I “Googled” Plymouth Avenue and so far only one photo came up, which is at the same location as the cartoon version I posted in an earlier blog. I am inserting it again along with the actual photo, which is from 1943. The first business visible on the left is the North Side Bakery, where my best friend Gary Lundquist was a baker for several years. In the middle of the next block is the Homewood Theatre, where we took in Saturday matinees for 12 cents and a dime for popcorn, and where I got so lost in the movieland dream world that my mother would on occasion have to come looking for me as I stayed for the second feature. And on the near corner is Strimling’s Drugstore, where we sat at the counter and slurped our cherry cokes and chocolate “phosphates.” The entire business district has been replaced after it was virtually burned out, I believe in the 1968 riots following the King assassination (correct me on the year if I have it wrong). There will never be another avenue like Plymouth or another neighborhood like the Old North Side. I do sometimes miss it.