14th and Peachtree

Surfing the net last night, I found a great picture at a site called TheStrip Project. Second from the left is Fifi Fiuk, whom I remember well. I believe she and John Peek were also close. Fifi and I had a family connection, and I know that she had been born in Germany during WWII and her early life was very hard. She was very sexy and had this great throaty, Lauren Bacall voice.

[In a conversation with Terry Hamilton tonight, I verified that the girl fourth from the left is Lisa Deadmore, daughter of Lou and Martha Ann Deadmore, long-time Stein Club regulars. If you click on the picture above, it leads to a much larger version of this picture with a listing of who these folks are.]

The picture is just great. It's very representative in that you have a group of fairly unattractive kids who have gone out of their way to be more unattractive, except for the pretty girl sitting down in the bottom row. Notice that she is surrounded by seven pretty dorky boys. Remind anybody of high school? The body language of the black guy says a lot, too, I think.

If I'm not mistaken, the Antebellum house in the background was a supervised rooming house for girls run by, maybe the YWCA. A girlfriend was staying there and, as always, desperate to leave home, I joined her. One of the many concepts that I've had trouble with in my life was curfew. That was at eleven. About 11:30 we came to grips with the fact that the door was locked and we were out on the street. Milling around with the other couple of hundred people, also on the streets, we met a guy who said that he was going out of town and we could use his apartment. We may have been naive but we weren't idiots, and this seemed too good to be true. On the other hand, we were now getting very sleepy, and maybe you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Taking the keys, we walked several blocks up Peachtree, and found the apartment. Sure enough, the key worked and there was a bed and everything. By now it must have been two o'clock in the morning. Sleep came as soon as we lay down. It was probably a little after dawn that the pounding on the door started. It was the sheriff's office. The tenant was being evicted. That included us. Very tired, I went back to the big, white house, collected my stuff, and did the only wise thing: I called my mother. She was very relived to hear from me and came right away.