Alfred D Guion

AT DELL AVENUE

        As Lincoln Avenue was the home of my childhood and boyhood, 71 Dell Avenue, Mount Vernon, was the home of my youth and early married life.  There I emerged from High School, started a business, married and began bringing up a family.

It may have been the fact that my mother had to live very economically that the value of the dollar was early impressed on my growing mind and the advantage of a savings account became important.  My mother paid me ten cents a day for cleaning ashes from the furnace and stoking it in the winter time, and once a week rolling the ash barrel from the cellar door at the back of the house to the curb in front for the ash man to collect.  I took great pride in watching my savings account grow, which enabled me eventually to…

The following memories are quotes from “Reminiscences of Alfred D.  Guion, written in 1960 while he was on a four-months “around the world” freighter trip.

The story of my boyhood would not be complete if I failed to mention my sisters and my favorite cousins and playmates – the Duryees – Adele, Nan and Dudley.  Dud was my own age, the girls a few years older.  Adele, who was three or four years my senior, seemed, at my age, to be old.  Their father, whom I called Uncle Eddie, was my mother’s cousin, and although he had perfectly good and respectable parents he turned out to be the black sheep of the family.  Alcohol was the cause.  In these days we would have regarded his failing as a disease and taken medical means to correct it, but at that time no such charitable view was taken.  My mother, who always…