By Dorothy Stanaitis
Twins were rare on Ogden Street, yet Mrs. McCuen had not one, but two sets of twin girls. Kitty and Betty were the older ones, probably 11 or 12. Patsy and Nancy were the younger twins. And as though two sets of twins wasn’t unusual enough, one twin in each set was blonde and the other was brunette.
 Mrs. McCuen dressed her girls in the plaid uniforms of Our Mother of Sorrows School during the week. On Sundays, they wore the pretty smocked gingham dresses that my mother had made for them — blue for the blonde twins, one large and one small, and pink for the brunettes.
Between the two sets of twins, came my good friend, Theresa.
It was Theresa who told us when Claire Anne was getting married and when Kathleen got a new puppy. I envied Theresa for the neighborhood celebrity her continuous supply of information yielded her, but I was forbidden to leave Ogden Street without my mother, which seriously limited my newsgathering.
So, most of the time, I was curling up with a library book or listening to the children’s serials on the radio, like Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. I even had a Jack Armstrong flashlight that I got by sending in Wheaties boxtops and a dime, I worked for hours in our basement developing an elaborate flashlight code to signal imaginary allies, which I hoped would impress Theresa McCuen, but the flashlight batteries died before I could show it to her.
Then Theresa surprised all of us with a news flash. Even the boys and “big kids” stopped their street games to listen when she announced that Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was coming to the State.
We had all heard about Snow White, the first full-length movie cartoon feature, and some of us even had cousins or friends who had seen it in a Center City theater, but now it was coming to our neighborhood.
Actually, the State wasn’t the closest theater. That was the Frolic, where we went each Saturday for the latest adventure of Tarzan or Roy Rogers. But we all knew where the State was, and I had passed it often on our family’s walks down 52nd Street to Black Oak (now Malcolm X) Park. It was the movie theater where local teenagers went on dates. It was close enough to be reachable on foot, yet far enough to be considered special.
A trip was planned for that very afternoon.
Wild with excitement, I ran home, only to face a terrible disappointment. I was not allowed to cross Market Street without my mother, and she was too busy with the new baby to go. I couldn’t believe it. I’d be the only child on the block to miss Snow White.
I went outside to share my disappointment with the little group gathered around the older McCuen twins, who were leading the expedition to the State that afternoon.
“Don’t worry, kid, we’ll talk to your mother,” one said, and off they went to my front door. It seemed like a long, long time before the twins came back. I held my breath until I heard the news. I would be joining the group after all.
The twins collected everyone’s movie money, tied it in their handkerchiefs and tucked them into their pockets. Then we all walked up Ogden Street on our way to see Snow White.
|