Schnectady Union-Star, November 23, 1954:
Mrs. C. D. Livingston, 952 Wendell Ave., entertained Saturday afternoon in honor of the ninth birthday of her daughter Diane.
Tommy Atkins entertained with puppets “Magic” and her two ventriloquial friends, “Cookie and Oogle.”
Guests were Marnie Morris, Kathy Vinick, Emmy Tischler, Ceil Cummings, Donna Cole, Peggy MacAndrew, Maxine Dehncke, Enid Hart, Eileen Casell, Betty Lou Ragland, Elain Cramer, Elaine Fifield, Anne Gates and Diane Durante.
The two-story brick house at 952 Wendell Avenue stands occupied but freyed from the urban life that has circled and gnawed away at it for seventy years. As a brick dwelling, it has done better than many. It has two spacious front porches with nice railings.
Schenectady, New York is a hard scrabble box of memories — The Electric City for its General Electric association. G.E. and its steam turbine division have dwindled to an iconic brick building and a sprawling, mostly empty parking lot.
Tiime rushing in a torrent along the Mohawk River.
I’ve driven by that house on Wendell Avenue in sunlight and shadow, in all seasons — Diane has pointed it out to me — driven up the gentle hill that is that sidestreet toward a main street — the street and neighborhood having slowly gone to seed.
Diane Livingston became Diane Harrison in 1963, pregnant at 17, mother ultimately of four children by David Harrison. The other little girls…she knows the fate of some, not of others. Not of Tommy Atkins.
There are home movies of that November day, shadowy, puppeteer Tommy Atkins? It is a woman, an elegant woman, the puppets floppy, silly and delightful, talking. Tommy’s lips move barely perceptibly. The movies are silent, the girls delighted, their small voices only imagined, shy before the camera, all dressed up by their mothers.
Mrs. C.D. Livingston died in 1999.
One of the girls, Marnie, became a ballarina in New York City.
The sweet, aching dance of time.
Out of Childhood.
Away from Innocence.
Diane turned nine on November 26, 1954
I turned eight the next day.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
-F.C. Fitzgerald, 1925
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