With the new prosperity came growth, and as a country grows so do her cities and towns. And as towns prosper, they breed violence. I was only a kid but I heard some grownups telling about a man who got shot in Hamlin. One man was after another man with a shotgun. He got off one good shot, which proved to be effective enough. The man who got shot ran into a hardware store, ran through the store and out into the alley, up the alley a few doors, then ran back into a drygoods store. There he crawled under a counter to hide and died. That's how I remember it. That's all I ever heard about it. I don't know who got shot nor why. During all this time, naturally, we kids were growing up too. Frank was almost a grown man and Susie had fallen in love. When she was born, they named her Susie. But it wasn't long till her Aunt Annie nicknamed her "Sookie." She hated that nickname ever- so-much. Nevertheless, she was stuck with it until she began to get serious about having Dode Sanford over to our house for supper quite a few times through the week and almost every Sunday night. Then she began asking us kids to call her Susie. She even gave us a penny now and then to do so. Fifty years later she moved to California and changed her name again--to Susan. Some girls are just never satisfied with what other people give them. She still argues that she was named Susan to begin with. And she's probably right, Jones County didn't start keeping records until four years later. Anyway, Uncle Jim's farm joined our farm on the east. Dode was working for Uncle Jim on his farm. That made Dode and Susie next- door neighbors. I think that was about the time I began to learn a little bit about what being sweethearts was all about. Well, the long-awaited day finally arrived and Susie and Dode got married. I don't remember much about it all. In fact, I never did know much about it. They didn't tell me and I didn't know enough about it to know what kind of questions to ask to find out more. If I remember right, it seems they just drove away in the car one day with Papa, and when they returned, someone told me they were married. I couldn't tell by looking; they looked the same as ever to me. I was told they went to see a preacher but I didn't know what for. Even at that early date, the county began to need better roads. Farmers were allowed to work on the county roads so-many days a year as a way of paying their taxes. The road work could be done at a time most convenient to the individual farmers. This was not a matter of welfare handouts to farmers. Rather, it was a case where farmers worked together to improve conditions in their community and still keep their money at home. If a man was unable to do his share of the road work, the county would collect tax money from that man and use it to hire another man to work in his place.