During the summer season brother Willie took farm produce to Atlantic City by horse and wagon, and when I had done well with pitching, picking berries, washing and bunching vegetables and other chores, he occasionally took me along. It was a five-hour drive over the Tilton Road, with its deep ruts and sand hills, to the turnpike toll gate in Pleasantville, where we sometimes had to awaken the keeper to unlock the gate. When the toll was paid and he let us through, we went over the road to Florida Avenue in Atlantic City. This was a corduroy road made with pine poles, covered with a few inches of gravel.
While brother was selling the produce, some of the neighbor boys and myself went down to the beach or played in the sand dunes below Georgia Avenue.
After lunch brother would go around to collect for the morning sales, stopping at a produce market on Atlantic Avenue. I noticed a lady who was speaking through a small funnel into a wooden box on the wall. The box was too small for someone to be inside, so I went to the outside of the building to see who she was talking to, but all I could see was a couple of wires leading up to a hole.
On the way home, I questioned my brother about this funny, strange thing. He said, "That is the new invention, called a telephone, and the person she was talking to was in some other building at the end of the wire." What I could not understand was how those small wires could have openings in them large enough to talk through.