Whatever the reason, Los Angeles became our new home. It was for me, anyway, a very difficult adjustment. I was no longer a novelty in our small town. Everyone was accustomed to me and my crutches and knew my complete history right back to Mother's first labor pain. But here was a huge city of strangers, all staring at me, or so I surmised. My surmise was not too exaggerated either, for the more curious often stopped me on the street and made blatant inquiry. "My poor girl, whatever happened to you?"

Strange men offered me rides. I am sorry to admit that probably not one of these misunderstood gentlemen had so much as a mild flutter of bad intention toward me. In my middy blouse marching myself to high school on my crutches, I am pretty sure I didn't set the baser instincts spinning. Having been warned, however, that a city man behind the wheel of an automobile was definitely not the same cozy dish of tea that my father was, I always went into a panic when a car pulled to the curb and some harmless man stuck a head out and yelled, "Little girl, can't I drive you to school?" I refused always, just as.promptly as my chattering jaws would allow, and at the same time I barked off down the street as fast as I could navigate in reverse.

I was so accustomed to treatment exactly like that accorded all the other boys and girls in our town that it didn't occur to me that I was singled out for gratuitous transportation because I was crippled. This was surely the evil city it'd been warned against.

With some reticence I finally broached the delicate problem to my sister, who was by this time a very worldly freshman at U.S.C. I dared not mention it to Mother who supposedly had known the facts of life for some time but was still acutely embarrassed over them.

"Are the white slavers after you, too?" I began timidly.

"Louise!" My sister grabbed my shoulder and shook me in her horrified astonishment. "What are you saying? Of course they aren't after me! What do you mean?" She paused in her tirade long enough to reassure herself by looking me up and down. "They couldn't be after you."

Bernice didn't often give me her unwavering attention, but I had it now. "Yes, they are so after me," I insisted with just a touch of pride. "And you'd better believe it, so there!" I proceeded to tell her how almost every day some sinister fiend, disguised in respectable pin-stripe or navy serge, pulled up and offered me a ride.

Bernice released her breath with a long, relieved sigh.

"Do women ever offer you rides?" she demanded, completely calm again.

"Oh, yes - sometimes women offer me rides, too. I get in with them. They drive me to school."

"Did it ever occur to you that maybe the men want to drive you to school too, you little goose?"

"Oh, they say they do - but I wasn't born yesterday." I squinted my eyes to give the impression of vast sophistication.

Bernice proceeded thoroughly to blast my ego. "It's because of your crutches, silly. They're just being nice to you."

"Oh, my goodness," I gasped, remembering with embarrassment the awfull imprecations I had heaped on several innocent heads. It suddenly seemed so simple. "I might as well ride then, I suppose."

"Oh, no!" Bernice said firmly. "Better not ride. Heaven knows, I think you're quite safe." It didn't sound flattering the way she put it. "Still there are some queer characters in the world. Just say, 'No, thank you,' but for goodness' sake, be polite about it!"

The very next day a man offered me a ride, and in consequence of his kindly insight, made a great contribution to both my transportation problem snd my popularity. He pulled up, tendered his invitation, and was refused - this time with elaborate courtesy.

"Your mother doesn't let you ride with strangers, does she?" he asked. "I don't blame her either, but I go directly by your school and I'd very much like to give you a lift. See those boys coming down the street there? Do you know them?"

I was too new to know anybody. "No," I admitted, "but that middle one's the captain of the football team at high school."

"If I offer them a ride too and they get in, will you? I'm a frail fellow and those three lads can finish me off thoroughly, if I get fresh." He laughed.

This was the first of my would-be abductors that I'd ever paused to study. He didn't look the least bit like a disguised procurer. As a matter of fact, he looked very nice although not as exciting as his predecessors who I had imagined were tapping me for the life of shame.

"Hey, fellows!" he yelled. "How about a ride to school?"

They came running and leaped in. I got in, too, still a bit wary. The trip wasn't the Road to Buenos Aires, however. We were deposited without mortal struggle at the high school.

From then on the captain of the football team said "Hi" whenever we met. It helped my social standing, as a newcomer, no end.

When I told Father about this, without elaborating on my former experiences with the white slavers, he gave me permission to ride with strangers who would pick up a whole carload.

From then on, whenever a driver stopped and offered me a ride, I suggested that he also take whatever boys and girls were near by on the sidewalk. He was always amenable. Before very long no one was more popular as a walking companion than I. It was actually the way I first got acquainted in high school.

The years from fourteen to eighteen are probably the darkest ones that a handicapped person must struggle through. Adolescence is not only a period of mercurial moods, it is also a period of great con-formity. Any deviation from the norm is felt most acutely at this time in life. A batch of schoolgirls are likely to be almost monotonous in their similarity. If an oversize man's shirt with the tails flapping in the breeze is the chic rage of the hour, all the girls promptly rig themselves out in such monstrosities. If "wizard" is the momentarily approved adjective and anything exciting is supposed to "send you," all adolescent girls recite by rote, "It's wizard" - "It sends me." They only feel secure in complete conformity. It is much later that the equally strong urge for individuality develops. So - during my adolescence I suffered inwardly because crutches weren't sufficiently fashionable to start a wave of amputations.

The weight of my crutch-born individuality was heavy upon me. However, if I had only recognized the fact, it served me well. I was easy to identify. I could never have been a Pinkerton operator, but no one who met me once, forgot me - not because of my memorable personality and my ravishing beauty, but because of my crutches. In one semester in that large metropolitan high school of some four thousand students, I became almost as well known as the best quarter-back. I was also friendly by nature and became a sure thing on a political ticket.

I began to be nominated and elected to all kinds of school and club offices. Practically everyone knew my name and was on speaking terms with me. Also, I had the solid political support of all the smooth girls in school. They were willing to vote for me because they liked me, of course, but also heavily weighted in my favor was the fact that I was no Menace. They figured I'd never beat their time with any of the boys who rated sufficiently to serve with me on the Student Council. I am not obtuse enough to insist that my crutches alone made me "The People's Choice" but I do know they had a great deal to do with it.

This tendency for success in student politics carried right through college. I got quite a reputation for being executive. Actually, I was about as executive as a spring fryer trying to outwit the man with the ax. I didn't actually yank myself out of this compensatory political bingeing until I was mature enough to see the horrible humor in Helen Hokinson's cartoons. I decided I'd better pull myself together or I'd turn out to be a "club dowager" or worse yet, a Congress-woman - and then, God save America! Now, even under the unscrupulous spell of a hypnotist, I don't believe my well-behaved tongue would say "Yes," if someone asked me to serve temporarily as sixteenth alternate on an unimportant subcommittee.

But in high school, dashing about managing things helped me a great deal psychologically. I was president of one thing or another twelve times before I graduated. But the sad truth was - I would much rather have been "right" than president. I was all wrong.

Adolescent boys are precisely the conformists that adolescent girls are. My male classmates all picked carbon copies for girl friends. At that age when the height of achievement is leading a prom grand march with a gangly pimpled youth, I was a great gal with the gavel. It wasn't adequate compensation. I was pretty enough, all Grandmother's direst prophecies to the contrary. My wardrobe was tasteful and adequate and magnificently reinforced by illegal pirating of my sister's closet. So far as I know, I had none of the awful afflictions that advertisers lead one to believe make wallflowers out of glamour girls. However, I led the sort of life that prompted Mother to say, "Isn't it wonderful that Louise isn't boy crazy? Remember Bernice at that age? My goodness, we couldn't sweep the place clean of boys. Louise is so sensible."

Dear Mama! I was about as sensible as a Mongolian idiot. I was just as boy crazy as Bernice, but I was infinitely more frustrated since I didn't have Bernice's reassuring following.

Oh, I got my hand squeezed a few times. Boys took me to the movies occasionally and played tennis with me, and I regularly helped several classy dunder-heads with their homework. A couple of boys even kissed me when I was sixteen, but one of these was a Lothario who made a bet that he would kiss every girl in the senior class who didn't have eczema or buck teeth. And with the other, I suspect, kissing was a reflex action that came automatically with the words "good night" I was just a "dandy pal" - a nauseating phrase - to the boys. I even maneuvered dates for them with the ladies of their choice. But I wasn't the least bit pleased with my "wholesome relationships." For all the good it did me, moonlight might have been an impractical invention of the Mazda Lamp Company. I certainly would have had one hell of a time becoming a juvenile delinquent.

"Make her practice her music lessons," Grandma used to say. "Or teach her stenography. She'll never get a man." I took my second husband out to Grandmother's grave a couple of years ago, just to show her! I heard Grandma rotating like a whirling dervish.

However, in my teens I shared Grandma's grimmest expectations. I decided to be an intellectual - the toast of Bohemian salons! I even took to writing poetry - a charitable way of putting it. My effusions were of the "Oh, Love, let us flee - our souls are stifling" school. I read books - uninteresting, uplifting, deep ones, with now and then a detective story tossed in, just to keep me in tune with the world. I would much rather have misspent my youth in riotous living.

But, like a lot of bad-tasting medicine, all this dosage resulted in eventual good. The reading made a permanent impression on me. More important at the time - or so it seemed to me - I got a masculine following! The long hairs, who likewise had stifled souls, began taking an interest in me. They were mostly pasty-faced lads who just despised football. They got straight A averages in school but ran to drooping shoulders from carrying heavy books, and thick glasses from eye strain. I'd have traded them, three to one, for a really dangerous muscle-bound deadhead. However, at sixteen, a girl on crutches counts her blessings by quantity not quality.

"I wonder where those boy friends of yours go at night?" my sister once asked. "Into dank holes? I bet they weren't born either - I bet they were spawned."