Finding youth

FINDING YOUTH
A Human Experience
Nelson Andrews
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS BOSTON
Copyright 1921, 1922 by FRED G. ANDREWS Santa Barbara California
The reader of these pages need scarcely be told that there is truth in them, and a deeper truth in the lesson that they teach. For this chronicle, in its essentials, might have been written of many a life other than his whose simple story is here set down.
FINDING YOUTH
This story is told because others need to know it. They need to know it now, when all the world is making a blind struggle to find youth-a new creative spirit.
It is the experience of just a common, everyday man-myself. But thousands of others have gone through my same experience. They are not finding the help, though, that I found. It is because I found this help-found something that man has always been seeking-that I feel impelled to tell my story.
My name is Harvey Allen. I was born in New York City and had lived there all my life. When the Big Thing happened, I was sixty years old. My wife and I had two sons, both married. We had six grandchildren.
We had lived in the same Harlem apartment for twenty years-with front windows looking out on the street, side air-shafts, and a rear view of clotheslines and fire-escapes. I never see a clothesline now that I don’t think of that day in October.
The neighborhood had changed since our coming. The Ghetto had expanded and taken us in. The color-line was drawn just a block away, in the next street. But the place was home, and we had stuck there.