The Holesome Bakery Searchlight
	Dear Janice, this was a little before your time but during W.W.II there were searchlights all over the country to watch for planes. After the war there was a smattering of them left around. They were really awesome to see at night. One of these searchlights was on the side yard of the Holesome Bakery which was about two miles from our house. Andy and I, when we were little things, used to sleep on the old screened in back porch of our house on Ellicott Street. We'd lie there and watch the searchlight beam make it's revolutions in the sky. It took one minute for it to make one full revolution. We'd try to hold our breaths for one full revolution. Sometimes we could do it and sometimes we couldn't. He, of course was better at it than I was. At the age of about ten and twelve, Andy was really into Batman and Mother had made him a Batman suit. We (he) got the bright idea that he was going to stand in front of the Holesome Bakery searchlight with his cape spread out and project the bat signal onto the night sky like they did in the comic books. We waited one dark night until 9:00 or 10:00 and snuck out, he in his Batman costume and I in my little cut offs, tee shirt and barefooted. We walked on backstreets all the way to the Holesome Bakery. I remember the dogs barking at us on the way. There was a fine, fine mist in the air. We got to the back street of the bakery and we crept across the lawn. I can still feel, to this day the wet, very thick, spongy lawn under my bare feet. Andy didn't seem to be as scared as I was. We snuck up to where the searchlight was. It had to have been five feet across the lens and the powerful beam shot up into the night sky for miles! The apparatus itself was sitting up on an about four ft. high mound with sloped sides that were red brick. There was a little door in the side of that sloped wall and a room under the searchlight where the attendant was sitting reading a magazine. I felt Andy's damp cape slip through my fingers as he very quietly climbed up the sloped wall to the top of the flat "mound" where the searchlight was. He stood in front of it and spread his cape wide. And all of a sudden steam started flying off of his cape and it looked like he was going to burst into flames at any second! He flew down from there and we tore across that lawn and back home to our bed as fast as we could. And that was the night of the bat signal...idea. Lynn