Explore "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
IT was in another Brooklyn summer but twelve years earlier in nineteen hundred, that Johnny Nolan first met Katie Rommely. He was nineteen and she was seventeen. Katie worked in the Castle Braid Factory. So did Hildy O'Dair, her best friend. They got along well although Hildy was Irish and Katie came from parents who had been born in Austria. Katie was prettier but Hildy was bolder. Hildy had brassy blond hair, wore a garnet-colored chiffon bow around her neck, chewed sen-sen, knew all the latest songs and was a good dancer.
Hildy had a feller, a beau who took her dancing Saturday nights. His name was Johnny Nolan. Sometimes he waited for Hildy outside the factory. He always brought some of the boys along to wait with him. They stood loafing on the corner, telling jokes and laughing.