his wife and Oliver to Roanoke, where he operated a pool hall until Prohibition made that uneconomic, so he and Olivia resumed their hospitality industry careers. The Hill family lived in the same house as Bradford Pentecost and his wife Lelia (d. 1943), who had no children, but often took in boarders who worked on the Norfolk and Southern Railroad like Mr. Pentecost (a cook). Hot Springs had no schools for black children, so Oliver remained in Roanoke, where he attended segregated schools until the eighth grade (the last offered to blacks in the city at the time). He also obtained his first jobs—at a local ice cream parlor (until the local police cited it for violating child labor laws), as well as delivering newspapers and ice, finding more strenuous and well-paying work as he grew stronger. During this time, the Pentecost family bought a larger house, 401 Gilmer Avenue. Hill came to consider Roanoke his childhood home. He later specifically remembered not minding serving food to strikebreakers during the Railroad Strike of 1922, because the striking unions were all-white, and sought to limit Negro employees to hard labor. Mrs. Pentecost tried to keep Oliver from working on the railroad, because her brother dropped out of college to work, and never returned, although many of her boarders were taking a year off working to pay for college. In 1916, the Hills moved to Washington, D.C., where Joseph Hill worked at the Navy Yard during the First World War. Oliver was in the sixth grade, but he did not like the D.C. elementary school he attended for a semester, and so was allowed to return to Roanoke and his foster parents, the Pentecosts. In 1923, further education being unavailable to him in Roanoke, Hill moved to Washington D.C. to attend (and graduate from) Dunbar High School, which at the time may have offered the best education available to black children in the country. At first Oliver was behind a semester academically, and also lacked scholarly seriousness. He also played various sports-especially tennis in Roanoke, but baseball, football and basketball at Dunbar (which did not have a tennis team). Joseph Hill's brother Samuel worked for the post office in Washington, D.C., and in his off-hours worked as a lawyer handling mostly wills and real estate transactions. Samuel Hill died of a cerebral hemorrhage when Oliver was a college sophomore, and his widow