The Journey to the West (7)

Here is another brief contribution to my "sort of memoir."

My father must have bought the first house about the time I was born. It was virtually downtown, being only a block from the business district and across the street from the Elks Club and the Post Office. We must have lived there until I was about two. I have no memories of living there but there are photographs that attest to it. The house was fairly large, frame (as were most of the houses in our town), with bedrooms upstairs. My father decided to rent it and bought a duplex two doors away where we moved. We rented the downstairs of the duplex and lived upstairs. It was a kind of strange place. There was a very narrow, dark set of stairs that led to our home. We lived in two stories, the first of which consisted of a large kitchen, small bathroom with only a tub, two bedrooms, and a large screened in porch. This was screened with something I think was called cellotex (a kind of plastic screening that did not allow air to penetrate). On this porch was my mother’s piano, our ice box, and a few places to sit. We did not have a refrigerator until I was a teenager. The iceman would come once a week, climbing up the steep back stairs with a twenty-five pound block of ice on his shoulder. The milkman delivered milk up the same narrow stairway, milk that came in bottles that he left on the little porch we had, where in cold weather the frozen cream would rise up out of the bottles. Wood and presto- logs were also kept on the small porch, with a small hatchet to break them up. There was no central heating, merely a large wood cook stove in the kitchen that heated water and warmed the one floor where we spent most of our time. As I recall, we rarely bathed more than once a week, and we had no telephone. We slept upstairs in a third floor attic, my parents each had their own double bed on one side of the chimney and I had a similar bed on the other side. There was a large walk-in closet where my father kept his guns locked in an ugly home-made box and we kept our clothing. I remember it as being warm and comfortable. As it was also at the time of the Lindberg kidnapping I also remember being frightened at night at imaginary figures created by an old-fashioned chest of drawers with upright arms that supported a mirror where my father hung his neckties.

For a time we had a boarder named Alma. She was very Swedish. I do not think this was a financial arrangement as Alma was a friend of the family, working as a waitress, who needed a place to stay. After she left we never had another boarder. She was quite nice except for the one time I walked in on her in the bathtub. I thought it was her own fault for not locking the door, but children rarely get the best of an argument with adults. When I was still small my mother would get up in the morning, start a fire, and when it began to warm up she would stand me up on a stool and dress me for the day. She also used to warm the cold toilet seat for me. I was pretty spoiled in that way. In the winter when I came in with freezing hands and feet she would sit me with my feet in the oven and rub my hands. I never doubted that my parents loved me, although I later sometimes came to doubt why they should.

There was a small backyard, probably not much bigger than forty feet by forty. Along one side was a woodshed and a boardwalk that led to a tumbling-down garage. There was no grass in this yard, just dirt. But I often played there with a little pedal car and other toys. Virtually no one tried to garden in our town as the soil was not fertile and there was little room. Our next-door Italian neighbors, the Costellos, had a tiny garden where they grew mostly herbs. I remember Mrs. Costello offering me food from time to time, like red peppers in oil and such. As I thought all red peppers were hot I always refused her. She must have thought I was crazy. She had one son, Martin, who was three or four years older than me. He used to tinker a lot with an old Model A Ford, make lead soldiers, and snorkel in his bathtub. He was always nice to me although we did not play together. His father was said to be mean and often beat him for even minor offenses. My parents were horrified as they did not believe in corporal punishment for children.

I was fortunate in having playmates that were almost exactly my age living within just a few hundred feet of me. Billy Zent lived across the alley, and Norman Letchet lived in our rental house. Bill had an older brother, Clifford, a year older, who also played with us. In those early days we mostly played Cowboys and Indians, Robin Hood, Cops and Robbers, as those were what we saw weekly in the movies. We went faithfully every Saturday where there were serials to be followed and lots of “B” pictures to enjoy. Once a year there was “Pals Day,” where two of us could attend for only ten cents (ten cents was the going fee for movies in those happy days). Ice cream cones were a nickel, hamburgers were a dime or fifteen cents. We had two movie theatres, one somewhat better than the other, but both offering pretty much the same fare. I recall when seeing Frankenstein for the first time I hid under the seat with my sheepskin coat over my head. I never liked horror films, or anything grotesque in any way, including Halloween, a quirk of character that is with me to the present day.