- Seeing my mother wash the outside of the windows in our third-floor apartment at 61 Larch St. in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, by sitting in the window sills. It scared me to death (not literally, of course, but almost)
- Travelling to Revere Beach in Boston, Massachusetts, which was very stony as I recall, not sandy at all
- Going to see Plymouth Rock where the pilgrims disembarked from the good ship
It occurs to me that I have tried to do something like this before, so I searched the blog archives and found a post from October 2013 entitled "Remembrance of things past (part the first)". The rest of this post is that post. Everything in it is still true except that I am now 83 instead of 72.
Remembrance of things past (part the first)
It occurs to me that I keep showing you odd bits of stuff like that film of San Francisco in 1906 but never tell you much about myself.
Today I will tell you
Of average height and average weight, I am a 72-year-old man who spent the last week in September in a hospital where a great deal of poking and prodding and sticking with needles and photographing of my innards and receiving a couple of pints of blood and a few other things too horrible to think about took place. And that was just at the admissions desk.
I was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, (it’s the smallest state in the union, and it’s in New England) because I wanted to be near my mother, and she happened to be there at the time.
We lived in a third-floor apartment of a house at 61 Larch Street and my pediatrician was a Dr. Kachichian. I attended the Pawtucket Day Nursery while my mother, who had received a teaching certificate from West Chester State College in Pennsylvania, worked at the Coats & Clark Thread Factory. My teachers were Miss Irma Chisholm and Mrs. Yvonne Schack. A Portuguese woman in the neighborhood would sometimes take care of me as well and give me apple pie and pastrami for breakfast.
One day at recess, while two children were playing on a seesaw, one jumped off and the other, a black boy named Peter, fell and hurt himself. His arm was bleeding, and I noticed that his blood was red just like mine. I decided on the spot that people are alike on the inside and it is only on the outside that we are different.
When I was about four or five, a man wearing a white sailor uniform began visiting my mother occasionally. My mother called him “Ted” and so did I. Eventually he moved in permanently and my mother told me to call him “Daddy” from then on.
I went to Hancock Street Elementary School to Mrs. Mullins’s kindergarten class, but after four days she took me to first grade. Apparently Pawtucket Day Nursery had done its job well, because I was answering all the questions and telling all the other children the answers. My teacher in first grade was Miss Edith Wildegoose.
(Here I am in the spring of 1947 as a student in Miss Edith Wildegoose’s first grade class. I was six.)
In August 1947 we moved from Rhode Island to Fort Worth, Texas, on a train. It took three days. We arrived on one of the hottest days in the history of Fort Worth, Texas, and walked several blocks from the Texas & Pacific Railroad Station to the Majestic Hotel, which was inaptly named, carrying our luggage. One day, while leaving the hotel to get something to eat, I saw a hotel employee whose skin was so black it was almost blue, who had the whitest teeth and the whitest jacket I had ever seen, sweeping little black things off the sidewalk into little piles in the gutter and setting them on fire. The little black things turned out to be live crickets, and the smell was beyond awful. I was scarred for life in that instant.
A few days later we moved to a boarding house in the Arlington Heights section of Fort Worth. Mrs. Cash, who owned the boarding house, spent her days telling everyone who would listen that her close relative, actress Faye Emerson, was married to Elliott Roosevelt, the son of the President. The phrase “six degrees of separation” had not yet been invented, and actor Kevin Bacon was not born until 1958, but Mrs. Cash was eager for all to know that she was associated with the rich and famous.
My parents eventually rented a small post-war bungalow on a horseshoe-shaped street (2332 Chandler Drive East, on the other end of the horseshoe from Chandler Drive West) and I was enrolled into Mrs. Wolfe’s second-grade class at Oakhurst Elementary School.
I was not to experience urban life for long. In the spring of 1948, we moved again to a three-acre plot two miles from a little town that boasted a one-block-long business district with a traffic signal at both ends. I was to live there for the next ten years.
(End of archived post)
I would just like to reiterate that there is nothing on earth quite like the smell of crickets dying. Driving past a turkey farm with fields full of turkey poop is a close second.
If you are very good I will show you "Remembrance of things past (part the second)" next.
Mu earliest memory is of me standing on the toilet as my mother applied burn cream to my legs worried that they would be scarred for life. They weren't but my hand is. I had just pulled a pan of hot grease melting for popcorn off the stove onto me.
ReplyDeleteOh, my! I’m so sorry to learn that you experienced such pain and suffering as a very young child. I wonder, did it affect your attitude towards eating popcorn in general? Thank you, Emma.
ReplyDeleteThis was a most enjoyable insight into your young life. First school days made an impact - I wonder if they still do. I must ask my children.
ReplyDeleteI remember my mother sitting on the windowsill cleaning the outsides of the windows and did it myself many years later.
I’m glad you enjoyed my memories from early childhood. I guess my mother was safe at all times while washing windows, but it scared the bejeebers (whatever they are) out of me. I was afraid she would fall to her death from three stories up and I would be left all alone in the world with no one to take care of me. I remember that distinctly. Thank you, Janice.
Delete"Driving past a turkey farm with fields full of turkey poop" sounds like a line from a song by your birth brother - Wilson Pickett who sadly died in January, 2006 at the tender age of 64.
ReplyDeleteIf I said I wore a white sport coat and a pink carnation would you have said it sounds like a line from a song by George Hamilton IV? If I said I left my heart in San Francisco would you have said it sounds like a line from a song by Tony Bennett? Those people are not my birth brothers, by the way, but John W. Derr and Wolfgang Bauer were. Thank you, Neil.
ReplyDeleteIt amazes me how quickly time passes and that cute little boy sped through time to become the current you. Memories seem closer during the holidays and loved ones gone are missed even more. Thank you for sharing a bit of your early life, RWP. You were a cutie!
ReplyDeleteYou are certainly right about how quickly the time passes. Yesterday I was a little boy and today I am in my eighties. All 22 of our family were together at Thanksgiving and this year, for the first time ever, the group included three great-grandsons, aged 4 months, 9 months, and 16 months. I can’t remember a happier day. They are the cuties now. God is so good and we are so blessed. I trust you are the same. Great to hear from you. Thank you, Pam.
DeleteYou moved about a bit, I remember you explaining all that not so long ago.
ReplyDeleteDid you find it scary or disruptive?
Although people often tell me I have a very good memory, almost all of the people I remember before we finally moved to Mansfield were adults. I can recall only two children in Rhode Island (the black boy named Peter who fell off the seesaw and cut his arm, and a little blond girl named Elaine in first grade who I thought was very pretty) and none at all in Fort Worth. That is both odd and a bit sad now that I think about it, but at the time it was neither scary nor disruptive. And I don’t think I was shy or a loner. It was just life. You have given me something to think about. Thank you, kylie.
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