Grandpa's Real Story

My little brother and me, around 1947.


I was born in 1943. For the first seven months of my life my
mother and father and I lived in a big building on Westgate Avenue in the University City loop. The building was so big that twelve different families lived in apartments in that building. I don't have any memories of what that apartment was like. Hardly anyone can remember things from when they were small babies.

When I was seven months old, my father had to go into the army, and my mother and I went to live with her parents, my grandparents, in their house on Stanford Avenue in University City. I do have some memories of this house, and I've been back to look at it since. It is still there and looks nice. What I remember most is that my grandparents had a wooden coffee table that was covered with a sheet of clear glass, to keep the wood from getting scratched. I liked to play with it by picking up one end of the table so it tilted, and my grandmother let me do it. On at
least two occasions I accidentally tilted it too far so the glass slid off and broke.

When I was seventeen months old, my father came back, and we moved to a kind of house called a duplex at 7208 Dartmouth Avenue in University City. One family lived on the first floor of the house and a different family lived on the second floor. There were two front doors. One led into the first floor, and the other led directly to a staircase that went up to the
second floor. At the top of the stairs was another door that had to be opened before you went into the actual second floor. We lived in this house until I was nine years old. First we lived on the second floor, and then we moved to the first floor. Our part of the house had three
bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. There was also a basement that was shared by both families.

When I was very young, it was hard to buy toys, and at first I had only three toys. The one I liked best was some boxes that fit inside each other.

My brother Ken was born when I was two years and nine months old. I still remember the day when he was brought home from the hospital. I hadn't known before I saw him that my mother was going to have a baby. He cried a lot and didn't do much when he was a small baby. For some of the time we lived on Dartmouth my brother and I slept in separate bedrooms, and our parents slept in the other bedroom. And for some of the time Ken and I slept in the same bedroom, and one bedroom was used as a playroom. We kept our toys there. Even if we had the toys spread out all over the floor, it didn't make a mess in the rest of the house.

There were a lot of children living on Dartmouth. To play with other children, all we had to do was go outside. Some other children would be there for us to play with. There was a vacant lot next to our house where we children could play the kind of games where we ran around. We didn't know who owned that vacant lot, but it didn't matter. No one told us not to play there. I've been back since that time to look at the house, and there are now two houses on what used to be the vacant lot. Apparently it was really a double size lot, but I didn't know that as a child.

All of the houses on Dartmouth had concrete steps in front of them. The land that the houses actually stood on was higher than the street, and the front lawns had hills leading from the street up to the houses. The steps were so people could walk to the front door without having to walk on the lawns. Some of the games we children played were on these steps. One was
called stepball. We used a small ball that would bounce when you threw it at the steps. There were special rules about who threw it and who would try to catch it after it bounced, but I don't remember the rules. We knew that if the ball bounced too far and went into the street, we just had to stay on the sidewalk and watch it. There might be a car coming, and it would have been dangerous to chase the ball into the street. Another game we played was called teacher. The different children would be sitting on some of the steps. The one sitting on the top step was called Teacher, and the idea was to get to be Teacher. You could challenge the kid sitting on the step above yours, and that kid would hold out two closed hands with a pebble in one hand. You had to guess which hand held the pebble. If you guessed right, you could move up one step, but if you guessed wrong, you had to go down to the bottom.