Welcome to my Early Years!

I was born in a small south central town in Lower Michigan on September 11, 1951.  My first home was a small house in town, built by my mother and dad, after they moved from a rented farm house.  I had two older brothers, no sisters.  I remember eating cheeseburgers and ice cream on a raised wooden platform leading into the kitchen, which served as our deck.  I don’t remember much about that first house, and we later moved into a different house uptown when I was between four and five years old.  I do remember lying in my baby bed during a daily, regularly scheduled nap time, when my brother came in and demonstrated his new wind up fire chief’s car, which I had to stand up in bed to see; next my mother coming in to give me a brief spanking for standing up when I was supposed to be sleeping.  A visiting neighbor girl felt sorry for me and reached her arm through my bed bars and stuck a penny package of Kit candy (individually wrapped taffies) under my pillow.

In 1955 or 1956 my parents bought a burned out house closer to town.  I remember watching the high school band marching by our house and waving to me, and I don’t remember going to school at that time, so I must have been about four years old.  I can remember finding a blackened noise making toy (the little tin barrel with something inside that clunked around when you pushed it with its handle) in a burned back room/coal bin, and playing with it around the yard.  My mother and dad spent a considerable amount of time fixing and repairing all of the fire damage to that house.  I don’t really know how my dad found the time to completely redo a burned out house when I remember him having two full time jobs most of the time.  I understand the house previously caught fire after being struck by lightning and that a women and a child died from the smoke.  That was a sad thought, but didn’t seem to bother us a whole lot, it was just a place to live and had enough room to allow us to have our own bedrooms (although I did always worry a little during electrical storms).

I remember wanting an upstairs bedroom, so when one was ready, I moved into my own room upstairs.  That didn’t last very long because I was afraid my bed was going to go crashing down through the floor, with me on it (this was the first house I lived in that had an upstairs).  After a couple of nights of lying awake in my bed, yelling, I was moved into the only downstairs bedroom.  Everything was OK after that.  This house didn’t have a tub or shower, I took my baths in a laundry tub in the middle of the kitchen floor.  It was kind of embarrassing to be taking a bath and have company come over.  My dad installed the first shower when I was twenty some years old and on my own.  Our only heat was from a fuel oil space heater which sat in the corner of the dining room.  It heated that room rather nicely, but we froze to death upstairs (when I wasn’t too scared to be up there).  I remember a measurable amount of ice on many of the windows, during the winter.  Also, a real furnace came much later.