So I graduated from high school with a job and a car already well in hand, and I began to look at a path forward in the world. I could not spend my life as a “maintenance man,” no matter how much satisfaction I derived from the work, so what next?

I was already teaching some classes at church. I was already reading and listening to philosophy as a sort of avocation, and I needed more mental stimulus, but I did not want what appeared to be the confinement of studying ones and zeroes all day, and neither I nor my family could afford college. A friend of mine from church was and electrician and was about to move out of state for family reasons, and approached me to see if I’d like to be an electrician. My starting pay would be more than double what I was making at the hotel, and there was room for growth. Further, there was a mental aspect to the job. I liked the idea. He introduced me to his boss, and I was hired.

I was only a few months into the job but ready to take my journeyman’s exam, when the boss required me and his best journeyman to fake up compliance with electrical codes on the job. We were not in compliance because the boss had supplied the wrong wire, but he required we fake it to pass inspection. The inspector caught the fake and red-tagged the job. The general contractor threatened to throw the boss’s company off the job and never hire him again, unless he fired the people “to blame” for the fake. With actual tears in his eyes, the boss fired me and Larry, and the same day called to recommend us to another company. I started with the new company the next day. Then construction money dried up in the valley and there was a huge construction shutdown, which meant all the newest crew at all the construction companies were let go. Being in construction wasn’t quite the smooth ride I had hoped. But another friend of mine from church was building two large “spec” homes (homes built on the speculation he would be able to sell them) in the hills. He asked me to straw-boss the construction which meant, in practice, I would find a skilled laborer for each trade, one at a time, and work along side them to get the houses done. I did that, kept working and getting paid, and learned more about the trades in the process. By the time these houses were “dried in,” I could basically build a house myself and, much later, I kind of did so.

When the houses were about done, my uncle came to town for a visit and we got to talking. He worked for a large multi-national out of state and wanted me to come work with him. So I did. Up to this point, I had continued to live at home, eventually coming to the point of paying my parents rent. I had also during this time wrecked my VW Bug and sold it to my friend at the hotel, who converted it to a dune buggy, bought a Honda 50 for transportation, sold that and bought a big old boat of a Dodge sedan that barely ran. The whole top end of the engine needed rebuilt. The brakes were bad. The motor mounts were shot. The rear axle bearings made noise. I had never been a mechanic, and had no training, but I borrowed a Motors Manual and a box of tools from a guy who lived in our guest house, and completely rehabbed that car. Later I sold it to an electrician friend and bought a hotrod coupe from another electrician friend, and that’s what I was driving when my uncle came to town.

But, “guest house” you say? Yes During high school and into my electrician career, in keeping with our need for a new home every 20 minutes or so, our family had sold the trailer and the lot it was on, bought a biggish house in town, sold that, and bought another house with a guest house on the outskirts, near our church. In these larger houses, we rented out rooms to an army vet, a young guy crippled with arthritis, and a woman who was a college student and artist. I can’t remember what she actually did for money. The army vet managed a health food store, and the arthritic dude collected Social Security or welfare or both. On moving to the house on the outskirts, we rented the guest house to the two men, and a room in the house to the artist. It was a four-bedroom, my big sis had married and moved out, my older brother had gone to the military, and so we had a spare room. But finally, I flew the nest.

At the new job with my uncle, I started in the personnel training section based on my experience with teaching classes. I was later promoted to a staff productivity and morale job in Human Resources, during which time I met, courted and married my wife. We met in March, moved in together in July, and married in November. To this day I don’t know why she picked me. She was model-beautiful, brilliant, down-to earth and tough as nails. She is to this day. One of the most capable people I have ever known. I was ultimately recruited to join the internal security team of this company where I worked. My job there would be to ferret out actual industrial spies and get them pursued in court. My posting would be to a position that supervised offices in five states. To do this job, I had to undergo 18 months of training, 9:00 in the morning to 10:30 at night (with meal breaks) in human behavior, formal logic, common law, spycraft, interviewing techniques, ability to observe in detail, and ability to research essentially any subject or person in depth. Upon embarking on the job itself, my pay went up substantially. My wife and I, having bought our first home by then, and our first new car, calculated this was a good time to start a family, and so we did. During almost my entire tenure with this company, a friend of mine in HR who had experience in construction, and I, did add-ons and remodels for extra money. We weren’t licensed for this, but we were just selling “labor” to “friends,” so no one cared. Later, for extra money, I began to take in cars from friends that needed work, and fixed them in my driveway. I became familiar with pretty much all systems in all cars and trucks.

After seven and a half years with my uncle, advances in technology dictated some efficiency gains at the company, and the office I was in charge of was closed – all operations converted from telex, fax and mail to computer-based systems, and consolidated into the home office. They told me if I would move out of state, they had a job for me and maybe the Mrs. as well, but by then we had a kid, another on the way, my wife’s family lived in town and one-by-one, for one reason or another, it happened my family had moved to town as well. I declined the new job and, never having been unemployed for more than a day since I was sixteen, was confident I would find something, close to home.

And out of the blue, an attorney called me and offered me a job – with another increase in pay. This attorney had worked for the firm that represented my former company office, was going out on his own, and was familiar with my work because of his work on our legal matters. He wanted to know if I could double as his paralegal (he would train me) and investigator (which I already knew how to do). He had three cases that needed to be prepared for trial, and he proposed I could try out on those cases, he would pay me by the hour, and if I did as well as he thought I would, he would hire me full time. That’s what happened. I worked for him for 16 1/2 years. He was one of the most successful trial lawyers in our area – president of the State Bar Council, voted Trial Attorney of the Year more than once, and generally highly respected.

When the trailer was all packed up and hooked to the hauler, we followed it to Arizona. Mon & Dad had secured a lot in a “trailer estates” out past the edge of town – a place where you bought your lot and parked your trailer. It was going to take several days to get the trailer set up, so we stayed at a hotel. Which hotel you ask? Why, the one managed by one of our friends we had made near our getaway with the cabin, of course. We got the room for free, there was a pool, and the kids of the manager were allowed to eat for free in the coffee shop, and so treated us kids to lunch repeatedly. So we had moved to a town where we already had friends. And dad’s job paid better than the one before.

I entered school at the beginning of the second semester, and started off on good footing. I joined the fencing club and the forensic society, took typing and German (I was already semi-proficient in Spanish, having taken it for two years in California) and other electives that I liked, and otherwise advanced classes in English, math and science. While at this school, I won an oratory contest at club, city and regional levels, and then completely embarrassed myself with a devastating case of stage fright in front of thousands of people at the state competition. Oops. I made friends at the bus stop, one of whom I’m in touch with to this day. He lived in a big, nice double-wide in the trailer estates, and we played chess and Risk together, messed around with his Ham radio, and built and re-built his train sets. We were certifiable nerds. The kid across the street from us had a .22 rifle and a .410 shotgun, and we would go into the desert and shoot random stuff. Another kid at the bus stop was a complete and intentional jerk and, after more than a year of insufferable crap from him, I punched him in the face one morning. But that’s another story. A woman with two daughters between our house and the bus stop was a Jehovah’s Witness, and determined to convert our family. My dad had been raised by Presbyterian missionaries, his father was a Doctor of Divinity and head of mission (his mother was one of the first female medical doctors licensed in the US), and my dad had gotten his degrees at a church-run college. He was what you might consider a biblical scholar. And he LOVED debating with this woman. Just sayin’. Seems we were not converted.

I spent only a semester and one more full year at this first high school, because a brand new high school opened nearer to our house, and so about a third of the student body, no seniors, were transferred to this new school. At the end of my sophomore year, I was approached by two of the teachers at this first school, and asked would I please agree to attend a two-week journalism workshop at a college some 200 miles away or so, so that I could be editor of the first yearbook for the new school. I said OK. A girl who rode my same school bus was tapped to attend as well, so that she could be assistant editor the first year, and then we would swap for our senior year. She agreed. So, two weeks away from home living in a dorm on a college campus, attending classes. A first for me. It was a very pleasant experience. Coincidentally, my wife and I later sent our eldest to that same university to pursue a music degree. She kind of loved it. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

At the new school, I took all advanced classes, but no college-level studies. My electives were things like Journalism, Chemistry, Physics, Trigonometry, and other classes I was not otherwise required to take. By my Junior year, I was two English credits and one history or social studies credit shy of meeting graduation requirements. So I took stuff I liked – which included math and science and some half-baked computer programming class, US Government, driving, and I joined the Track and Field team.

I edited the yearbook, was inducted into the Honor Society, had my first two “real” girlfriends, learned to drive, bought my first car from my parents with money from an after-school job (a piece of crap half broken down Volkswagen). And when Jay finally got on my last nerve at the bus stop and I punched him in the face and sent him home crying, the Vice Principle and Dean of Discipline, a genuine war hero (and sponsor of the Honor Society) met me getting off the bus and because Jay’s mom had called the school, asked me what happened. I told him and his reply was “Well, it’s about time someone stopped him,” and that was it. I learned the perks of having some status with the brass at school. I lettered in Track (3rd-fastest sprinter on the team), graduated eighth in my class, behind seven girls, None of whom ever dodged homework as hard as I had. But what was that after-school job that had earned me my first bucket of bolts?

I was a “maintenance man” at the hotel managed by our family friend. And it taught me how much I valued working with my hands. It taught me more as well. When working the midnight shift, I was tasked with filling in behind the front desk, stocking the bar, running the PBX (manually-operated switchboard for guest room calls), and making up rooms for late check-ins. This was also when the floors had to be polished with a huge rotary machine, pool chemicals had to be adjusted, lightbulbs in every building had to be replaced (hallways and exterior), mail had to be run to the post office, etc. It was Jack-of-all-trades during the late shift. And after midnight, when I left, there was no one on duty other than the barkeep and the night auditor.

The hotel was four buildings covering two city blocks, comprising 150 rooms and a convention center. There I learned carpentry, electrical, plumbing, glazing, locksmithy, wall and floor covering, bath remodels, minor HVAC, and what-have-you. If it was involved with keeping a hospitality establishment fit for service, I did it. At one point, I re-carpeted 30 rooms on my own. It was my first “real” job, and a solid grounding for the trades. I continued working there after school and did not go to college, despite a scholarship offer from a computer school (still kicking myself over that). I was, no kidding, enjoying working with my hands just too much.

And in my “spare” time, I taught some classes at my church. I was the very model of a “responsible” young adult.

After seven years in the sticks, in trailers (but on land we owned) our family bought our first real house. The place in the boonies was sold, and we moved into a nearly 1900 sq ft 4-bedroom, 2-bath stick-built home with an attached garage on 3/4 of an acre. Dad actually bought a brand-new Toyota Land Cruiser (in those days, think Jeep CJ form factor). Mom grew tomatoes. Dad planted fruit trees. Mom took painting classes and took up drawing and painting, and was damned good at it. She won prizes for her pictures at the county fair.

We began to take 2-week driving vacations every year, and Mom & Dad bought vacant land in a neighboring state, where we eventually built a cabin and had a well drilled, and we saw the sights and “got away” for a solid two weeks each year. We even made lifetime friends near our cabin, and saw them at least once a year. It felt like things were looking up. When I say “we” built a cabin, we literally did. Our hands, our tools, and everyone pitched in except my baby sister. It was small, but weather-tight, and we kids had a sleeping loft. I kind of loved getting away to that place. It took a couple of days to drive there, so we would camp in state or national parks along the way, and see even more of the country. While camping, Mom would often break out an instrument (or two) and we would sing around the campfire and nearby campers would come to listen.

We were living in a real house and taking vacations. At Christmas, we had a real Christmas tree. Often, we had new clothes. Family and friends came to visit us and hang out with our family. My older sister, to whom I had grown close by this time in our shared introversion, entered and won a beauty contest. She met a guy with whom she took ski trips, and they got married in our front yard. My paternal grandmother, whom I’d never met (and who was going blind) came to visit on her last cross-country trip from Ohio. (My paternal grandfather had passed when I was four, and I actually never met him that I can recall.) My maternal grandfather, a noted sportsman and inventor whom I’d met but once, could no longer tolerate a lingering and painful illness, and killed himself. Shortly thereafter, my maternal grandmother came to live with us.

We were, it seemed, a sort of stable point, safe harbor, for the extended family. It was a warming feeling to welcome our kith and kin to our “real” house.

And it all changed. I was never entirely sure why. I think it may have been because Aerojet General was going to lose their Atlas contract, the rank and file had been forewarned, and Mom & Dad decided they had to cut back and be ready to move. We sold the house, bought another trailer, and moved onto a rented lot in a trailer park well out of town, in the middle of a school year.

This was a nice trailer park, in that the lots were pretty generous, it was remote, on a quiet road, on a creek, had a lake we could fish in, and blackberries grew in abundance down by the creek. Grandma bought a smallish trailer (which if I’m right, she lived in the rest of her life), and put it on the lot next to ours. I would nip over for chowder or tomato soup and oyster crackers and even an occasional sip of white Port wine. Grandma smoked like a chimney, and I grew used to it. Mom hated the smell of cigarettes, but it didn’t bother me. We grew flowers, but no food.

I had, during my final year at my last school, stopped using my first name and began using my middle name to be more “normal.” I use that name to this day, as far as most people are concerned. At the new school, I found myself ahead of most of my classmates, began to participate in sports (basketball and softball and flag football), I had good clothes, a good name and solid performance in classes, and for the first time in my school career was not bullied. I had my first “girlfriend” (for a few weeks) and some money from delivering newspapers, and graduated Salutatorian, second-highest in my class, from eighth grade. My mom had taken up singing for tips at a local coffee house and I would sometimes go and sing with her. I organized and ran a huge easter egg hunt for all the younger kids in the trailer park. Everyone had to pay a dollar to enter, and I bought prizes for those who found certain special eggs. The managers of the park hailed me as some sort of minor hero. Socially, at least, things were again looking up.

Then, the Atlas contract at Aerojet General was lost, 60% of the personnel were laid off (including my dad) and it was, once again, time for him to find a new job. we school-aged kids stayed in school while he went out job-hunting. He left the house for some months, driving to interviews at aerospace companies around the Southwest, and eventually landed a job in Arizona. This was during Christmas break, the break between school semesters, and Mom quit her gig at the coffee house. They threw her a huge Christmas-themed going away party. Whereupon, a new chapter begins. Adios California, hola Arizona. We wanted for nothing between his jobs, so I suspect he and Mom had put by savings from the sale of the house, which tided us over. But now it was time to pack up the trailer and move on.

Dad found a new job in California, and so we pulled up stakes and moved again. 18 months or so in Alabama, and then back on the road. We traveled in a sort of caravan to northern California and alighted in a small town a few dozen miles from dad’s new job at Aerojet General. My folks purchased a partially-wooded parcel some 4.5 acres in size outside this small town, acquired a mobile home to set up upon it and house us, and we began our tenure in California. We still had the Willys, and the old codger (Sig) up the hill from us sold us a 1929 Ford Model A pickup (boy, was THAT thing an adventure to keep running, and to ride in!) and eventually we seem to have come by a Corvair Van. We obtained our household water from a broad irrigation ditch halfway up the hill, which we passed into a settling tank and then pumped to the “house.” The same old codger up the hill grew concord grapes and olives, and taught my mom the art of curing olives. She cured two or three huge (I mean huge – probably 30 gallons apiece) porcelain vats of olives in solutions of lye and brine by turns, and I think she must have given a good amount of them away to acquaintances.

A fair portion of our acreage was covered by an old orchard of apples and pears, but a pear blight had been through the region in recent years and the trees had been “girdled” (a belt of bark cut away near the base of the tree) specifically to kill them, and not spread the blight. Still, a number of them had survived, and we had a sort of minimalist orchard. My folks got bantam chickens and raised a flock in a fenced area under the huge live oak out back. Rather than confine them to a coop, their wings were clipped so they could not fly away, and they didn’t. Despite very poor soil, we gardened in the front yard. Somehow, we wound up with a large colony of cats under our trailer, and we adopted some of them. Eventually, we adopted a German shepherd who had flunked out of police training. Too timid.

Within days or weeks of our arrival, my mom had tried to enroll me in first grade at the local elementary school, because she had already taught me reading/phonics and writing, at least to some degree, but they declared me too young, and so she had to keep me out until the next school year. They offered kindergarten, but she considered me too advanced for that, and so continued to home school me until I could enter first grade. I was there, and actually recall the conversations that went on while she tried to enroll me.

I’ve not mentioned my older sister up to now, as somehow she essentially escaped my durable recollections until about this stage of my life She was five years older than me, two years older than my older brother (who was 2.5 years older than me) and tended to keep very much to herself. We 3 boys roamed all over the nearby landscape, played army and cowboys and Indians and cops and robbers in the woods, harvested salamanders from the irrigation canal, found an old disused garbage dump a mile or so away in the sticks and broke every bottle in it with well-aimed rocks, and all the Calvin-esque adventures boys are wont to pursue. Our folks bought us used bikes one Christmas, and we learned to ride. Mine was a girls’ J.C. Whitney. So we were a family of six out in the boondocks (I made friends with neighbors, each at least a half-mile walk from our place) in (I think) about a 10X50 trailer with wooden sides. Things were a bit snug. We had been there perhaps two years, perhaps less, when a local pyromaniac recently released from a mental institution, burned the place down. We lost everything. Even the old Model A had its paint blistered and its wooden stake sides scorched. I recall learning we had no homeowners insurance, bunking with friends until we got a new trailer, and receiving a fairly good supply of cast-off clothing from friends and neighbors so that we’d have something to wear.

After a couple of weeks or so, my folks managed to secure a used trailer somewhat larger than the old one, and life began to return to normal. The old trailer had been cleared up by the simple expedient of having a D8 Caterpillar bulldozer come to our place and push the charred hulk over the side of the hill to make room for the new digs.

It was not long before my folks built on a covered and ultimately-enclosed porch, which even had a fireplace fashioned from a 55-gallon drum on its side, with a hole in the front to insert wood, and a hole in the “top” side for a chimney. This became a sort of family room where, in the evenings, we would listen to music like the Everly Brothers and “An Evening (wasted) with Tom Lehrer” and have dad (every night) read Dickens, Jules Verne, etc. to us. Then mom & Dad bought an airstream trailer for their “master suite,” attached it to the far side of the family room, and our home got even larger.

For all that we largely wore hand-me-downs and had hardly any money, it seems now like a kind of idyllic existence. It was around this time that my mom began to teach herself guitar. She and Dad had met in a church choir, and actually loved to sing, especially together. Eventually, Mom taught herself ukulele, guitar, banjo, autoharp and dulcimer. We used to say she could play anything with strings. And speaking of Mom & Dad making music together, I recall them always being demonstrative and physically affectionate, for all that dad was kind of rigid and distant toward us kids. Anyway, when we’d been there for five years, Mom had a surprise pregnancy and we gained a little sister. Our family was now seven. We lived in that place (our lane branched off of a dirt road that literally had “poverty” in the name) for seven years. It was the longest I ever lived in one place until I was grown and married and we bought our first home. Two to three years in one spot was our norm.

In school I learned that getting ahead of the class was a liability, that having a “funny” first name was a liability, as was wearing worn, semi-fitting and out-of-fashion clothes, and I learned what bullying was, both physical and emotional, in earnest. I began to become pretty introverted. I knew I was small, skinny and unprepossessing, and that I could be beat up by mean and stupid people who were, nonetheless, popular. I didn’t think of us as poor but, looking back, we most definitely were. Mom baked our bread, and we bought things in bulk like huge chunks of bologna that we had to slice ourselves, and there were two choices for breakfast on any given day. Oatmeal, or eggs from our chickens. I learned to hate oatmeal, and to fry a mean egg. We did chores, took turns washing the dishes, and made our own breakfasts, and lunches to put in brown bags for school. In fifth grade, I joined the school glee club to be a member of something, and to practice an activity that I loved.

There were goats on our place behind the cabin. I don’t know where they came from, but I think they may have actually come with the property. We would take walks out back to see “the bluff” behind our place, which seemed to be an area favored by the goats, and near it there was what appeared to me at that age, to be a veritable mountain of sawdust. Some kind of lumber milling operations had been done there evidently, and there was this sawdust pile one could climb and, near the top, find puffballs – a fungus related to mushrooms that contained tons of loose spores which, when you stepped on them, were blown out in a fairly impressive cloud. That was entertainment.

But I think one of the whole points of living in this place was to be able to grow our own food. My mom planted a garden out front, where she grew tomatoes, string beans, corn and summer squash, and I don’t know what else. But I do know this – these plants were huge, and hugely productive. Why? Organic gardening and “Injun Jim.” We just called him Jim, but I heard folks call him Injun Jim. He lived with his family (whom I don’t recall meeting) well up the hill from us across the county road, and he introduced us to an old Native American practice for growing crops. Dig a suitably deep hole and drop a seed into it, with a fish. One fish per seed. One seed per hole. My folks had tilled compost into the ground and after planting the seeds, covered each row with a layer of straw. Tons of beans, huge tomatoes, enormous ears of corn, great big squashes. It was something to see. But this was how I learned of trout in the creek. Jim had stretched something (lines, a net, I’m not sure) across the creek and caught a huge burlap back full of trout. He and his family could not use them all, so he taught us the planting trick with the surplus. This kind of fishing was illegal even then, I recall hearing, but no one seemed to mind.

Unfortunately we never got to see our first harvest fully mature.

My dad was working as an exterminator and then a vacuum cleaner salesman, but he had degrees in Math, Physics, English and French. After serving in WWII )installing and repairing radars, etc. in the Battle of Britain and then in North Africa), he had stayed in the active Reserves until 1952. After separation from the Army Air Corps he had striven to make a half-decent living, but nothing had come up that really fit his skill set. Then our friend (his best friend from college) Phil visited, and told him of a job at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville Alabama. It paid well and was right up his alley. So we pulled up stakes and went to Huntsville in a converted school bus. The garden had not matured, but mom canned tons of green tomatoes, green beans and squash, and stocked our mobile pantry. The enormous ears of corn were not ready to harvest by the time we left.

We spend the winter in the school bus on Green Mountain while the house we had arranged to rent was fixed up or refurbished or something. We kids all caught chicken pox and passed it around to each other in the cramped quarters, but it seemed no big deal in those days. There was a coal pile on this property as well, and we burned the coal in the pot-bellied stove in the converted bus to keep warm. The house was made ready and we moved in, and made friends with the girls down the lane. I began going to Sunday School, and got a mask, a cape and a play sword, so that I could be Zorro for Halloween.

This was a ten-acre property with a huge fallow field beside the house, and a cave on the back of the property. We took walks and played outside all summer while Dad made good bucks at the Arsenal. I think my older brother “fell in love” with Aura down the lane. By now, I also had a little brother, 2 1/2 years younger than I.

While we lived there, we had a Willys Jeep station wagon (which I don’t recall whether it came with us from Ohio or not), which my mom would use to drive to town. On the way to town one day, we passed an elderly black woman, making the trek to town on foot in the broiling heat. My mom stopped and picked her up. At first hesitant to get in the car at all, the woman flat refused to sit up front, insisting she could only be in the rear seat. I moved to the package tray, and she got my seat. She insisted on paying for the ride, and did so with some of the homemade ginger snaps she had been carrying with her in a brown paper bag. Each of us had at leas one cookie. When we reached the outskirts of town, the woman insisted we stop so that she could get out and walk the rest of the way, so that neither she nor we would suffer the ire of the locals because she had had the nerve to accept a ride from a white person, and actually ride in their vehicle with them. I don’t think I was even five yet, but the clear injustice of this stung me even then.

We were on Green Mountain for only 18 months. The contract Dad’s employer at Redstone Arsenal was relying on was terminated by the Defense Department, and he had to find new work.

I’ve lived a long time, and plan to live a good while longer. To that end I try, to the best of my ability, to take care of my physical, mental and emotional self.

The earliest memory I have is one of chasing my brother (the only one I had at the time) down the hall in the modestly-sized mobile home where we lived (in a trailer park near the shore of Lake Erie), tripping over a heating register on the floor, and crashing into one of the steel bars of a folding bed – with the bridge of my nose. I don’t recall much after that besides, perhaps, a very cold washcloth on my face, but I still have the scar – lo, these decades later. I had to have been about 2 years old at the time, a stage of life before conventional wisdom holds that one can remember things, yet I remember it. I always have.

My next memories are of us moving into and refurbishing a log cabin at the end of a short driveway that crossed a wooden bridge just downhill from the county road that stretched south from Cleveland, OH, where I had been born. The bridge crossed a creek which, I learned later, contained trout. Lots of trout, apparently. But more on that later. I was around 3 years old when we moved to the cabin.

So while we were moving in to the cabin, a number of changes were made. Those I recall specifically had to do with the roof, some kind of furnace or heater, electric and water. There was a spring house, with (one supposes) a spring in it, and my folks ran a pipe from that to the summer porch on the side of the cabin and installed a hand pump for water. Later, I think they actually put in indoor plumbing of some kind. I don’t recall using an outhouse. The single bare bulb hanging from the roof inside was augmented with some additional wiring, outlets and whatever. A big steel enamel heater of some kind (I think coal-fired, as we had a coal pile) was pressed into service. And the tin roof was covered over with plywood and roll-out roofing. The seams of the roll-out roofing were sealed with some kind of liquid tar compound from gallon cans, which occasioned one of my more vivid memories of that time, when I tried to lift one of these gallons to give it to someone on a ladder, and dropped it on my left big toe. The toenail, to this day, has never grown right again.

Some black fellow, whose name I don’t recall any more, was always there helping my parents refurbish the place. I don’t know where he came from, or how my parents met him, but they seemed good friends with him in time, and I have to assume they paid him for his labor (there’s no other reason he’d have worked all those hours). A story my mom used to tell concerned how people treated each other in the early Fifties. She needed to make a phone call, and we had no phone, so she had to go to the neighbor’s. Our black friend had a truck, so she got him to give her a ride. When they alighted from the truck and Mom knocked on the neighbor’s door to ask to use the phone, the neighbor said, “Oh, sure, Honey! Go on around back, Boy.” Whereupon, my mom, deeply offended by the clearly prejudiced treatment of our friend, stepped down off the porch and accompanied our friend around the side of the house to the back door. The neighbor opened it and said “Oh, no, Honey! I didn’t mean you!” Mom used the phone and left, but I’ve kind of wondered over the years if the neighbor learned ANYTHING from that interaction. We eventually got our own phone, on a party line, and one had to pick the receiver and make sure no one else was using the line, jiggle the cradle to alert the operator, and then ask for the desired number. Good times.