Information for My Grandchildren

Realized I know something nobody else in the world knows—it was just my mother’s birthday.  If she were alive she’d be 108 so she’d be dead anyhow. 

Been thinking about our home(s) when I was a child in Boston.  I guess it was the immigrant culture, always a bed for a recent arrival or a boarder.  In the 1920s when we lived right the ocean on the North Shore, Mother’s unmarried sister Pearl lived with us.  Daddy’s brother Harry and his wife brought their baby back from the hospital to our house.  My half-sister Ethel came to us for her last year of high school.  And Mother’s youngest sister Ida and her husband moved in with us as newlyweds.

Then the stock market crashed,  Daddy lost his job, the mortgage was foreclosed and we became the vagrants.  We moved in with his sister Minnie’s family in Buffalo—I slept in the upstairs hall and went to first grade there.  The next year back to Boston, to “the slums” of Lynn where we shared with Ida’s family, seven of us by that time, in a four-room “cold-water flat” over a grocery store.

Then our own apartment in Malden, Aunt Pearl living with us again--how I coveted that tiny private little room in the front of the house but I never got it.  Daddy’s grown-up nephew Norman came to live with us and slept on the "studio couch" on the porch.  (He owned all the swash-buckling Raphael Sabatini novels, purple cloth covers; I read every one.)

Always relatives boarding with us, until when I was 13 we finally settled in Upstate New York.  Along the way we lived several other places – Lowell (Depression closed down the mill so that was the end of  that job), two different apartments in Lynn (factory town), five different rented apartments or houses in Penn Yan and then Rochester, so that by the time we bought the house out on Keuka Lake and I started high school, I’d gone to seven different schools. 

Nice finish at any rate: Like those in several small towns around here, the public high school had (has) such an elegant Victorian name.  I'm a graduate of  Penn Yan Academy.