Tattle Tale Talk #2 Win My Home Free Huntington Hills Golf and Country Club

Every fall we kids always looked forward to the new cars displayed in the show rooms.  We would visit the car dealerships and dream of riding in one of those new cars.  Sometimes we would spot a light beam in the sky and follow it.  Yes, the beam ended up at a car showroom. 

My early childhood certainly centered on our church with memories cherished.  After the Christmas Midnight Service, a new silver dollar was given to each choirboy along with a small box of chocolates.  Our church every Easter set free a hundred homing pigeons.  They circled the spire of the church three times before taking off to find their way home. 

Birthday parties always included an airplane ride.  My grandmother would get a wide board about 4' long and two bricks.  Place the bricks on the floor with the board on top. One person is brought into the room blindfolded and turned around three times before asking the player to stand in the middle of the board with their hands holding onto the shoulders of the person who guided them into the room.  Ask two people to hunch down and raise the board off the bricks and shake the board with the player standing in the middle of the board.  The board, after a while should be tilted so the player will fall off the board, as the person with the hands on the shoulders begins to slowly lower his body.  The player on the board will fall on top of the person.  The whole sensation given the player on the board is the feeling of flying up into the heavens.  We called this trick The Airplane Ride. 

Another party game my grandmother introduced to us involves taking a mirror without a frame and putting it on a seat of a chair. Two people put their noses against the edge of the mirror, while putting a hand to close the eye that is facing the back of the mirror.  One person or the host puts one end of a scarf into their mouth and holds the other end with their hand.  Next, wave or flap the arm up and down while doing the same with your one leg while keeping your nose on the side of the mirror.  The other person sees the host flying in the air. 

This was my weekend life in East Liberty on Beatty Street.  My grandmother was very clever to rent a large house on that prestige street.  She turned as much space as possible into apartments and rented out those areas for income.  All her neighbors thought she was having parties all the time with all the people coming and going.  Her husband, one might say, never recovered from The Great Depression.  He didn't have a steady job.  The fact that she had a husband prevented her from collecting any meaningful amount of money from welfare to help raise her own four children.  I believe she received seven dollars a week.  Before moving to Beatty Street, my aunt told me she could remember moving 10 times to different rental addresses in one year.  My aunt on her way home from school would meet her mother on the street with all the family possessions heaped into a wagon, ready to find the next place to live around East Liberty.  Like Scrooge, The choirmaster gave my grandmother a turkey every Christmas for dinner.  Times were very hard for my relatives, but I can also remember the dark side of my own life. 

Nothing much good happened until my mother died and her children were taken away from the father to live with their maternal grandmother.  When I was nine years old, my mother suffered from a stroke that was probably caused by a very abusive alcoholic husband.  He moved her out to a rural area of Pittsburgh in order to get her isolated from any influence her family could provide.  He denied her the basics such as household money to buy groceries.  He refused to provide bus money so that her two sons could attend choir practice.  We always owed the bus company a bill for transportation.  My father was a machinery painter for a company.  He always ended up in some saloon after work and gambled his paycheck away before coming home.  I can remember plenty of fights and things being smashed on those pay days.  To protect herself, my mother had invited her father to live with us.  He was a Methodist and hated drink.  This arrangement should have worked out except that he also hated kids.  My grandfather would always play 'tricks' on us.  For instance, one very cold January day he locked us out of the house after we returned from school.  We had to call from a neighbor's house my grandmother who lived thirty miles away to come to our rescue.  He knew that I would open the refrigerator and drink milk out of the carton.  He fixed me one day.  I opened the refrigerator and gulped some warm yellow liquid from the milk carton. 

My mother never recuperated from her stroke, because she had developed drug poisoning.  I can remember making sure that she took all her medicines, before I took off for school.  Her body became bloated and inflamed causing a lot of pain when she moved.  Some days I was so worried about her condition that I would go and hide in the woods until the school bus passed.  Her doctor again put my mother in the hospital to recuperate.  She was trying to get out of a hospital bed one night and fell, hitting her head on the iron bed and died. No one in those days sued hospitals.  After the funeral, my grandmother instructed us kids to get into the Willys, and away we went to live with her, my aunt and uncle.  My father was only allowed to visit us when he was sober.  This happened very infrequently.  My father found another woman and married.  He just moved away and never bothered with us again.  My grandmother received no financial support from anyone until her offspring were old enough to get their own jobs. 

Somehow my grandmother always found a way to provide a Christmas for us.  I can remember every year getting a new addition to our Lionel train display.  My uncle would achieve a spectacular train display with mountains, bridges, waterfalls, and hand made houses.  We had three trains running around a plywood structure especially constructed.  This was all created secretly out of our sight.  No Christmas tree ever appeared until Christmas Eve to be trimmed.  All of this added to our delight on Christmas morning.  Every kid in our neighborhood would visit each other over Christmas to compare train layouts and indulge in homemade cookies. 

My brother and I wanted to add to the family income, but couldn't find a solution until one day coming home from church on an Easter morning.  A five and dime store was giving away free baby chicks in a rainbow of colors.  We collected seventy.  We were going to raise them up to sell their eggs.  After about three months of cleaning out cages in our basement, we realized that we had all roosters and no hens.  One of our neighbors asked us if we heard unusual noises early in the morning coming from the direction of our home?  My aunt came to the rescue and called the SPCA to inquire if they knew of anyone that would like to have grown roosters.  The lady who answered the phone said she would love to have them.  She provided directions to her home.  Once we arrived, she greeted us with great joy and told us to just leave the chickens run free inside her home. 

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