My very first jotting:
When I was very young, I would run screaming toward my daddy and/or my mommy when I heard horses' hooves outside coming up the cobblestoned street. This happened every single day, because this was the milkman with his deliveries to the neighborhood, in his horse-drawn little milk truck.
We lived in a pair of small rooms in a house on Drinker Street in Dunmore, Pennsylvania. In 1934 my brother Joe was born in this house, but I doubt that I remember anything about that. I am a year and a half older than he is, and we usually don't remember much at that age. Anyway, it was probably a very private affair, because we, all three of us siblings, were born at home. My birth took place just one street over from Drinker, on Warren Avenue.
My daddy would say that I had a "cherry" nose; it was red from the cold air of winter, he said. And he told me how scared I would be of the sound of the horse's hoofs as the milkman came nearer and nearer to our house.
My parents told me that I used to play with the little girl, Marie, who lived in the house. I think her parents owned the house. There was a baseball field across the street from our house, just one or two doors down.
My brother and I were baptized in All Saints Church a few streets away. My father worked in the coal mines in Dunmore. Not very long afterwards, the miners were working infrequently, so my parents had to move to another town for work. This other town was Larksville/Plymouth, near Wilkes-Barre.
(About the "cherry"nose, just a week after I wrote about this memory, I read about Johnny Marks who wrote "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer ". The article mentioned the cherry proboscis. This article was in the Autumn 2010 copy of the Colgate SCENE publication.)
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My parents had to move to Plymouth/Larksville, because of lack of work in Dunmore, but I don't know what year that was. Probably about a couple of years later. We lived on Buttonwood Street, in our first home which was a small apartment. I am not sure who owned the house, but there was an older lady Mrs. Rudnitski, who lived very near. (It could have been Mrs. Rudnitski who owned the house.) I used to love going into her kitchen, because she had a large shelf clock in there. I liked the way it looked, large, pretty, and up on the shelf. And most of all, I liked the way it ticked so loud!
My mother asked Mrs. Rudnitski to cut my hair one day, saying something like "po' ooshi" meaning 'just below the ears'. Well, Mrs. Rudnitski cut it above the ears, which was not a pretty sight! Who knows? maybe she was hard of hearing, and didn't hear the instructions right, that it should be below my ears, but I don't think my hair was cut by her, ever again... My mother told me about it many years later.
My father worked in the Lance Colliery, which is at the corner of Main Street and Chestnut Street. The men walked to the mines, deep under Lance Colliery. There were 'cages' for carrying the men, that were pulley-ed down from the surface to the deep mine, and pulley-ed up when the whistle blew signifying the end of the work day. Just like the elevators in an office building, but the 'cages' were open-air with a grill around them, and the 'cages' were full of grimy-black men with grimy-black clothes. No business suits on men going to their offices, or pretty dresses on women going shopping. My parents were not well off, many times barely making it. Money was not plentiful, as the miners didn't work every day even though they wanted to.
This is the house where my brother Joe locked himself in the bathroom, and they were trying to get him out of there. I was so concerned that he hadn't eaten his cooked egg, so I brought his plate to him, and told my parents that he has to eat. (How? with the door locked!)
I'll see around the Corner Post...
