Back Home Again ( Part
8 )
5199 Moreland Dr
Fire, Fire
Sept 30th
1994
OK, now we’re on the next street, the house we
were waiting to be built. Well they built it and we moved in. This whole
subdivision used to be a farm field. And where we build our house was where the
farm house used to be. So there were a lot of trees around it. We had 14 cherry
trees in the back yard. That’s what was so cool about it. And we had an apple
tree in the front and an apple tree in the back. It looks like the apple trees
are still there, a little raggedy but there still there. And I see one cherry
tree in the back, I think. And then on the left hand side, there used to be a
great big huge tree. And that’s cut down. All the cherry trees are cut down.
There were so many things that happened at this house.
The big apple tree that was in front of the family room is gone. There
used to be a circular driveway in front of the house.
Oh, I forgot to tell you, the address is 5199
Moreland Dr. And the street was named after my grandparents, the Morelands
because they built the subdivision. So we lived on Moreland dr. We lived here
from 1954 to 1957, about 3 ½ years. I was 9 years old and by the time we left,
I was 12.
My grandparents on my Dad’s side, that’s
Nana and Papa. They moved in with us for a short time because they were going
to go.... they were having a house built in Florida. So they stayed here like a
summer. That was fun because Nana always used to bake all the cherry pies. I’d
go pick the cherries and then I’d come in and Nana and I would make all the
cherry pies. That was fun. I can still make a cherry pie.
What else?....Then there was.....Oh, the
furnace. We had trouble with the furnace. The house kept smoking up all the
time and we couldn’t figure out why. One night I was sound asleep and they woke
me up and they said, “The house is on fire, the house is on fire.” So we got
out of there. Boy that scared me. I was terrified. What had happened is, when
they built house, they set the furnace right on the wooden plywood floor, which
is really stupid. My grandparent really got mad at the people that installed the
furnace. They had to replace that and fix that. It never happened after that.
No more smoke.
Oh, and when they were building the
subdivision, they came across a bunch of baby rabbits and they saved one and we
took care of it. The mother had been killed, I guess. They were tearing down a
barn and they found it. So we took care of this baby rabbit for about a year.
It was really cool. It used to stay right in the family room there. That was
fun.
There was this tree.....well the apple tree
right there in front of the family room. There was a branch that would hang
over into the front of the windows and the family room had Jalousie windows
that opened up. So we had this squirrel that we trained and he would come down
to the window and we would feed it breakfast cereal. We’d feed it Trix and the
squirrel loved that and he would come every morning to get his cereal. Then he
would go back up into this great big tree. I guess he lived there in the great
big tree in the corner. One day a couple of kids came by and started throwing
stones at it and it really spooked him out I guess and he never came back. I
really yelled at those kids too.
Somebody plowed into that tree one time.
Because it’s right at the end of a busy street and there’s a stop light there.
The guy went right thru the stoplight and hit the big tree. I don’t know what
happened to him because it happened in the middle of the night. My dad woke me
up. “Look Bill, there’s an accident.” But I was too tired. I just wanted to go
back to bed.
And my Dad built a bar in there....had a bar
built in the family room and the drinking continued. Jean and I after a party,
we would wake up early in the morning and I remember a couple of times we’d
take all these drinks and start mixing them together, the left over drinks and
see what we could come up with. I ate one of those red Maraschino cherries that
you put in a dink. I started eating one and I started choking on it and it
clogged my windpipe. I really thought I was going to die .It really scared the
hell out of me. I finally got it up.
Oh, one of the most terrible things that happened
was what happened to Jeanne, my sister. My grandparents just got back from
Hawaii. This time they were living it up I guess. They’re rich. They came back
from Hawaii and brought everybody back a present. And Jeanne got a Hawaiian skirt.
It was during the summer time and I was with this guy that I knew down the
block. And Jeanne and her girl friend were out there. She was in her....right
in front of the house here and she wore her Hawaiian grass skirt. She had a
sparkler and she’s dancing and waving it around and she held it next to her
grass skirt and it caught fire. And did that thing go up. The guy who was with
me, he goes running down the driveway, he goes running away. I couldn’t believe
he was doing that and I couldn’t let my sister burn. So I took my arm, my left
arm and I brushed it against her skirt trying to put the flames out and that
didn’t do anything. Finally I just took it and just yanked it and ripped it
right off her real quick. I finally got it off. Thank God it came off! She was
burnt pretty bad on her stomach. I had a bad burn on my arm but Jeanne had a
worse burn on her stomach. Lucky thing I was around...I’m glad I was around
otherwise who knows what would have happened.
During the summer time, my Dad says, “Why
don’t you go out and make some money?” We didn’t know how, so he suggested, why
don’t you sell some bottled pop to the workman in the subdivision building the
homes. So we got a wagon and a cooler and Dad went out and got a whole bunch of
pop and we put it in the cooler. We lugged it around the subdivision selling
pop to all the workman. There was this one time, it was on the next block,
pretty close to the house too. We stopped and it was right next to the busy
street there. And the workmen were way up at the house there. We were just
about to go up there and sell them some pop and this guy stopped in this car
and he says, “Well, I’ll drive you and get you some more pop.” And he insisted
that I go with him. He was trying to get Jean and I in the car to go up to the
store and we didn’t want to go. Well the workmen finally caught on. They were
watching us evidently. They came back down towards this guy’s car and really
let him have it. Not physically but they would have killed the guy because they
realized what was happening. This guy was trying to kidnap us. I don’t know
what would have happed if that guy would have got us in the car. But Jean and I
were definitely not going in that car, I knew that unless he took us by the arm
or something.
One time Jean and I were playing....Jean and
I and this other guy were playing in the back there in the houses. Jean decided
she wanted to go home so she started walking away and I threw a brick at her. I
didn’t realize it was going to hit her but it hit her right on the head. God,
some of the dumb things I do. But she was alright though.
The people who bought our house must have
really screwed it up. Not only did they cut the cherry trees down but we used
to have a circular driveway, they ripped that out and they put a new driveway
in and it’s really crazy. Instead of putting it were it’s supposed to be were
the garage should be, they put it on the opposite side of the house. It really
looks weird. The circular driveway we used to have, that was classy. That
looked kind of nice.
I don’t think I told you what my Dad did. He
was the foreman of the subdivision. Before that he was....I think he worked for
the telephone company, I know that. That’s what he did in the service and when
he got out of the service, he continued to work for the telephone company. I
think there were a few little jobs between the telephone company and being a
foreman of the subdivision.
Well I have
more to say about the house here on Moreland Dr but I’m running out of tape. So
we’ll continue this on tape two. See you later.
Back Home Again ( Part
9 )
5199 Moreland Dr (continued)
I Almost Didn't Make It
March 25th 1997
We’re still at
5199 Moreland dr. And NO, I haven’t been sitting here for two years. We have to
take a break here and I’ll explain what happened. I had a heart attack in March
of 95, so I wasn’t able to able to get back and work on this tape. I really
didn’t think I was going to make it through the heart attack. That was
terrible. But here I am and we’ll go on and talk about Moreland Dr and later on
in my life we’ll get back to the heart attack.
Nana and Papa at Their Home in Florida
Since Nana and Papa, that’s my Dad’s parents
are staying with us at this house. I thought I’d talk about them for a little
bit. I’ll tell you were they came from, what they did and where they’re going.
They were the neatest people. Papa was so neat. He had great big hands, you
know a big German guy. He had these huge hands. He used to fumble everything
but he was a funny person. And Nana was just as funny too. She was neat. She
was the nicest.... neither one on them had any money but they were really fun people
to be around. Papa used to work in a steel mill when he met Nana. He also put
in stained glass windows in churches.
Papa
is on the left putting in stained glass windows on the big building
Later on he owned a garage, a gas station
where they worked on cars and pumped gas and so forth.
This was his gas station. He retired up to Deep Lake after he sold it
He retired from that and moved up to Deep
Lake. That’s in northern Illinois. That was a nice place. They stayed up there
for a couple of years. I remember we used to take drives up there, the family.
Mom and Dad and me and Jeanne would drive up to Deep Lake and see Nana and
Papa.
This
was their home in Deep Lake. My grandmother inherited from her mother
Those were good times. We’d have a lot of fun
and on the way back, I remember my Dad’s favorite song. It would be in the
evening on the way back from Nana and Papa’s and this song came on, my Dad’s
favorite song. I can just picture him reaching over, turning up the car radio
and he’d start singing and Mom would scooch over and put her head on his
shoulder. They’d cuddle while he sang this song and I’d be sitting in the back
seat looking at both of them and it was just like the whole world was at peace
and everything was right. Those were the best memories. While you listen to
this song, I’m just going to sit back and visualize my Dad and my Mom. (On my
tape, I have Nat King Cole singing “Tenderly”) WOW!
Well, Nana and Papa decided to sell the house
at Deep Lake. They want to move to Florida. They found a house down there but
they have to wait for it to be built. So that’s why they’re staying with us on
Moreland Dr. There really isn’t enough bedrooms in our house to accommodate the
4 of us plus those two, so Papa decides to take a security job at the model
homes. My grandparents are starting a third subdivision and they need a
security guard at the new model homes to sleep over night there. So he stayed
at the model homes most of the time. My grandmother stayed with us. I found
myself in my sister’s room were my grandmother was staying. I had decided to
take my clothes off again. Just as I got naked, in walks my grandmother. I
tried to hide by the bed but she saw me and didn’t say anything. My grandmother
got what she had come in for and then walked out again. She didn’t care if I
was naked. That’s the way my grandmother was.
One hot
summer night my grandmother was baby-sitting my sister and I, while my parents
went away for a couple of days. We didn’t have air conditioning in our house. I
asked my grandmother if I could sleep with her that night. She was using my parent’s
bed because it was bigger and more comfortable. She put me to bed first and
then when I was just about asleep, I felt her get into bed with me. I went to
touch her and noticed that she was naked. I asked her if I could sleep naked
too. My grandmother said, “Ok” and I took off my underpants. This was neat and
I fell right to sleep. The next morning I woke up and my grandmother was gone.
I always wondered if she ever stayed the whole night with me.
I remember
another hot summer night, my grandmother my sister and I were sitting on the
patio in back. She was having her smoke. Since it was hot that night, she told
us we could take our clothes off and just play in our underpants. My sister and
I ran around the back yard playing in our underpants. We dared each other to
run around in front of the house were people might see us. That was so much fun
back then.
We took a couple of trips to Florida, the
whole family. This is the first time that Jeanne and I got to go along with my
parents on vacation. So it was really cool. We’d go down to Florida. We were
staying in a motel in Miami. We had been out that day and when we got back to
the motel, the room was hot. My mother told my sister and me to take our
clothes off and just stay in our underpants while dad turned on the air
conditioning. My sister and I were
playing on the floor and I looked at my sister wearing her silky panties again.
I really liked them. I turned to my mom and said, “Can I have a pair of nylon
underpants?” I wanted the kind my sister had on. My mom said, “I don’t know if
they make nylon underwear for boys” My dad heard me and rolled his eyes and
said, “I wonder about him sometimes.” My mom told him to be quite and then she
said, “Tomorrow, we’ll shop around and see if they have them.” The next day we
went shopping and went into this one store and my mom asked if they had nylon
underwear for boys. The salesman said, “Yes, they’re men’s but small might fit”
Mom held them up to me and we both looked at them. She said, “Is this what you
want?” “Yes.” I replied. But they
weren’t the ones I wanted. These were boxer shorts and the nylon was scratchy.
Mom paid for them and when we got back to the motel, I put them on and played
while the room cooled down. It turned out to be fun just wearing them though
because they were completely see-through. It was like being naked in front of
everybody.
I remember one time Nana came with us to Florida. That
was good. We’d get in the mountains, I remember the Smoky Mountains. There were
these little thin winding roads going through the mountains. You’d look over
out the window and right there, you go straight down a thousand feet, you know?
And Jeanne would get all scared and I said, “Can’t you stand it Jeanne, can’t
you stand it?” That was funny. We used to get on her case all the time and Nana
would start laughing.
I remember one time, Papa stayed at the house
and he woke up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet and he didn’t
turn on the lights like most people do. You just feel your way around and you
go and sit down and do what you have to do. Well that’s what he was doing. He
was just sitting there in the middle of the night going to the bathroom. He
didn’t close the door or anything and here comes my Dad. He’s got to go to the
bathroom and he sits right down on top of his Dad. He didn’t even know his own
Dad was sitting on the toilet. That was funny. We laughed silly the next day
about that.
Well they finally had to go to Florida. Their
house was built. We went down there a couple of times to visit them at their
new house. That was cool because you got to fishing and it was warm down there.
This was the first time I ever got to fly in an airplane and it was to go down
to see Nana and Papa. It was one of those great big four engine Constellations.
It was Eastern Airlines. I even got to get out of school for two weeks for that
vacation. That was cool. That was one of the high point of my life, to fly for
the first time. That was really cool. The only thing is, I didn’t know about
the ear pressure when you’re going down. Holy cow, I don’t know, it’s not bad
when you’re an adult but when you’re a kid. Oh, I thought I was going to die.
My ears, I thought I was going to go deaf. I was screaming, “Ma, I can’t stand
it!” She gave me some gum to chew and that helps a little bit but I’ll tell you
that was horrible.
I found this big box in back of our house. It
must have come from a furnace of refrigerator, or something like that. I put it
in the back yard and cut holes in it for windows. I made them so you could open
and close them for privacy. I loved making forts. When I was inside of my fort
I had the urge to take my clothes off but I was afraid that my mom would catch
me and really get mad at me. Maybe if I asked her if I could, she would say
yes. I went into the house and asked my mother if I could take my clothes off
in my fort. She said, “OK.” Wow, I couldn’t believe it. I went back into my
fort and got naked. I was really having fun until I saw this huge black and
yellow spider crawling up inside the wall of my fort.
I’m terrified of those big kind. I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could but I was naked and the main street was right next to our house. I grabbed my pants and put them on as fast as I could and tore the fort open trying to get out of there. I looked at my destroyed fort and thought to myself, I had permission from mom to be naked and now my fort is wrecked. That stinks.
I was about 11 years old at
the time. One day my Mom came up to me and said, "I signed you up for
swimming at the YMCA.” “OK,"I said. She told me that my cousin would be
going with me. He is the same age as I am. It sounded like it would be a lot of
fun. So when the day came we picked up my cousin and my aunt. They dropped us
off and told us they would be back later in the afternoon when it was over. We
went down into the locker room to change into our bathing suits but the life
guard said. “You don’t need a bathing
suit. We swim in the nude.” "WHAT!" I looked at my cousin. We didn't
want to go naked into the pool with all the other guys. But our Moms wouldn't
be back until much later in the afternoon when our swimming period was over
with. We had no choice. Other than taking a bath, I had never been naked in the
water before. I got in the pool and it really felt neat but I didn’t like being
with all these other naked boys swimming around the pool in the nude. I finally
got used to it and just swam around naked the rest of the afternoon. We talked
with some other guys and asked them if the girls swam naked when they had the
girls swim period but nobody knew. We had to find out.
Our Moms Sent us Swimming Naked at the
YMCA
When our Moms picked us up later that
afternoon we told them, "We Were Swimming Naked." We told them that
they don't allow you to wear bathing suits. Well our Moms started laughing out
loud when they heard that. They thought it was great. I didn't want to go back
but my cousin did. So Mom said, "There's nothing wrong with swimming
naked. You should just forget that your naked and enjoy the water. Everybody
else is swimming naked so don't worry about it." “OK,” I told Mom and I
continued to go. One day when we got to the YMCA a little early, the girls were
still swimming. We had to find out if the girls swam naked too so one of the
guys found a back way down into the pool area to see if the girls were naked.
We waited breathlessly for this guy to report back to us. When he came back he
told us, “They’re wearing bathing suits.” Our hearts sank. We wondered why we
swam naked but the girls didn’t. I went with my cousin a few more times and
then I told Mom, “I like being naked but I don’t like being naked with a bunch
of guys. I don't want to go anymore,” I
told her. “OK, you don’t have to if you don’t want too.” I thought it was so
cool being naked though
I got myself in a real mess one time. You know
the Columbia Record Club? Well I filled
out one of their applications. You buy one record and you get six more free.
And I thought, Oh wow, that’s pretty cool.
I didn’t mail it, that’s the thing I didn’t understand. I must have set
it down someplace and somebody else must have mailed it. Well anyway, so many
weeks went by and all of a sudden I get this great big package with all these
records in it and I had to pay for them, or my parents ended up paying for
them. They weren’t too happy about it. The thing was I still had to buy six
more records at the regular price. Well, my parents paid for it but then they
kept on sending the records even after I fulfilled my contract. Boy, did my Dad
get mad. He said you keep those records and I’m going to right them a letter.
He wrote them a really nasty letter. Well, I never heard from them again and I
got to keep the records. Boy, don’t ever
join those records clubs. You’ll really get yourself in a mess.
Here we are posing for a photo that they were going to put in the
newspaper about ice skating
Oh, Jeanne and her girlfriend join this ice
skating school. Michael Kirby ice skating school in Park Ridge. They were
having a lot of fun, so I decided to join. That was really neat. I got to learn
figure skating. I was even in a show at the Chicago amphitheater and we were
ice skating. That was a lot of fun.
Jeanne and I are in this Ice Skating Show
I don’t know if my legs could hold up now, ice
skating. But that was fun at the time. If I would have kept it up, I would have
really been good. I guess my parents couldn’t afford it anymore. It was getting
to expensive.
Oh, Mom had a miscarriage at this house. She
got pregnant. That would have been so cool. She came up and said, “I’m
pregnant. I’m going to have a baby,” and I thought, “Alright, I’m going to have
a brother.” And I’m sure Jeanne was hoping she’d have a sister. And my Mom was
cleaning out the crawl space underneath at the time she found out that she was
pregnant. And she wouldn’t quit cleaning it out. She had to finish the job.
Nobody could talk her out of it. I don’t know if that was the cause of her
miscarriage but she had the miscarriage soon afterwards. We never had a third
child. I don’t think my Dad was too unhappy about it. I think he was kind of
glad. I don’t think he could have stood another kid in the family. I don’t know
that for sure but that’s just my impression.
I had the best bedroom in the house. It was in
the back. It was the biggest bedroom. And it had great big windows overlooking
the patio and the cherry trees out in the back. On one of the outside walls was
a closet that you could access from the outside. A closet where you keep the
garden tools and stuff and that was adjacent to my bedroom. Somehow a rat must
have gotten in there or something, or a squirrel or something. It got way up in
the closet in the rafters. It kept on scratching. That was really spooky
sometimes because that gnawing and scratching at night, that got me.
I remember my first erection. I got to tell
you about this. I use to play a lot like I said in the houses in the back where
they were building them. And I went into this one house. I was always looking
for a fort or something and there was this crawl space in this house. It was
really clean down there. They had these real small pebbles down covering the
ground and it was just like a neat little fort in this crawl space. And a
little window you could peak out of. It was really for a vent but they hadn’t
put the vent in. So it was just a little hole you could look out the wall
outside and see who’s coming. Anyway I decided to take my clothes off. I had
never done it before, to be naked outside. So I took my clothes off. And nobody
told me about erections. Nobody told me anything. I was in the dark. And all of
a sudden, I get an erection. And it gets hard and it got so hard and it just
wouldn’t go away. And I didn’t know how to relieve it. Oh, it was terrible. It
must have lasted a couple of hours it seemed like. It finally got to be that I
was in pain. It really, really hurt. I didn’t tell anybody. I swear to god, I
told myself, “I’ll never, ever take my clothes off ever again. I don’t want
that to ever happen.” Oh, was that terrible.
Oh, and speaking of which, I met my first real
girlfriend. Her name was Sandra, Sandra Withington.
My
first Girlfriend. I wonder where she is now?
I met her in
sixth grade. She had the neatest lips. That’s one of the things that attracted
her to me. She was really cool, at least I thought so anyway. At first I didn’t
know how to get to know her. So a couple of times I followed her home because I
didn’t know where she lived. She lived pretty far from the school. There was
this hill by her house. I scooted up the hill, I remember. And she was walking
down the street and I was watching to see which house she went to. And on her
way this little twerp of a kid who lived on the same block came up, this guy.
And I thought, Oh No, she’s got somebody” I said, “I’m not going to let that
stop me.” I called him twinkle toes, because I was mad. So at school, the only
thing you could do is to start talking, so that’s what I did. We became friends
and she had a couple of parties down in her basement. Nothing ever happened
between us or anything. It was just the first love of your life, you know? But
nothing happened.
I remember one summer my Dad started taking a
walk. You know, from the house all the way down Canfield to Higgens road, which
was about a mile. There was a store there and he said, “Come on kids, let go
get some ice cream and take a walk.” And it was great for us you know, for
Jeanne and I because you got to go out at night and take a walk. The first and
second time it was a lot of fun. We’d be with Dad and talk and walk about a
mile down there. But there was also a bar down at the end there too. And I
think that was the real reason he wanted to go down there, just to get out of
the house and have a couple of drinks. So we’d sit at the bar with him and he’d
have his couple of drinks and we’d be there for probably about forty-five
minutes. Then we would go next door and get the ice cream. We’d walk back and
you couldn’t eat the ice cream when you got back because it was so gushy from
being warm outside. So you’d have to wait until it hardened up again before you
could eat it. My Dad kept on taking his walks down there every once in a while.
We didn’t go with him after that though. It just wasn’t as cool as it was the
first couple of times. We all knew he just wanted to go down there and drink.
I got some neat Christmas presents in this
house. Nana used to give me pajamas. The first time she gave me a real nice
warm soft pair of pajamas and I thought that was so cool. It felt so good. And
the next Christmas she asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I said, “A pair
of pajamas.” So she got me a pair of pajamas and the next year I asked for the
same thing. She said, “You already have pajamas, what do you want pajamas for?
I always like getting pajamas from Nana. It was something about... it was just
soft and comfortable...and it came from her. I just loved Nana. She was neat.
Some of the other Christmas presents I
remember in that house were.... I got my first and only chemistry set. I mixed
a couple of chemicals together. Boy did that burn my finger, jeez! I don’t
think they had any regulations on what you could put in those chemistry sets. I
even had a jar of radioactive ore I remember. I got a train set one Christmas
at this house. It was an American Flyer.
My cousin Jim, he got a Lionel, which was really the coolest thing to have and
I got the American Flyer. It was fun getting a train set but I wish my parents
had given me the Lionel. But that’s ok it was still neat though. It was a
passenger train with all the little people in there. My cousins Dad had built
him a table and set up a whole town and everything down in their basement. So
that was really cool. I didn’t have that. I just had my train on the floor. I
always wanted to build a town and have a train set.
All in all, this house wasn’t too bad at all.
We had a lot of good memories in here. There were only a couple of them towards
the end when we were living there. One of them was when my Mom really got drunk
during the daytime. She had never done that before. At least I hadn’t ever seen
it. She came out on the patio, she was bombed out of her gourd in the middle of
the daytime. And she had this can of tomato soup and she had a spoon in the
other hand and she was eating this cold tomato soup. I thought, “god, how could
she do that. She went back in and I think I was talking to my sister how I
couldn’t stand it and hated it. We were right under the kitchen window and she
heard us. And she came out and she said, “If you don’t like it, I’ll just leave
and you can get yourself another mother, you know she was drunk. That’s the
beginning of where she starts to get drunk during the daytime just before we
moved. But I never heard my parents argue. I’m sure they did. But in this
house, I never heard them argue. Not in front of us anyway.
I remember standing on the side of the house
one time, talking to my sister I believe. And I said, “When I grow up, I’m
never going to drink or smoke,” Because I didn’t like what I was seeing in the
house, Hah.
I had some pretty good memories here. More
than I thought I was going to have. With Nana and Papa staying, I mean everything
wasn’t that bad.
Well, now
the third subdivision is under construction and like we’ve been doing, we
follow the subdivision. So we’re going to move to the new house on Vine Ave.
Off we go.
No comments:
Post a Comment