Back Home Again ( Part 12)

                                Back Home Again ( Part 12)

                                     5598 Vine continues

                                                                                                                                                                                             

                             Talking about my Mom and Dad

July 6th 1997

 I’m thinking of Inky our dog. We still have her. Inky was fun. And one of the things I used to do to her to tease her all the time, I would put a pillow over my head. Don’t ask me why but it drove Inky insane and she use to get....she would start showing her teeth and growling at me. It was like she was ready to rip my head off. And then I would take the pillow off and then she would be all happy and her tail would be wagging and everything. But the minute I’d put the pillow over my head, she’d get real mad. My Mom said, “Boy, One of these days she’s going to bite you.” I said, “No, Inky’s a good dog.” She never did.

                                                                                                                                                      I sure miss Inky

    One of the other things we did with Inky is, one of us would....It would be a lot of fun. One of us would run around the yard and the other would have Inky on a chain and we’d get her to run after the person. Like if I were holding Inky and Jeanne was in front of me, she’d start to run. And Inky would start running after Jeanne. And inky was so strong. She’d pulled you lick-idy-split around the yard. That was a lot of fun. Inky was a neat dog. But one time we went on vacation and we’re going to Florida. I didn’t think about it until the day we left. I said,” What are we going to do with Inky?” Mom said, “We have somebody that is going to take care of Inky.” So we dropped Inky off at this person’s house and said a few words to the people. I still remember the people standing out in the yard there and Inky’s out there. And we get back in the car and she wants to get back in the car with us but she can’t. I remember looking back and seeing Inky standing by the people and that was the last time I ever saw Inky. She was getting so old by this time. I didn’t think she was that old, I thought she was great. I found out later, my parents had those people....were going to put her to sleep. That was the whole purpose of bringing her over there, to put her to sleep. And if I had known that, there was no way that Inky would have been put to sleep. I still hate people today that put their dogs to sleep. If you raise the dog gone thing, you keep it and take care of it. That’s what people do now with people. They get to old but they can’t put them to sleep but they throw them in a nursing home to get rid of them. It’s the same thing. I hate that. See, this is where I get some of my things from. Things that happened in the past carry off when you get older.

                                                                                                                                     

 Oh, I remember one time I was going through my mother’s drawers, my Dad’s drawers. You know how you just look around and I came across my Mom’s.... I opened the drawer and there’s this rubber girdle there. I looked at it, “oh man.” I took it out and I put it on. And I thought, “Does this feel good.” I got to go back....and this goes back to when I was on Devon Ave and my Mom when I was two years old. She took away my rubber pants and diapers. Because at two years old, Jeanne was coming along and she didn’t want both of us to be in diapers and rubber pants. So she took me out of the rubber pants and hid the rubber pants. Remember I told you at the beginning when I was talking about Devon Ave, I went down in the basement and found my rubber pants and I put them on and Mom came down and she says, “What have you got on?” And she saw that I had the rubber pants on and she says, “Big boys don’t wear rubber pants.” So she took them away from me and I really put up a fight. I wanted my rubber pants back.  I remember crying. Around that same time, my mom and dad were getting ready to go out for the evening. I walked into their bedroom to see what was going on. My mom was standing there doing something and I walked up to her and put my little 2-year-old arm around her. My arm only reached around her bottom. I felt her and said, “Mommy your wearing rubber pants. I want to wear rubber pants too.” She said, “That’s my girdle,” and took me out of her room and closed the door. So anyway getting back to Vine Street, when I saw this rubber girdle in there, I guess all that came back to me. So I took it out and I tried it on a couple of times. Every once in a while I would go into her room when she was gone or something and I’d sneak in there and I’d put them on.

    One day I was in my parent’s bedroom watching TV with them. Mom and Dad asked me if I wanted to sign up for football. I don’t remember really getting to excited about the idea but I said, "OK." Mom had a list of things I had to have to be on the team. Mom said, “Oh, it says here that I have to buy you a girdle. Mom smiled at me and said, “I have a girdle, you can wear mine.” I looked at Mom and I wanted to say, “OK, let me try it on.” But I ended up saying “I don’t want to wear your girdle.” I really did want to wear Mom’s girdle. That would have been the perfect opportunity to get to wear her rubber girdle whenever I wanted too but Dad was standing right there in the bedroom with Mom and I and he started laughing at me. So I said, “No.” If my Dad hadn’t been in the room, I would have said yes to Mom. I would have signed up for football just so I could wear mom’s girdle. After that, I told my Mom and Dad that I didn’t want to play football.

   I remember the holidays here around Christmas. Those were always fun times for me with the presents and everything. That was really fun. We’d go over to my grandparents, the Morelands. And we’d have the present opening on Christmas Eve. I remember one Christmas I asked for a radio, a short wave radio. I had a feeling my mother bought one for me and she hid it the house right before Christmas. So every time she was out of the house, I’d start looking for this radio. Well, I finally found it in her closet. And I said, “YES, YES, I got a radio! That was fun. I played with it so much that, by the time Christmas came around, I wasn’t surprised at all. But that was a neat radio. That was neat. 

    Oh, and my uncle Bill, he would always have the greatest presents for all the kids, great big boxes all wrapped in the same wrapping paper. You could always tell which gifts were his underneath the tree. One Christmas, I got an airplane, with the engine on it and my cousin got one, Jimmy. We both got one. And I got this really fancy airplane and Jimmy’s wasn’t that cool. And he was really jealous. In fact he even mentioned it a couple of years ago. He was still mad about that. I got a better plane then him. The only thing is that I didn’t start it for a long time. During the summer, I asked Mom if she’d help me start it. So we started it in the garage. We got the thing going and it just started right up but neither one of us knew how to stop the thing and it was making so much racket in the garage. It just kept on going and going. My Mom didn’t know what to do. She’s holding the plane, so she takes it and puts the propeller right down on the cement and the propeller goes flying in a million different directions and the engine stops. That’s the only way we knew how to stop the plane.

    Then the Morelands would give us a hundred dollars every Christmas. Of course we never got to see it. My parents spent it. So, you know, on clothes and stuff like that and whatever else we needed. But we never personally saw it. Oh, on the way back one Christmas, it was real windy and we’re getting out of the car after coming back from the Morelands from Christmas. Mom’s got the hundred dollar bills and WOSH off they go. The wind caught them and they took off. Never found them. Someone must have found them. I’d sure like to find them.

    Just about every Christmas I could think of, we’d always wonder what to buy Mom for Christmas. And she always wore this Channel #5 perfume. So that’s what Jeanne and I got her for Christmas usually. You know, one of those small bottles. Back then they weren’t that expensive. I thing they were five dollars. Try and buy Channel for five dollars these days that is impossible. And that’s how my Mom smelled, with the Channel #5. Now I got a bottle in my bathroom, in the cabinet there. Every once in a while when I start thinking about Mom, I’ll spray the Channel #5. It’s not really Channel #5, it’s one of those fake Channel #5 but it smells the same thing. And I’ll spray it, WOW! I mean the memories come back. It’s like my Mom’s sitting right there! So if you ever come over and see perfume sitting in my cabinet, you’ll know why it’s in there. There’s a reason. I want it there. Sometimes I want to think about my Mom. I want to smell what she smelt like back then. Maybe sometimes I want to cry. But it’s there for a reason.

 There’s only one time I heard my Mom swear. She never swore except this one time. She was down stairs in the rec room. She was sewing something or fiddling with something trying to get it to work. I think it was sewing. She was sitting on the couch doing it and I’m coming down from upstairs and I’m just about to turn the corner to go downstairs and just as I’m turning the corner, she said, “Shit” to herself. But out loud just enough were I could hear it. And I was just taken aback so much because she never swore except that one time. She looked up and saw me and says, “Oh, I’m sorry Bill. She really felt bad that she had sworn. I wish all people were like that. I don’t like swearing. I know I did a lot of it but I try not to do it anymore.

  My Mom and Dad were selling real estate. The model homes were right in back of our house so it was just a short walk over there. They would sit on the open house on the weekends and sell real estate. I remember a couple of times when Mom came back and she had sold some houses. It was so neat to see her so happy that she sold a house. And everybody else was happy for her and Jeanne and I would say, “Alright Ma!” You know, we just loved it when she was happy like that. My Mom and Dad took the brokers test. They had to study for the brokers test. You don’t have to have a broker’s license to sell new real estate but they wanted one anyway so they studied and got there broker’s license. I have my real estate license but not my brokers yet. I remember my Dad saying, “Don’t ever give up your real estate license, Bill. You may use it someday.” He had given his up. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. And to make it look better, The Morelands give their old Cadillac to my Mom. It was a “55" Cadillac. Of course my grandparent always had the new Cadillac. Every two years they would buy a Cadillac and they would give their old one either to my Mom or my aunt or somebody would get the old car. They were company cars.

                               

                                                                                                                There is the our "55" Cadillac and we also had a "55 Mercury

                                                                                                                              

     In the meantime, my Dad was still one of the foremen on the job. The other one was my uncle Al, Marie’s Husband. My uncle Al and my Dad did not get along together at all. My Dad was always bitching about Al Pisors being a foreman. I remember my dad would go out... get dressed every morning and he always wore a brand new starched shirt. He always dressed really great. He always smelled the same. He wore Mennen after-shave lotion. And I use it once in a while.  And when I use it, of course all the images and everything else of Dad comes back when you smell it. Smells are so strong and they bring out all the memories and the pictures. Smells are really strong.

   When we moved into this house, my Dad wanted to put an in ground pool in the back yard. Now here are some of his faults. He says he’s going to something but he doesn’t do it. We never did get our pool. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the money. Maybe he was just dreaming but he shouldn’t have said it if he didn’t mean it. Then I remember one time, when everybody else had the go carts, he said he was going to build me a racer made out of wood and that would have been fine with me. It would be him and I working on it and he got me all excited about it. He would tell me what it would look like and he would get the carpenters to help. I was really looking forward to that and he didn’t do it. He didn’t keep his promise. And you know the train set I got here in the living room right now? I promised Shawn when he was five years old....Whenever we used to take him to the train station and Shawn loved trains so much. I promised I would build him a train set and I kept my promise because I thought of this racing car my Dad had promised me and he never did. So that’s why I kept my promise to Shawn and built him the train set. Even though it’s sitting here, it’s his anytime he wants. He can pick it up. Besides it was a lot of fun putting it together and Shawn and I had something to talk about. But anyway that’s why I kept my promise and my Dad didn’t, some of his faults.

   Some of the nice things he did for use though was he would take us to Riverview. Oh, that was the coolest park in the whole world. And Mom and Dad and Jean and I would go. Man, was that ever a nice place. I got lost there one time and I really got scared. All of a sudden everybody disappeared and I didn’t know what to do. I’m in this big crowd. I thought I would never see my parents again. But I finally found them…. with the rollers coasters, the classic roller coasters.

                                                                                                              Soldier Field back when they had stock car races in the infield. That was exciting to watch

                                                                                                      

   And Dad used to take us to stock car races down at Soldier Field downtown. Oh, that was fun. You could smell the rubber burning and all the dust and everything getting in your eyes and the roaring. That was cool. Then on the way back.... Jeanne was with me too. Then on the way back as we’re going down Lake Shore drive, there used to be sign.....We’re heading south on Lake Shore Drive from Soldier Field and on the left hand side, there used to be a great big “Dad’s Old Fashion Root Beer” sign. And every time we would go by it, we said, “Daddy, Daddy come on were gonna stop for some Dad’s Old Fashion Root Beer and we’ll get some ice cream and we’ll make a root beer float when we get home.” And so that’s what we would do after the stock car racers. Oh, the memories! That’s why I like stock car racing today. See, everything goes back to when you were young. Geez.

 My Mom and Dad used to take us to a place called Russell’s Bar-B-Que. OH, that was the greatest bar-b-que in the whole world and it still is. It’s still there after all these years.  It’s on Thatcher Ave in Elmwood Park. Oh, they had the best bar-b-que sauce. I remember we would get in the car and go. We just couldn’t wait until we got into the bar-b-que. And they had the old fashion booths made out of wood. And then the little jukebox selector would be in each booth so you could play songs. I always used to play the same song all the time. It reminds me of Russell’s Ba-B-Que and my Mom and Dad, it was “It’s All in The Game” by Tommy Edwards. And I would play that. That was neat.

 (On my tape, you hear a coin dropping into the juke box and then, you hear Tommy Edwards singing, “It’s All in The Game”)

  And I’d have one bar-b-que dinner and then an extra sandwich .I’d have two sandwiches. Oh, I’d be so stuffed. Those were some of the Great Memories!

   One time when Mom was sick, Dad took us to Russell’s Bar-B-Que before we went downtown to the hospital where Mom was staying in. We stopped in and had a Russell’s bar-b-que. Then went downtown and went up to the room. I guess we snuck up to the room. She asked us, “Did you guys eat?” and we all said, “Yeah, we stopped at Russell’s-B-Que, Mom. We were all excited and she just started crying.... because she wanted to be with us and have a Russell’s-b-que. I won’t forget that.

 I’m going to talk about vacation. Mom and Dad would take us to Florida. Oh, that was so much fun except for the Inky part which I didn’t know about, thank goodness when I was on vacation. Well we went down there and.....That’s when my Mom and Dad and I and Jeanne would get on the all-day fishing boat and go deep sea fishing. Oh Man, was that ever fun. I still love it to this day because of that. And like I said, when Mom would get a big fish, we all would get so excited for her and everybody would be so happy. And Daddy would get a fish and everybody would be happy for daddy. “Daddy, what does it look like? How big is it?” And he’d get it towards the surface. “We can see it. WOW, is it a big one.” I still love deep sea fishing today. When my Dad moved out to California later on in his life, he would still go out deep-sea fishing. He always told me, he always said, “Every time I go out, I think of your Mom and Jeanne and you when we used to go fishing in Florida.

 My Dad was always on call because we lived in the neighborhood and he was the foreman. And if anything went wrong with anybody’s house, the first person they would call would be my Dad. He got a call one evening from a guy. My furnace is out I don’t know what’s wrong with my furnace. Can you come over? So my Dad went over to light the ...to get the furnace going. And he lit the thing and the thing exploded in his face. He was in the crawl space and it sent him flying across the crawl space. He came back and he was all singed all over and burned on his face. Wow, I remember that.

  Now that Inky’s dead, Mom buys a.... she gets a poodle, a white poodle. I can’t remember the name of the poodle. I guess it didn’t impress me very much. Then we got a little black poodle too along with it. We had two poodles. And I remember one day. Mom had just come in from grocery shopping. She parked the car in the garage and gets all the groceries in the house. And the dogs are running in and out. Mom goes to close the garage door and right at the very last instant, the little black poodle decides to scoot underneath to go outside. Well the dog didn’t make it and that garage door came slamming right down on that poodle’s head and that was the end of that poodle. Mom cried about that. She felt so bad. We still had the white poodle.

 

  Every year, my friend, my sister and I would build a fort in a prairie near our house. We used wood that we found from the homes they were building in the area. We had built three of them while we lived here. They always seemed to get wrecked at the end of the year. So when school got out for the summer we would build another one. The first two were double decker forts. We started taking off our clothes after we built the first fort. It was one of those harmless things like “I’ll show you mind if you’ll show me yours.” kind of thing and we eventually all ended up naked in the fort. We didn’t know about sex yet. There were two other girls on the next block that wanted to come into our fort and we all got naked with them too. Nothing else happened. Well, they must have gone home and told their parents what happened because the next thing I knew, my mom gets this phone call from the father of these girls. I get the drift of the conversation and he’s coming over to talk to my mom. Well, I’m out of there and on my bike as fast as I can. I know I’m in big trouble. I went over to another of my friend’s house and told him, “I’m never going back home again.” He laughed and said, “Where’re you going to go? You have to go back some time.” I knew he was right but I wasn’t going back until it got dark outside. When I got home, I could see the look on my mom’s face. She started asking me questions.  She was really mad at me. Mom ended up grounding me to the house for the rest of the summer. Summer vacation had just started and she makes me stay inside for the rest of the summer. I could usually talk her out of things but I couldn’t do it this time. I don’t think she would have gotten so mad and gave me such a harsh punishment if it were her that caught us. It was because my parents were the salespeople that sold these homes and my dad was also the foreman of this subdivision. So my mom had to make it look like she gave me a stiff punishment. And mom sure did a good job of it. The funny thing was I never heard a word from my father about it.

                                                                                                                 My sister, Bob and I hanging around outside during the summer of 1957

                                                                                                               

   I remember one time, there was Bob, myself, who else? There was somebody else with us. There were some abandon stores that were next to the Wiliby Mansion. So we were roaming around the store to see what we could find. There was just garbage in there. But anyway we’re in there hanging out, looking around. We sat down and started talking about sex. I don’t know who brought it up. Anyway, somebody started saying, “You know your mom and dad do it. And they describe how it goes on; you know, put the penis in the vagina and so on?  I said, “MY PARENT DON”T DO THAT, are you crazy. They would never do that!” And they said, “Well how in the hell do you think you were born?” And I won’t believe them. This how naive I was. I didn’t know about that stuff. I knew about looking at girls in the fort but I didn’t know what to do. Then I felt like fool. I started thinking about it and I didn’t want to believe it.

 The school I went to was further away now that we moved. I had to walk about a mile to get home. One day I was on my way home from school and I had to pee so bad. I put my hands in my pocket and started rubbing my penis. I didn’t think I was going to make it home on time. I kept rubbing and rubbing myself trying to hold it back. All of a sudden I could feel myself wetting my pants. I gave in thinking I had no choice so I stood in the middle of the street and let it come out. But it felt different this time and I could tell nothing else was coming out and my bladder was still full. I didn’t know what happened. When I got home, I looked in my underpants and felt some wet sticky stuff inside of them. I didn’t tell my mom about it. I didn’t know it then but I found out later that, that was my very first orgasm.  So later on the guys... one of my other friends I remember was the first one who brought it up. He said, “Do you know what happened? I was in the bathtub and I started rubbing my penis with a bar of soap and all this white stuff came out. I didn’t know what it was but it really felt good.”  Everybody started laughing at him because nobody had done it yet. Nobody knew what he was talking about. He said, “Go home and try it.” As soon as I got home I tried it. This felt great. I guess everybody went home and tried it too. That’s how I learned about sex, on the street, talking with the guys about it.

   It was summer and warm out. I was inside and suddenly I felt like getting naked but I was afraid I would get caught and I didn’t want to get into any trouble. Mom was in the kitchen, so I took a chance and I went up to her and asked her, “Can I go in your room and take all my clothes off and watch TV?” I thought she would probably get mad at me for asking her such a thing but she said, “OK.” that’s all she said. It wasn’t a big deal with her. I was so surprised and happy that she didn’t care if I got naked. I told mom. “If my sister comes home don’t let her come in your bedroom.” The TV set was always kept in my parent’s room. That’s just the way it was in our family. So if you wanted to watch it you had to go in my mom and dad’s room. This was the first time I ever did this at home. It was so exciting. I went into mom’s room and turned on the TV and took all my clothes off. I laid on top of my mom’s bed in the nude and watched TV.

Later that summer, I went up to Mom again and said, “I’m going up to your room and take my clothes off. This time I didn’t ask her, this time I told her. “OK,” Mom replied. She didn’t mind at all. It was fine with her and off I went into her bedroom and turned on the TV.

                                                                                                                                                                                               

There’s this other friend I had that I haven’t brought up yet. We always use to call him Chip. He was another crazy guy. He would do anything. He lived on Summerdale. Ring a Bell?

He use to have sex with.....He had a girlfriend. We always use to go over to his house and sometimes he won’t answer the door and we knew he was home. So we looked in his basement window and we’d see him in the basement and here he is with his girlfriend and his parents are still upstairs. There he is on the couch having sex with his girlfriend.

He talked me into going over to this guy’s house. I had seen the guy around but I didn’t know him. He wanted me to go in and slug him for absolutely no reason at all. He says, “We’ll go in and knock on the door and get him in the garage and then you really pound him one. I don’t know how he talked me into it because I didn’t want to do it. I guess I thought they would think I was chicken if I didn’t do it. It was really stupid thinking. Anyway, they talked me into it and they got the guy in the garage. I waited for him just to turn around. Just as he was turning around, I hauled off and slugged him right in the jaw. I have to say, that was one of the other most stupid things I ever did. He may never even remember but “I Apologize.” That was stupid. That still bothers me when I think about how someone can talk you into doing something you don’t want to do.

 “Remember me mentioning Summerdale? Ever hear of John Wayne Gacy? He’s right down the street!”   I’ll be taking about him but I’ll have to skip ahead in time for a moment and then we’ll get back on track.   

                                                                                               

                                                 

            

     You can see what I mean when I said John Wane Gacy's was right down the street from Chip's house

He's Right Down the Street!

By Bill Kaufman on Saturday, March 13, 2010 at 1:37am

Chip Johnson was a friend of mine way back in 1954 when I first met him in second grade at St Eugene’s grammar school. He lived on Summerdale. When I turned 18, he was supposed to join the navy with me but he chickened out. I went ahead in the Navy and he married a girl that lived down the block from him on Summerdale.

I remember this one time after I had gotten out of the Navy. I went over to visit with him. It was a nice sunny summer day and he went in the house and grabbed two beers. He handed me one and we went for a walk down the street sipping on the beer as we went.

As we were heading west on Summerdale, Chip started talking about this guy that lives down the street. Chip said, “Guys go in his house and they never come out again.” I said, “Yeah, right.” I didn’t believe him. I thought he was just bullshitting me. But he told me “If his car comes down the street and stops to talk to us, I want you to run in the opposite direction.”

Now Chip was never afraid of anything in his whole life. He was crazy and he would do anything. But Chip was afraid of this guy.

When we got to the intersection he pointed to Gracy’s house and said, “That’s where he lives.” I wanted to walk past his house to see what it looked like but Chip wouldn’t go any further down the street. So he turned around and we headed back down Summerdale towards Chip’s house.

Sometime later when I was at home, I saw the news about Gacy. I almost freaked out. I turned to my wife and told her this story about the time Chip warned me about Gacy.

I’m glad we never saw Gacy that day. I sure wouldn’t want to be one of his victims.

After all the news about Gacy, I wanted to go talk to Chip about it but he was gone. I guess he had left his wife and little boy back on Summerdale and moved away somewhere.

Now I'll go back in time and get back on track on Vine Street... Continuing next Saturday in Part 13 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Back Home Again ( Part 10 and Part 11)

                                  Back Home Again ( Part 10 )

                                            5598 Vine                                                                                                      

                        Music is the Time Machine of your Mind

 “Hi Sandra” 

(On my tapes, I have Paul Anka singing “All of a Sudden My Heart Sings”)

June 6th 1997

Well I’m at 5598 Vine St and I lived here from 1958 to 1961, from age 12 to age 15. 

  When I first got here, the first person I met was Bobby. He lived across the street from us, kiddy-corner here. Bob had already got to be friends with a guy named Tommy. He lived down the street on other side here. Bob he was into...his father was into guns, collecting and liked guns and so on. So was Bob. They used to go hunting ever season. In the summer time they used to go up to an island where they had 40 acres  and go hunting. And Jeanne had a girlfriend named Vail. She lived on Moreland Dr down the street from us at the other place. And they moved with us. When we move over here on Vine, they moved across the street. Jeanne and Vail were real good friends. 

 Hah, I’m looking at my house...there was my bedroom, right there, right in the front on the right hand side. That was my bedroom. Jeanne’s was the window on the left hand side and my parent’s room were in the back. This is the biggest house we lived in. It had a nice rec room down stairs. The people that live in it now changed the house a little bit, quite a bit. There used to be Jalousie windows all away around on the garage, which made the garage real bright. Like I said before, my Dad always liked Jalousie windows so he put in Jalousie windows. Oh, there’s the Willow tree my Mom and Dad planted. It was just a little thing. Now it’s just huge. In fact it got so huge they had to cut some of it off on top I can see because it got so big. (The tree no longer exist today)

                         
 There’s this other guy his name was John and when I first got here, I saw this guy on a Go-Cart. His Dad had bought him a go-cart. I’d see him buzzing up and down the street. I said, “Ah man, that’s cool.” So I wanted to get to know him so I could get to drive his go-cart. I finally got to drive his go-cart.

So now that we’ve moved, I have to walk to school a bit further now. But I’m still going to St Eugene’s. I moved further away from Sandra, my girlfriend. I don’t see her quite as much but I still go over to her house once in a while. Jeanne invited Sandra to come over one time and go in our swimming pool that we had. It was, you know just a little play pool. And so Sandra came over and down stairs in our basement were the laundry room and the rec room with knotty pine paneling separating the two rooms. Some of the boards had holes in them. And so when Sandy and Jeanne went into the laundry room to change into their bathing suits, I looked through one of the knotty pine holes. I had to see Sandra, what see looked like. I just saw her in her panties that was all. I didn’t see all of it but that was funny. That was cool.

   Bob and I did a lot of things together. We were into hunting. Since he was into hunting, I got into it I guess.

    One weekend, my Mom and Dad wanted to get away. Jeanne was sleeping over at someone’s house. They couldn’t get rid of me so I went along with them up the coast of Lake Michigan into Wisconsin somewhere. We were in the car when my Dad said, “How would you like a BB gun?” of course I said, “Yeah!” Mom didn’t want me to have one but she caved in I guess when my Dad said, “It will keep him busy.” We pulled into this motel and resort right on the shores of Lake Michigan. There was nothing else around for miles. I couldn’t wait to try out my BB gun. I grabbed it and spent the rest of that day and the whole next day shooting at sticks and rocks and things along the beach. When I got back, I found my parents sitting in the bar. Now I know why my Dad wanted me to have the BB gun. He just wanted to get rid of me while they played around in bed and in the bar. But now I had a BB gun.

    I remember one time I was out in the field next to the house and there was this guy, this kid after me for some reason. I don’t know, he was just mean so I shoot him with the BB gun and I kept shooting him and shooting him. He kept running after me and I ran into the house and he told my Mom what I was doing. Boy, did my Mom get mad and she took that gun away from me and smashed it into a million pieces. That was the end of my first BB gun. I didn’t have one for a while. Finally I talked her into having another BB gun. So Bob and I, we’d go out in the fields in the back here and hunt for anything, mice, rats, birds, doesn’t make any difference. Just have a lot of fun.

  When they were building the Kennedy expressway here, they started clearing out the.....There used to be all farms along the way were the Kennedy expressway was. So there would be all these abandon farm houses. That was so cool. There was Bob and Tom and John and myself. We would go into the abandon farm houses and you know, just try and demolish....first we would explore them, the farm houses. We had one we called the Wiliby’s mansion.  I don’t know why we called it that because John used to live in the house. That was his farm house. That’s where he used to live. We used to go in the mansion and explore. We’d bring axes with us and stuff like that, demolish the windows, break down walls and stuff. Just for the heck of it.

  Bob and I one time, we went into Wiliby’s mansion and went into the attic and we found all these newspapers dating back to the Civil War. It was from the Civil War, like 1863 to the early 1900's. We had all these newspapers. All of the attic was filled with them. And so we took them and there was this barber shop across the street. We had told the barber about what we found. He said, “I’ll give you quarter for everyone you give me.” So we were selling all these old newspapers for a quarter. Then we started coming across the ones from the Civil War. We said, “Maybe we ought to save these things.” Bob saved most of the ones of the Civil War news in them. He says he still has them to this day. I saved a lot of papers too and I traded them...I gave then to my uncle for something and he put them in the attic. I don’t know if they are still there or not. I don’t even know if they’re worth anything but it was cool. We did things like that

    Some of these abandon farm houses… someone would come along and set fire to them at night and you would see these great big blazes the sky at night. My Dad used to love to go fires and we’d see a big glow in the sky and he says, “COME ON Billy, Jeanne, there’s a fire, come on let’s get in the car and go. Mom would never go. I think maybe she went once but she always stayed home and let Dad take Jeanne and I to the fires. When we’d get back, Mom would always say, “You guys smell like smoke.” So we would have to change our clothes. Eventually Wiliby’s mansion got torched. I think it was the.....I don’t think it was kids, I think it was probably the fire department themselves or the city setting them on fire so they didn’t have to pay to demolish them.

  Bob and me and Tommy used to like to go to forest preserves. Well Tommy, I hung around with him but you know, he wasn’t really a close friend like Bob was or John. Anyway, we used to go to the forest preserves west of here and take our BB guns in there and spend all day in the summer time in there on the bridle path with our BB guns shooting things. If we ever got caught in there with our BB guns we would have gotten into trouble. When someone came along we would hide our guns. I still like to go....I think that’s why I like trees. It’s just beautiful in the forest. Oh, and Bob and I would find a nice skinny tree but real tall. We’d climb toward the top and start swinging on them. Boy, could you get those thinks going back and forth. That was a lot of fun.

 Another thing I was interested in when I lived here was, the new jets came out....The Boeing 707, that was it! And they were first introduced at O’Hara airport. And when I first went there, the first time I went to O’Hara airport, it was like a little rink-e-dink country airport. I’m not kidding you. It was just one little building made out of wood and that was it. Well eventually they started building on and then they had the 707's. Bob and I walked one time all the way from here all the way to airport. Boy, was that a walk. That was an all-day thing. That was cool, but when we got there, we asked if we could go up into the tower. We got to go up to the tower and look around. We had to keep our mouth shut and stand still and don’t move around. And so they let us in the tower and then we asked if we could go on a Boeing 707 and they let us walk through, of course it was empty and everything but when we walked through the 2^nd plane we found a pilot and a stewardess making out on one of the seats kissing. So that was really cool. I just loved flying. We used to go over there and collect the ah....what do you call it? The departure...The Schedules. They used to give out schedules, big thick schedule books of arriving and departing planes. We used to collect them from all the departing airlines. They don’t have them anymore but at that time they did. I wish I would have kept them. That was cool! 

______________________________________________________

                                Back Home Again ( Part 11 )

                                           5598 Vine St     

                                                                                                 

                    Everything Was an Adventure Back Then

                                                                                                                                

   

        This is the way our  Home looked back then when we lived there

   June 6th 1997

 

I remember one time there was this Electra. One of the prop planes but the Electra. And it took off and started to bank to turn and it went right down and it hit the railroad track embankment and it just exploded into the ground and to the forest there. So I heard about it on the radio. I took my bike and I asked Bob if he wanted...he didn’t want to go, it was too far. So I went by myself. I rode out there. And I got out there and at first they weren’t going to let me through. A cop stopped me. Oh, I had asked John if he wanted to go. His Dad was the chief of police of Harwood Heights, a little town over here. And he was the Chief of Police and I asked him, “Could I go over there?” He said, “Sure.” Well he had no authority out there but he said, “Sure, go on out there.” So when the police stopped me out there, I said, “The chief of police of Harwood Heights said I could go out there and I could go past. Anyway the guy let me through. I went out there and they started carrying all these bodies out with the heads gone and the arms gone. They were all charred bodies. God, did that make me sick. That was the last time I was ever interested in airplanes again. I swear to god. To this day, I still don’t like flying. That just really shocked the heck out of me. I don’t ever want to see that again.

  During this time, before I saw that plane crash and I was afraid to fly anymore, before that. Bob and Tom and myself, they decided.....we were at the airport and saw that they had helicopters that went to O’Hare to Midway and then to Meig’s Field downtown and then back to O’Hara again.  So when we were at the airport, we found out how much it cost. It turned out to be, what was it.... twenty dollars apiece if the three of us went. Ten or twenty, something like that or $20 altogether. Anyway, we came back. We had to ask our...you know my Mom and I thought, oh man, she’s going to turn me down. I want to go on the helicopter so bad. Everybody had to ask their parents. Well all the parents said yes. We couldn’t believe it. Tommy’s Mother drove us out to the airport. Ah, was that ever COOL! That was one of the most exciting things that ever happened. We got on the helicopter and it....helicopters are really cool and it took off and we just flew over the city. You know, real low and went to Midway. And then they dropped off some passengers and picked some up. And we flew on and flew over the downtown and out to Meig’s Field there and landed, and we took off and came back to O’Hara airport. Oh, was that ever Cool! That was a cool ride. That was fun. That was worth every cent.

  When Bob and I used to go hunting in the field here, the field and what we called the Big Hill. The Big Hill, let’s see, there’s my house here and just to the left is another house that the Morelands built. And everything south of here is all prairie. Off to the southwest here, they have pilled a great big mound of dirt. You’ve seen them every once in a while. The road graders would make this big mountain of dirt? Well, that’s what we had over here. And we called it the Big Hill. We played a lot on that. We used to go hunting around there. Take our bikes up there.

   Anyway, we were out with our bow and arrows one time out in the field and I was with Bob. He was shooting his arrows into a hill. We were target practicing. There was nothing else to shoot at. So he shot his arrow first and then I shot my arrow and I split his arrow right down the center. Now, I’m not anywhere near that good a shot. It just happened to be a lucky shot....Or maybe not. Because he got so mad, he turned around with his bow and arrow and immediately shot me right...right in the stomach with his bow and arrow. And that arrow....Thank God....hit my belt buckle. Otherwise that thing would have gone right in me. Anyway, as soon as he shot it, he turned around and ran when I doubled over. We weren’t friends for a year.  I don’t think I snitched on him right away. Finally I told my parents what happened. Anyway, my parents finally got us together again. They went across the street and made friends with ah.....starting talking with his parents and then finally one thing led to another and Bob and I were friends again. But I can’t help think about what would happen if it didn’t hit my belt buckle. WOW!!

 Another thing Bob and I did in the field back here was, we looked for fossils. I guess in school we started learning about fossils. So we started looking for fossils in the field back here. We found a lot too but just little eddy-biddy ones. Oh, and then we discovered that there was the fool’s gold. It looks like real gold and its real heavy and there was a lot of that out there. So we started collecting that stuff. And I came across...I don’t know if it was a rock or a fossilized something. But it looked just like a petrified claw of a turtle. I think that’s what it was. I don’t think it was a rock. It was hollowed out underneath. It looked just like a petrified claw. It was cool. I saved it but I don’t know what happened to it. So, I still collect rocks today. I have a whole bunch of them at home. You know those geodes with the crystals inside? You break open the rocks and there’s crystals inside and they’re real pretty. Well, I collect those because of what happened back here on Vine St. That’s where I got that from. It’s amazing sometimes. You wonder, you know later on in your life. Why do I do things, why do I collect things or why do I do things. And when you do a tape like this, you find out, you go back in your life and you find out, well, so that’s why I do that. A lot of things happen that way. At least that’s what I’ve been finding out. 

   Oh, when we were in the field back here, Bob and I saw these...we called them wild dogs. In fact we talked about them recently and we still think it was wild dogs. Anyway, back then we had our bow and arrow and he said, “Bill, those are wild dogs.”  And they were fierce looking and they would just roam around in the prairie there. Somehow we got this stupid idea. I’m going to kill the dog. So I go up there, in fact I did it right down the street here. Looking south, I did it right down the street. It was all prairie then. And the dog looked up at me and I took my bow and arrow and I shoot him right in the side. And you don’t think anything of it until that arrow hit and you hear that dog squeal and roll over on its side. And I said, “What have I done now. I can’t reverse it, Oh Man!  So I try and go up there and I was going to pull the arrow out of him. Well he’s so mad his teeth are snarled up. There was no way I was going near that dog. The dog rolled over and the arrow snapped off and half of it was inside. The workmen were nearby on the other side of the street, building a house. One workman yelled out, “Did you shoot that dog?” Boy, he was mad. We said no and then we left real quick. We went back there later. The dog must have ...it looked like he had crawled through the weeds but he wasn’t there. Either that workman took him or the dog crawled off. But I don’t see how he could have crawled off on his own. After I shot and put an arrow into him, Bob put an arrow into him. So he was shot twice. I’ll never forget that. That was one of the worse things I did. 

 Oh Bob’s father had the whole basement filled with guns. He used to make his own bullets. So there was a lot of gunpowder in Bobby’s basement. One day we got the idea of making skyrockets. We found tissue paper and got gunpowder and rolled it and found a long straight stick. We rolled gunpowder and tissue paper and made a fuse out of gunpowder and we were shooting skyrockets off. That was cool. That was a lot of fun. The only thing is, later on, I wasn’t around then. This was much later. Bobby decided to make a bomb. He took a pipe and do I have to say anymore. He took it out to the Big Hill over there to blow it off. This is what the other guys told me, he went to light it and throw it and it went off. It blew part of his thumb off and knocked him unconscious. I asked him about it and he told me what happened but after that he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

 Since John got his go cart. We used to have so much fun in that thing. We’d take it by the Big Hill because there was no traffic and no buildings out there just new paved roads out there. We’d take it out there and oh, we used to have a ball out there. So everybody else decides… everybody else wanted a go cart. And Bob’s Dad didn’t buy him one but his Dad built him a go-cart. I went down there. He had just finished it. It was still in the basement and I sat on it. I did something and I broke it. Boy, did his father get mad. It was just an accident. Anyway, so he fixed it and Bob tries it out down the street here. And something went wrong or he couldn’t steer it right and he’s going lick-a-ty-split and can’t control it. I never laughed so hard in my life that was funny. But later on he got to learn how to use it better.

   Oh, Tommy’s father bought him a go-cart. Dog gone, I didn’t get one. My parents won’t buy me one. I guess maybe they didn’t have the money, I don’t know. I always wanted a go-cart. I wouldn’t buy one now because there’s really no place you can drive them anymore. Oh, another place we drove the go-carts was west of here and across Cumberland Avenue. There’s a street. It’s all built up with big buildings and apartments now but at the time it was nothing but a field and the road went right through the field for a little over a quarter of a mile. It ended at the forest preserve at the other end way in the back there. We used to call that the drag strip. People had marked it off a quarter of a mile and they use to race cars there all the time. You could hear them all the way from our house, the big powerful cars. You could hear them squeal their tires and come roaring down the strip especially on Friday nights and Saturday nights. We’d go down there and watch. Somebody had ground up some trees and we’d sit in a big pile of wood chips. So we’d sit there and watch the cars racing down. Of course the cops always kept an eye on it after a while. You’d see them get a ticket for drag racing. Or better yet, there would be an accident once in a while. I saw a corvette....I didn’t see it crash but I saw the results. It went into a ditch. He crashed his brand new corvette, uh, it made me sick. But anyway, we used to drive the go-carts there. That was a lot of fun. If you start at the drag strip on the west side and came east, you’d hit the quarter of a mile mark at the end there and then right away there was a forty-five degree turn in the road. So if you didn’t slow down fast enough and make that turn, Crash, right into the ravine there. That’s where the corvette went.

     One time, Bob and I, there was a tree right around the bend from the drag strip. As soon as you make the turn there was this tree. We cut it down one time and laid it across the road and we get in the pile of wood chips. We see this car come roaring down the drag strip again. He makes the turn ok. He’s still going pretty fast and sliding around the turn. All of a sudden the tree’s right there. He slams on his brakes and you hear screeching, uh, we thought he was going to end up in the ditch. That was something else. We didn’t do that again.

  (“Ahh, the cops just went by as usual when I stop at a house here. They usually... someone calls the cops and has him check me out. No big thing, Here...uh-oh, he’s turning around, coming back. I wonder if he’s going to stop...Yeah I think he’s going to stop me. This should be interesting. I think so. He’s sitting there looking at me. He stopped for a while. Right across from me, he kept staring at me. I guess he checking out my plates and then he left. This happened once before at another house. Oh while, on to the thing.”)

 I started hanging around John a lot because he had the go-cart and not only that but he got this.... He was the first guy in the neighborhood to get a car. It was an old red Crosley station wagon. I don’t know if you know what they look like but their small and ugly. It’s the only way I can describe it. Anyway he got this old Crosley someplace. No license or anything and we used to pile in there. It ran pretty good I guess. But I don’t know, when you’re thirteen, fourteen that’s fantastic. So we took it down to the drag strip one time, maybe two times that I can remember. We rode up and down. It didn’t go very fast. But then later on, he stored it in my garage for some reason. He had to store it in our garage and I don’t know the reason and Mom was in the hospital at the time. And all the kids were in the garage. My Dad was out for the evening. So all the kids were in the garage with the Crosley and John wasn’t here. He had gone home and left his car in the garage.

   I didn’t introduce you to this new guy. He’s not new but he’s new to you. His name is Skip. What a character! He lived in back of Bob and uh, he was the bad guy in the neighborhood. Anyway, he was over that night and he was with some other friends he brought, that came over that I didn’t know that well from school. They had motor scooters and they were riding around the yard and oh man, what a mess. Anyway, Skip gets in the car and he goes nuts. The guy was nuts, really. And he kicks all the windows out of John’s Crosley. I couldn’t believe it. You know, it’s in my garage. I felt responsible but I could control the guy. John comes over later on after dinner. He sees what happened. Holy Cow! He went ballistic and he just hauled off and slugged Skip in the face so many times, geez. I don’t blame him. Eventually he trashed the Crosley and he got this 1950 Ford business coupe. Really, it’s a classic now. So I hung around his garage where he had the car in the back of his house and we worked on that car a lot. Instead of going out with the girls, I ended up working on cars. We put a “57" it was either a “57" or “58" Chrysler engine in it, the one with the big heads on it. Oh, was that cool. When you put it in the engine compartment, the heads touched either side of the engine compartment. You could even put your hands down the sides, it was that close. God that engine was big. But that’s what we worked on.

                      

                                                                                     

 Once we got it running, we were down on Canfield there and one of the other guys that he knew said, “Can I drive it? I’ll show you what it looks like when the front end comes up.” So he goes and starts way at the end of the street here on Canfield and we’re at the other end. And we watch him and you can see the whole front-end lift up and the roaring and everything and we’re watching it. And the guy blows up John’s engine. Ahhh, was he devastated, after all that work. He ended up putting an Oldsmobile engine in it. But he could never get it started. So he sold it to some guy he knew and the guy brought it to a mechanic and got it started right up. John was so mad. He said, “Dog gone it, I should have kept that car.” I spent many days in the garage working on that.

                                                                                                                            

                                                                                                                                                   John’s Garage                                        

 When John and I weren’t working on the cars, we started smoking. We had to sneak our cigarettes. We called them weeds so our parents didn’t know what we were taking about. Yeah, Right! Anyway, when we were working on the car and felt like a cigarette, we’d have to hide. We used to even go out back where they had just put in these new sewers for some new homes they were going to build. We’d put a whole bunch of hay at the bottom of the sewer and that’s where we had our cigarettes so no one would bother us and we wouldn’t get caught smoking.

    There was this little tiny Ma and Pa grocery store on the corner of Canfield and Higgins and we used to go in there and steal cartons of cigarettes. Put it in our jackets, underneath your arm and walk out with them. I don’t know how many we took. Anyway, one day the owner confronted John when he was over there by himself about the missing cartons of cigarettes and John said, “Yeah, we took them. So he ended having to pay, Oh, I don’t know how much money it was and he wanted us to ... because we were all in on it together. He wanted us to split it. And I didn’t have the money and to get it, I would have to tell my parents. And I wasn’t about too. So I never, you know, split the money. I never came up with the money. I wasn’t about to let my parents know about that.

  John and I used to go out to the Big Hill. His father had some fireworks hidden the house. Since he was the chief of police, He would confiscate the fireworks and then bring them home and blow them off himself. Anyway, so John went in the attic and got two aerial bombs, ah, really cool. We brought them to the Big Hill and shot them off. Man, did they make the racket. That was really cool.

 Oh, I got to tell you more about this Skip. He was the punk of the neighborhood. He looked like you know, with the hair coming down in the front, with the pompadours or whatever you call them. And he always thought he was so cool and he wasn’t. He had glasses and he always acted tuff. Ah, he’s the one who got me smoking. He used to hang around with this gang at Oriole Park, which is, I don’t know, about a mile from here. I don’t know why I got into that. I didn’t hang around that gang so much but I used to go with Bock and he knew all the guys at the park. You felt like, your cool. Anyway, He would lie so much. You couldn’t believe if he was telling the truth or not half the time. And he got me smoking. About the first couple of weeks, I was so sick. I’m trying to be cool and smoke. Then I finally got used to it and got hooked on it.  Wonder if I would have ever smoked if it wasn’t for him? You never knew when you went out with him whether he was going to start a fight or not. He’d always lose. But he would always act tuff and start a fight with somebody. So I never wanted to be around him

.

    One time while I was walking with him across the expressway on this bridge on Cumberland, just talking and walking and he stopped at the top of the bridge and he sees this parking lot full of cars and say’s “Come on, let’s go steal a car Bill.” I said, “Get out of here. I’m not stealing no car. What are you nuts?” He says, “Ah come on, let’s go steal a car.” I said, “The hell with you,” and I turned around and went home. He went on and said, “I’m going to steal that car.” I don’t know, he said he did the next day but like I said, he lied so much you never knew if he was telling the truth or not. But he said he took it.

  We were all at the Big Hill one time. There was Skip and Bob. I guess the whole group were out at the Big Hill. We had our bikes out there. We get to the top of the Big Hill and we’re going to ride down this real steep part. And when you get to the bottom, there’s another little hill maybe about twelve feet high. So you go down the real big steep hill and then you go over the little hill and if you don’t slow down on your way down the big hill, you’ll kill yourself when you fly off the little hill. So everybody’s taking it easy and having fun. Skip, he wants to show off. This is how stupid this guy is. He gets up and peddles he PEDDLES down the steep hill as fast as he could. And he didn’t slow down at all.  He went off the little hill and he must have sailed twenty-five into the air and came down headfirst right in to the ground. God, he just laid there, he’s unconscious. He had knocked himself out. We all thought he was just kidding like he always does, goofs around. We all went up there and said, “Wake up, wake up Skip” and nothing happened. Finally he came around. We still thought he was kidding but he wasn’t. He was knocked out. And then a few minutes later, he says, “I going to try that again” and we all said. “You’re crazy, don’t do that you’ll kill yourself.” The guy was absolutely nuts. Nobody wanted to be around. We all said, “Well we’re going to go home. You can go down if you want but we’re going home.” So we all left him there. We went about to pick him up and drag him home. So, I don’t think he went down because he didn’t have anybody to impress anymore. Boy, that guy was stupid.

    On the way to the park, there was this little Ma and Pa grocery store that we bought our cigarettes from. The old man behind the cash register really couldn’t see very well. He wore these really thick coke bottle glasses.

      One day, we found that we had run out of cigarettes. We didn’t have any money to buy any more. So I looked around my dresser drawers to see if I had any change. All I came up with was this big old Mexican Peso that my grandparents gave me when they came back from their vacation. I said to my friend, “I got an idea, let’s paint it silver. We’ll make sure the old man is behind the cash register and give him the painted Peso. Since it’s the size of a half dollar, he’ll never know the difference.” We said, “Yeah!” and I got out the can of silver spray paint.

     We had to wait a day for the paint to dry on the coin. The next day my friend and I started walking to the park. We stopped off at the little Ma and Pa store. We both argued who was going to go in and do this. We both were afraid we could get caught. But since it was my idea, I was the one to go in. I went up to the counter and asked for a pack of Marlboro. I gave him this silver painted Mexican Peso. My heart was pounding. The old man held the coin right up to his coke bottle glasses and looked at it. He looked at it for what seemed like an eternity. I just knew this wasn’t going to work. It was taking this old man to long. All of a sudden, he reaches into the cash register and gives me my change for what he thinks is a half dollar. I couldn’t believe I got away with it. I walked out with my cigarettes and my friend and I started laughing. We light up and continued our way to the park to hang around with the other guys. 

    We never did go back to that store again. You can only get away with that once. The following summer, the store was closed for good.

  

One time, I found out how to make little miniature rockets out of matchsticks. I buy the wooden matches and take little tin foul and wrap the tin fouls around the tip of the matches and you prop it up against something and take another match and put it underneath by the tin foul. And when it ignites, it builds up enough pressure so this match shoots just like a little rocket. A lot of times during the summer, I’d be in the garage and I’d shot these little rockets. There would be match sticks all over the floor. I remember that.

  I bought this cannon. I don’t know where I got it from. Boy was it loud. You mix something in it. I can’t remember what it was. They gave you some kind of powder and you mix it with something. There was this plunger on top that when you push it down it would rub against some flint and ignite the mixture inside the cannon. You would pound this plunger down on the cannon and it would go KAA-BOOM and the flames would shoot out. Holy Cow, that was cool. I wonder what happened to that?

    Summers were neat when school got out. I used to sleep all the time until like noon, one o’clock. Then I’d get up and Oh No, I’m wasting the day. That was neat being a kid because you could always wake up and find somebody to hang around with, somebody to play with. Now I’m 72 and I wake up (Thank God) and there’s nobody to play with. That sucks! I’d like to be a kid again. That was fun. Everything was an adventure back then.

 I remember when I used to get sick a couple of times. I remember when I was sick, my Mom would always take care of me. That was always a great feeling. I always knew she’d be there. That was neat. When I got bored and when I was starting to feel better, I used to get magazines and I cut pictures of deserts out. Like cake and ice cream, anything that was a desert and paste it in a scrap book. Boy, that was a lot of fun, I think. Not being sick but at least I was busy pasting things. That was interesting. But NOW I’m sick and.... That’s what I hate about being sick now. Mom isn’t here. Nobody really gives a rat’s ass what happens. And I’m all by myself in this apartment. No one to take care of you. Man, that’s the pits. I wanna go back!

    I remember one time my parents were sick. My Mom and Dad were sick and Jeanne and I decide to.... No, they weren’t sick. I take that back, there weren’t sick. They were sleeping and they had the day off. It was Sunday, I think. Jean and I decide to make breakfast and serve it to them in bed. Now I think we had....we made the regular breakfast of bacon and eggs and toast. But it turned out so crummy. I wasn’t eatable let me put it that way. I think my Mom tried to eat it. My Dad definitely did not eat it. Oh boy, that’s funny thinking back on things like that.

 Well, I’m going to stop here and I see you over on the next tape.