What My Father Built

My father was a skilled carpenter and as such, he built many of our play things both inside and out. Outside, he built a slide which was attached to our swing set. He also built a play fort out of wood for us, where we could play soldiers and Indians, which was a very popular game in the 1950s. It even had a look-out tower. Another he built was a jungle gym, or monkey bars, as we called them. We spent hours climbing on the jungle gym and had fun hanging from the bars and moving hand-over-hand on the rungs of the monkey bars. Attached to the jungle gym was a teeter-totter, which I particularly liked.

When we were a little older, Daddy built us a play house. It had windows that opened and a front porch. The spare key to our house was hidden in the recess above the door on the inside of the play house. It was big enough for us to move our table and chairs that my father had made into the play house. We spent many happy hours in the play house which was situated across the driveway from our house. It was nestles in a clearing in the woods near the driveway, near the lilies of the valley.

When we were very young, my father made blocks by cutting shapes from scraps of wood. My mother painted the blocks in bright colors. Being able to make so many things meant we could have many nice play things that we would otherwise not habe been able to afford. My father was very talented and kind to us. He was very creative. We were a priority in his life, and for this, I am grateful.

Weddings

The royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton got me thinking about weddings, so thought I would tell you a little about my weddings. They were very different.

My first wedding to Grandpa was a big affair, but not as big as Grandpa's family would have liked. I had 6 bridesmaids and 6 groomsmen. I remember all my bridesmaids but I don't remember all the groomsmen. Then I had my sister as maid of honor (although she did not return the favor when she got married). The bridesmaids wore light blue long sleeved dresses and "picture hats," which were big floppy white hats that were popular then. (My sister wore a picture hat and veil at her wedding.) I wore a long white A-line dress with long sleeves and a high neck. It was covered with lace and had little blue ribbons with a pearl sewn all over the dress. My veil was a mantilla-style and was also the train. I have a picture of it in black and white and somewhere I have my picture book.

Your Grandpa and his groomsmen wore white tuxedos. I don't remember what my mother wore, but Grammie had a dress made of pink satin and wore a pick hat. They rented practically the whole Radisson in New Hartford and Grandpa Bud brought all sorts of cold cuts and bread to have for after parties for the people from Albany.

The day before my wedding our septic tank broke and couldn't be fixed before the wedding, so we couldn't take showers at my house. I had to go to a neighbor's house to take a shower, as did my bridesmaids. What a mess. Your grandparents were very religious and had a mass brochure printed up for the wedding mass. Someone forgot to bring them from our house to the church and I wouldn't walk down the aisle until someone went back to get them and hand them out, so our wedding started about 15 minutes late.

Our reception was at a golf course club house. We had a band and a buffet. Grammie and Grandpa Bud would have preferred a sit-down dinner but my parents couldn't afford that. We were married a week after we graduated from college. It was a lot for them to afford. It was a nice reception and we left the reception to travel to our honeymoon in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. We stayed the night outside of Binghamton and then traveled the rest of the way the next day.

The place we stayed had individual suites and included meals and things to do. I got sunburned very badly the first day and was miserable the rest of the time. It was a nice honeymoon for what we could afford. We decided to keep the honeymoon cheap so we could save to buy a house.

We lived with your grandparents from June until April when we bought a house a block away from their street. It was nice to be close to them, but they always knew what we were doing as they drove by our house. We spent every Sunday with them, while Grandpa watched some ball game and I sat with Grammie. This continued even when you were born. It was very difficult to get Grandpa to go visit my parents once every month or so. They lived 100 miles away, so it wasn't far, but he didn't want to miss his time with his family on Sunday.

My second wedding was very different. There were only 3 people at our wedding before the Bandera Justice of the Peace: your mother, and Doug's brother and sister-in-law. We had lunch after at a little restaraunt  in Bandera. And then I went back to work on Monday. We did go on a little honeymoon in November to Mustang Island. Doug claimed I ruined the day when I said something about a former boyfriend, even though he talked about his former wives.

So that's the story of my weddings.

Irish Dances and Best Friends

Everybody has a best friend in school. In grammar school, my best friend was Cornelia (Connie) Farley. Connie was of Irish-American descent and loved all things Irish. She knew how to dance jigs and reels and every St. Patrick's Day, she would try to teach us how to dance Irish dances. We all loved learning the dances and the songs that Connie would sing. 


I would often spend the night at Connie's house and we talked and shared secrets the way best friends do. We were very fond of John F. Kennedy, our Irish-American president. When Mrs. Kennedy was pregnant and gave birth very early (too early) for the baby to survive, I was at Connie's house. We prayed and prayed for the little baby Patrick but to no avail. We cried when we heard he had died and then prayed for the family.


We would make our own magazines at Connie's house. We would cut out articles and pictures from other magazines and use floor and water paste to paste them into our own magazine. They were just articles and pictures that we liked and thought would look better in our own magazine.


We would often dress up in our mother's dresses that were long on us and play nun. We enjoyed doing that very much. We would give each other punishments or penances. One day we got a little carried away and Connie hit me a little too hard with a stick and it hurt. We cut back on our penances after that.


Connie went to the other girls' high school after 8th grade and it was the school that I wanted to go to but my parents preferred that I go to UCA. So after 8th grade we lost contact with one another until about 4 years ago when we had our 40th anniversary. Even though I didn't go, someone gave me Connie's email address and we have kept in touch ever since.

Found Another Crush

In my last post about Valentine's Day, I wrote about three crushes I had in grammar school and how one of them brought me my first Valentine's Day gift. I mentioned that I had liked one boy, Allen, the best. He was a wiz in science and math. He always won the science fair awards from third-grade one. He was one of the people I competed with for top grades in out class. I had heard from my mother many years ago that he had dropped out of college and was writing poetry and novels.

Imagine my surprise when he found me on FaceBook a couple of weeks ago! We have been corresponding by email for the past few weeks and seem to have an easy time "talking" to each other about the past and what we are doing today. He lives in New York City and does indeed write poetry and novels and also does voice-overs for PSAs and commericials, and and also works at a radio station. He has a 21-year-old son and has been married and divorced. He changed the spelling of his name to Alen Pol Kobryn, from Allen Paul Kobryn, and you can even find out about him in Wikipedia. He is very much as I remember him, and I enjoy writing to him.

Funny how people pop into and out of your life all through the years. 

My First Valentine's Gift

I was in the 5th grade and I had crushes on three boys in my class. I got valentine in school from all of them and I sent them all valentines as well. All three of the boys I had a crush on lived on the other side of town. Our entire class exchanged valentines on the day before Valentine’s Day, which fell on a Saturday that year.

One of the boys, Timmy Fitzgerald had bought me a box of chocolates and wanted to come by my house on Valentine’s Day to give me the chocolates. Well, on that Saturday, we had a terrible snow storm. My mother told me that probably Timmy would not be coming over because of the bad weather. However, apparently Timmy had very persuasive powers with his father, and he and his father drove all the way across town so that Timmy could give me the box of chocolates.  I treasure the box the chocolates came in for quite a long time afterwards. My mother was shocked that Mr. Fitzgerald drove all that way to our house for Timmy to give me the chocolates.

I remember the box so well. It had a satin pillowed covering on the top of the heart-shaped box.There was a plastic flower on top of the box, too. I kept my treasures in that box for quite a few years.

My crushes were just crushes, I liked Allen the best; he was very smart, as was I. But he couldn’t get to my house easily. His father had a disability and his mother worked to support the family. But I liked Allen so such. And Jimmy was also one of my crushes, but that crush ended in fourth grade when I found out he liked a girl in his neighborhood.

Jimmy and I connected when I lived in Albany. We had lunch and caught up on all his family (there were 12 children in their family!). We still keep in touch on holidays and birthdays, Allen, who now spells his name Alen, recently found me on Facbook and we have been corresponding through email every since. He works as a voice-over professional in New York City and write books and poetry. Alen sent me an article yesterday on Timmy, who was retiring from his Assistant District Attorney’s position in Oneida County. My mother had found an article on him years ago, so I knew he was an ADA. My mother also talked to Alen’s mother and she told her he was writing (this was many years ago). The article Alen sent was really nice; Timmy has been the ADA for abused and neglected children and has 10 children of his own!

It’s strange how I have reconnected with about 4 or 5 of my elementary school classmates. I have more contact with them than I do with high school friends or even university friends. Perhaps it was because we grew up together and feel more comfortable with each other since we spent 9 of our formative years together. The article Alen sent me prompted me to write about my first real Valentine’s gift from a little boy who was able to get his father to brave the winter storms to come to my house on Valentine’s Day.

Favorite Children's Books and Movies

There are certain children’s books and movies that are classics and I remember them vividly and the affected they had on me. My favorite children’s classic was Heidi. I loved the story of the orphaned Swiss girl who charmed her grandfather who cared for her. Not only did I read the most popular book Heidi, but I also loved the rest of the trilogy which follows Heidi as she grows from a little girl to a young woman. I especially remember the descriptions of the melted cheese and bread sandwiches that Heidi ate to build her strength. Those passages would make my mouth order since I loved melted cheese sandwiches.

Another favorite book was Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. When I first read it, I didn’t understand that the setting was the time period was the War Between the States (the Civil War). When I read it again later when I was older and realized this, I enjoyed the book even more because I could understand it better. I cried when Beth died, as she was my favorite character, but I also loved Jo for her strength of character and determination. This book, too, I followed with reading Little Men. I couldn’t get enough of Alcott’s stories.

When I was quite a young reader, I loved the Bobbsie Twins series. I was enthralled by the concept of two sets of twins, one dark complected and the other fair. I could identify especially with Nan, the older girl. I remember that I especially liked the book where the Bobbsie Twins go to the seashore.

I read The Wizard of Oz and really enjoyed the book. But when I saw the movie, I was absolutely terrified of the flying monkeys. The witches were fine, but those monkeys were horrible. And we always watched the movie when it came on televsion, and to this day, I have little love of monkeys, flying or otherwise.

I didn’t read the play until later, but as a child I loved Mary Martin’s version of Peter Pan when it was on television. I saw the Disney cartoon when I was quite young, probably no more than four. My babysitter Connie Guilfoyle, the daughter of my father’s supervisor, took me to see it. I remember that Connie told me that I could cover my eyes when the part with the crocodile came on because that part scared me. Connie also took me to see Alice in Wonderland. I had an Alice in Wonderland rain cape and umbrella which I loved wearing. It was made of pink translucent plastic and had the characters imprinted on it. I didn’t read the Alice books until I was much older but truly enjoyed them.

When I was older, a pre-teen, I loved reading the Nancy Drew series of books. I had quite a number of books in the series and I would trade books with my friend Debbie Brown who had even more books in the series than I did. I also liked the Cherry Ames series, which was about a nursing student, who then became a nurse and had adventures as she worked in different types of nursing situations.

Another series I loved and appreciated when I was older was the Winnie-the-Pooh books. I never had them read to me when I was younger but loved them when I read them by myself. When I was in high school, I even read the Latin translation of Winnie-the-Pooh. When the Disney corporation bought the rights to Winnie-the-Pooh, I was tremendously disappointed in their version because the cartoon characters looked nothing like the drawings of the characters in the books. And they made Piglet, my favorite character, to be such a coward, when I did not see him that way from reading the books.

These were my favorite children’s books and I have even read them as an adult. They still hold much pleasure for me today as they did all those years ago.

Pets

We had three dogs while I was growing up. The first dog was a beagle mix we named Tinkerbelle. We got her when I was in Kindergarten. She was allowed to wander around, and she went into the road and was hit and killed down the road from our house. We three children were heartbroken, and we cried and cried for days. My father buried her in the woods and covered her burial place with bricks.

Our second dog, Tippie, was a collie mix. If we let her out by herself, she kept running away from home, so my father made a run where she could be kept on a chain outside and not runaway. However, then she barked and barked, and the neighbors complained, so she was given away to someone out in the country.

The third dog, the dog we grew up with for the rest of our lives, was Sissy was also a collie mix that the neighbors, the Geers, who were Joanne’s godparents got for her, because she loved the collie Lassie on the television show. She really didn’t look much like a collie. She had a long snout like a collie and was tan and white with semi-long hair. She was such a good dog. She didn’t wander away and didn’t bark unless a strange car pulled in the driveway. We got her on Oct. 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, so she was named Assisi, nicknamed Sissy. She loved my grandfather most of all and he loved her. He would pet her and say, “Oh, if only you could talk.” He talked to her all the time when he came through the woods to visit and when he came in my Uncle Donald’s car, Sissy never barked at the car because she knew Grandpa was coming.

Sissy was allowed in the house more than the other dogs had been, but she could only stay in the kitchen. Sometimes she would try to sneak into the living room, but she also was made to go back into the kitchen. When my grandfather walked through the woods to visit, if he walked back, my mother had to keep Sissy in the house because she would follow him back into the woods.

My mother had a bell on the back porch which she rang when it was time to come inside. The bell was for us and for my father, but Sissy knew what it meant, too. If she didn’t want to come in, she would go behind a tree and put her face against the tree so that she couldn’t see my mother and she thought that she was hiding from my mother. However, she didn’t realize that her hind end was in plain view and that my mother could see her. So my mother would call her and eventually she would come in.

The night my grandfather died, my brother went out to the back hall where Sissy slept and hugged her and cried, telling her that Grandpa wasn’t coming back to see her anymore. For months after Grandpa died, whenever my Uncle Don’s car pulled into the driveway, she would get very excited and wait for Grandpa to emerge from the car. She seemed so disappointed and confused when he didn’t get out of the car. It was really sad.

Sissy lived to a ripe old age, but she got arthritis. My parents tried to make her as comfortable as possible, but eventually she had the disease so badly that she couldn’t walk up and down the back porch stairs. When that day came, my brother took her to the vet to have have put to sleep. He cried and cried after that.

My parents didn’t have a pet for a while after that. Some years later, my brother brought them a puppy from a litter he had in North Carolina. He was a black lab mix that my father named Duke, after John Wayne’s nickname. My father loved that dog and Duke was allowed in the house more than any dog had been. He stayed on a chain when he was outside and it was long enough that he could roam around quite a lot. Pat loved the dog too, and took care of him when he moved home after my father died. Unfortunately, my mother gave Duke a bone to chew on and it pierced his intestines and he got peritonitis and died suddenly. My brother was quite shaken up by Duke’s death, as it happened when my brother was stricken at the same time with a case of gout. My mother complained about having to let Duke in and out and sweeping up dog hair, but although she had arthritis, he was good for her and her health went downhill more quickly after Duke died.

I loved all our pets, and today I try to keep my pets healthy and happy, because they make me happy and keep me healthy.

Art

I had many pastimes when I was growing up. One of my favorite things to do was to draw pictures and if there was nothing else to do, I could always draw pictures. My father would bring home pads of paper that the students in the print ship had made, so we always had plenty of paper. We had a box of crayons, but one of my favorite gifts was to get a box of new Crayola® crayons. I loved the different colors and the smell of the crayons. I drew pictures of anything you could think of. Pictures from my imagination would spring to life on the blank white pages.

When I was young, before I started school, there was a program on TV called “Ding Dong School.” Miss Frances was the teacher and everyday we drew a different picture and learned our alphabet and numbers and sometimes we would do some sort of a craft project. After I had done my drawing and the show was over, my mother would hang up my picture just like Miss Frances hung up the pictures drawn by the children on the show. I was so proud to have my pictures hanging in the kitchen, a new one every day.

When I was in kindergarten, my father enrolled me in an art class for children at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, the local museum that also had a well-known art school. I went to the art school on Saturday mornings. To me, it was like going to heaven. I loved the smell of the paint in the studio and my teacher allowed me to draw and paint whatever I wanted, making suggestions as I drew or painted. I brought home all my art work to hang up.

One day when I came home with yet another picture that I had drawn or painted, my mother said, “Why don’t you make something useful like an ashtray or something? You can draw and paint at home.” She missed the whole point of the discovery class, which was for the teacher to guide us as we used our natural talents. The next week I experimented with making clay animals and eventually I did make a metal painted ashtray for my mother, but my true love was drawing pictures and painting.

Because my mother felt it was a waste of money to send me to art school when I could do the same thing at home, I did not return to the art school after my classes ended. I was very sad because I had felt so much at home in the art studio. I felt valued and productive and happy there. My mother did not see why they should pay for art lessons when I didn’t make anything useful or different. So my budding career as a artist was squashed early on. However, when we had art time at my school, that was my favorite time of the school week. We were not allowed to paint, and painting was rarely allowed at our house, too, but I was allowed to draw the pictures that I loved so much. I had so much imagination in pictures that I wanted to get out of my head and onto paper.

I believe that children should be allowed to expressive themselves creatively in the media with which they are most comfortable. My media was crayon and paint. Today I still like to sketch and draw and paint, as well as having discovered mosaics. These are my favorite pastimes.

My Worst Birthday Ever

Earlier, I wrote about my best birthday. Today I will write about my worst birthday ever. Nothing could ever be worse than this.

It was my 14th birthday and I was a freshman at Utica Catholic Academy. We were waiting for an assembly to begin in our auditorium; we were all sitting together with our little blue freshmen ties and navy uniforms and white shirts. The assemble was late in starting, which was very unusual as everything usually started right on time. It was a little after 1 p.m. Suddenly, Father Donavan, our principal, stepped onto the stage and up to the podium. He told us that we should all return to our homerooms and pray because the president (President Kennedy) had just been shot. We were in shock. How could this happen in America? Lincoln was murdered but that was over 100 years ago because a deranged man was upset because the South had lost the Civil War. Why would anyone kill our president?

We returned to our homerooms and each of us prayed silently and some of us cried. The radio played classical music over the louspeakers in each classroom, until around 2 p.m. the announcer broke in to announce that President Kennedy had died at a Dallas hospital. Vice-President Johnson was taking the oath of office as the President's body was being flown back to Washington, D.C. We were all devastated. All of us were crying and hugging each other. The principal came on the loudspeaker and asked us to pray for the repose of President Kennedy's soul and for his family. We struggled to pray through our tears until it was time to leave school.

I don't remember how I got home, if I rode with my father or if I rode the bus home. But I know I was still crying when I got home. My mother was not sympathetic to my crying. She told me to cheer up, because it was my birthday. How could I possibly cheer up when the president of our country had just been murdered!?

We had my favorite dinner of steak and french fries been I barely touched it. I felt sick to my stomach and had an empty feeling inside, I felt as if my world had been torn apart. I didn't realize it then, but I was experiencing what many people all across the country were experiencing at that time--disbelief that this could happen in our country, questions about why this man Lee Harvey Oswald would do such a thing, what would happen to us as a country now. Camelot had died. Poor Jackie. The poor children. How could they understand what had happened? He wasn't the president to them; he was their father.

A while later my grandparents and Uncle Donald came up for ice cream and cake, as they always did on our birthdays. I remember the gift my grandparents gave me. It was a Norwegian-style royal blue sweater with white and red embellishments at the top. I put it on; it was lovely. And I went to see alone in the cold on my back porch to cry. And I cried and cried. As I remember this, tears well up in my eyes because I remember this so vividly. My grandmother came out to sit with me and comfort me. I didn't care that it was my birthday. I didn't care that my mother had made my favorite dinner nor that she had baked my favorite cake--chocolate with chocolate icing. I only cared that this day had forever changed my life and the lives of everyone in our country. We were a country of violence. It had been easy to ignore the violence of the civil rights movement that had happened in the South. "They" were different, ignorant and stuck in the past history of slavery and injustice toward African-American people. This was different. How and why would this man shoot and kill our president?

I remember that a boy I had met and liked called me for my birthday. I took the call but didn't talk for long. We mostly talked about the events of the day. My aunt and uncle called to with me a happy birthday, and while I appreciated their call, I was more focused on what had happened.

The next few days brought even more shock, for as the country prepared for President Kennedy's funeral, Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald on live television. Oswald was being transferred to another jail in Dallas, and somehow Ruby got close enough to shoot Oswald and kill him. We would never know why Oswald had killed Kennedy or even if he had done so. Conspiracy theories began to abound, and later the Warren Commission was appointed to investigate the events and issue findings about the president's murder. They concluded that Oswald worked alone and had killed the president with the help of no other persons. Few people believed that and there was much conflicting information that supported other theories. The Warren Commission files were sealed for 75 years, so at some point people may know why they came to that conclusion and have access to the information they had, and maybe the truth will be known.

All I know is that my innocence of the world and the way it operates died that day, on my 14th birthday.

My Father, Floyd, aka Pops

I decided that I'd like to write about one of the best men in the world--my father. From my earliest years, I remember my father as a loving, gentle person who was devoted to his family. He married my mother at about 36. At that time he was a Building Construction teacher at Utica Free Academy (UFA), where he was an alumnus. When he graduated in 1930 my Father;s dream was to become an architect, so go to the University of Michigan. But the Great Depression had just begun so money was very tight. Fortunately, my grandfather continued his job as a carpenter, but there was not money for my father to go to college. He had greatd drawing talent and taught himself the basics of architecture. He used his self-taught knowledge to design and build our family home on Valley View Road and some other buildings or rooms. (For example, he drew up the plans for the room Jim and I built at the house on Darmouth Street.

He became a carpenter just like his father and often they worked on jobs together. They were very similar in nature and personality. They were honorable men, some of the nest men I have every know. The saying goes, 'A girl marries her father," but in my case, I married one man who was everything my family was not. The other husband had some of my father's traits but he had a very cruel, mean streak, something I never saw in my father.

My father was also interested in airplanes and aviation. He build and flew gliders with his friends. There was an incident that made the Herkimer papers, when one of their gliders landed in a corn field and did some damage to the corn. He became the principal of the Utica School of Aviation. He held that position until World War II started and all the teachers and students were drafted into the Army Aircorps. He taught people how to put the airplanes taht had been damaged in the war back together. He was stationed in South Carolina and in Cuba during the war.

My father and my brother did not have the best of relationships. I think my father felt my brother did just enough to get by in school. Pat was so brilliant but put in the minimum work in school. He could have been at the top of his class, had he wanted to. And my father wanted my brother to do his best at everything did he, but Pat was a social butterfly and studies came easy to him, so although he did well in school, he could have done much better. But my mother loved my brother's outgoing personality. In her eye, he could do no wrong. That, I know caused friction in my home. My sister Joanne was my father's baby and he did so many things for her through his life, things my mother did not always approve of.

 I adored my father. We had similar personalities. We were both great readers, although our tastes in reading where rather distinctive, It was from my father that I developed a love of wood--any kind of wood. I remember that I even did a school project on wood. He loved the outdoors and making things. He often went hunting, fishing, and snowshoeing with my grandfather and my brother. We ate whatever they brought home; nothing was wasted. He loved deer hunting and fishing for trout on the land owned by cousins and his Uncle Howard. His hobby was making furniture for our home; he developed that skill in high school.

My father recognized that I had artistic talents and enrolled me in a children's art class at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Museum Art Achool when I was in kindergarten. I loved art class. I loved the studio and the pain splatters, the smell of the paint. My art teacher believed in letting children explore the arts to see what they liked. I loved to draw and paint and that is what I did, This did not make my mother happy. I said I could draw and paint at home. She didn't see that the teacher was guiding us. My mother's statement, "Why don't you make an astray, something useful." She was always looking toward the practical side of everything. She didn't really appreciate anything that didn't have a use. For example, when she took ceramics classes later, she made countless ashtrays. There were ashtrays everywhere in our house. 

My father made furniture and decorations for the year--Adirondack chairs, a picnic table, a slide for our jungle gym, a play fort, a play house, a shrine to the Blessed Mother, and arbors for the grapes we grew. He also planted a large garden which was the source of most of our fresh vegetables. My mother canned the vegetables for use during the winter months. He could never plant corn, however, one of his favorite vegetables, which was always eaten by the deer. They never touched the other vegetables, only the corn. So we purchased corn from the many roadside stands in the summer, as well as peaches and pears and apples to can for the winter.

My father never seemed to get angry, though he had the right to be many times. But he would never cross my mother. He placated her at every turn. She was a angry and moody person, and I remember many night lying in my bed while she screamed and cried in their bedroom below mine, threatening to leave my father and us children. She often packed a suitcase so she could "go home." My father would talk in a soothing voice to her and eventually she calmed down. But my father was constantly telling us children to do what your mother says and don't upset her. But it was a lose-lose situation, because of my mother's mood swings. There were days that we could do nothing right. But my father would try to persuade us to be more considerate to my mother.We knew that with my mother present, he would always take my mother's side. But when we were alone, he was gentler, begging us to be good to our mother so she would be happy. But my mother's unhappiness cane from inside her, not from what we di or did not do.

When grandchildren came along, my father was thrilled. He loved to read stories to the children (Sabrina, Danielle, and Greg) and he would take them for a ride around the property in a little wagon attached to the riding lawn mower. He entertained them with his hearing aid; he would cup his had over it and make it produce feedback. However, when he had had enough of the children's yelling, he would subtly reach up and turn the hearing aid off. It was really funny. Then he could read in peace.

When I bought my house and it needed some repair, my father came down to help with the repairs. He helped lay the vinyl tile on my back porch and installed new handles for the jalousie windows. If it was terribly cold in the winter, he would call to remind me to run the car to warm it up so it would survive the bitterly cold days.

My father had emphysema and a heart condition. The emphysema most probably came from working at school with the saw dust and no face masks (now required) and my mother's smoking. She was a very heavy smoker and smoked in all rooms of our house We know now that second-hand smoke is dangerous. was inherited frim his mother. His mother, my father, and both his brothers had angina. His brother Bob, who is now 90 years old, was had numerous heart bypasses. My father died of a heart attack in late September 1981, 6 1/2 years after his first heart attack. That attack forced him to retire from teaching, which was very stressful. My father died less than 48 hours after his second heart attack. He had just tuned 69 years old. His heart condition

At my father's funeral, the priest described my father in perfect terms. "He was a gentle, kind man.)

No Trip To Italy and Losing a Good Friend

This is one of the sad stories of my life. This one comes from high school, when I was a senior. My school planned the mother of all senior trips: a trip to Rome and Florence, Italy in January 1967. The trip was announced in November so we would have time to prepare for the trip. The cost was very reasonable for those day--$300. That included airfare, meals, transportation on the ground in Italy--everything. I was so excited about going on this trip which would also visit Florence to see the amazing artwork in that city. In fact, most of the trip was centered around art in Italy. The nuns and priests from school were chaperones as well as parents.


I remember coming home and telling my parents with the letter that the school sent to them. I was so sure they would be happy and think that it was an amazing opportunity for a 17 year old. But I was wrong. My mother thought it was not a good idea. She felt teenagers should not be going off to Italy because they wouldn't appreciate it. And it was a lot of money for my family. I tried the approach of telling my mother I would look for a job to help pay for the trip, but she did not approve of the trip and said so. A job to pay my way would not matter. My father said nothing. Raising children was my mother's business, not his. Especially not expressing his opinions about his daughters.

When I went to my grandparents' house for dinner the next week, I told my grandmother about the trip and my mother's reaction. My grandmother was horrified that my mother had reacted that way. That weekend, we were summoned to my grandparents' house and my Aunt Elsie and Uncle Bob were there too. My grandmother wanted to talk to my parents about the trip to Italy. She, my Aunt Elsie, and my Uncle Donald (Elsie and Donald were my godparents) attempted to talk to my mother about the trip, pointing out the benefits to me of the trip and saying that it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to go on such a trip. They all offered to pay for my way on the trip, they felt that strongly about it.

But my mother also felt strongly, in the negative, about the trip. She didn't want to accept money from my grandmother, my aunt and uncle, I think, because she would feel beholding to them. But more important, she did not feel that 17-year-olds should be going to Italy. We wouldn't appreciate it; we would not obey the chaperones, And, I will never forget this, she said, "I've never been to Europe; no daughter of mine is going off to Europe when I've never even been there."

I had always thought that parents wanted their children to have opportunities that they never had, but apparently that was not my mother's philosophy. My grandmother begged my father to talk to my mother and explain how important it was that I take this wonderful opportunity, but he would not go against my mother's decision. And it was HER decision. My parents did not discuss it--pros and cons. My mother had decided and that was that. My Aunt Elsie tried to talk to my mother about it and was basically told to stay out of our family business. This she said to her best friend; she didn't want my Aunt Elsie to look like a savior in my eyes, when my mother and I did not get along well. It was a case of my mother asserting her authority over me and what I did or did not do, So I was not allowed to go on the trip (which everyone said was the most amazing time of their lives).

My second best friend Bridget, whom I had been spending a lot of time with since Nancy and her boyfriend were preoccupied with each other. Bridget's mother, a very good friend of my grandmother, invited me to go to New York City for a long weekend while the rest of our class was in Italy. I was thrilled to be asked, and Mrs. Green was paying for everything. My mother said that I could go (she had been to NYC so I guess that's why it was all right). Bridget said something to someone at school about our mini-trip. And my best friend Nancy became jealous. She snubbed me at school and when I asked her what was the matter, she told me to be friends with Bridget but I had betrayed her by agreeing to go with Bridget. Apparently Nancy wanted to go too, but Mrs. Green did not really know Nancy and Bridget was not her close friend the way Bridget and I were. Nancy never spoke to me after she heard I was going to NYC with Bridget. She was cold and aloof and snubbed me and spread rumors about me the whole year after that. I was so sad and crushed that Nancy would do that to me. I couldn't make Mrs. Green take her on the trip, and why shouldn't I go if I was asked and my mother had said yes. It was a terrible thing to lose my best friend over something so silly. It was petty jealousy.

My grandmother, my aunt, and my mother did not have a very good relationship after the offer of the trip was turned down and Grandma and Aunt Elsie were told to stay out of our business. There was always hostility and tension amongst them after that. I still harbor anger with my mother for not letting me go for such a senseless reason. And I only grew closer to my grandmother and my aunt and my mother knew it, and was jealous. I also was angry with my father that he would not intercede and at least discuss it with my mother, or overrule her decision. But he never wanted cross my mother or make her upset, because then she would get extremely angry and out of control. But I was angry with him for not standing up to her, and telling her that she was wrong in this case.

This trip and the fall-out haunted me until I was 50 years old, nearly 51. I decided to take a 12-day cruise in the Mediterranean which visited Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, and Croatia. It was a wonderful experience and made up for the trip for which I had been denied all those years ago.

Punished for Doing the Right Thing

We all loved my grandmother. Even though my grandmother wouldn't taken my sister to visit with her overnight, my sister loved her very much. I remember one time when she and my mother had had some terrible fight. My sister must have been about 8 or 9. I remember that she packed a few things in her little suitcase and started walking to Grandma's. She got all the way to the intersection of Valley View and Higby Road before my mother caught up with her in the car and brought her back home. She got spanked for that, which I don't think was right because she was upset and instead of fighting with my mother, tried to remove herself from the situation, which was the right thing to do. My mother should have brought her back but talked to her instead to hitting her for doing the right thing. But that's the type of person my mother was. You didn't cross her or you got punished for it.

When I was in high school, I got a notion in my head that I wanted to go into radio. I told this to my guidance counselor Sister Mary Joseph, and then I told my parents, who were understandably upset since they wanted me to go to college. Sister Mary Joseph explained that I could go to college for communications and go into radio from there. I think my parents were shocked that she acknowledged my desire as legitimate but worked out a solution.

Later I wanted to take art classes as my electives in my senior year, or else go to the public school where I would be able to arrange courses better in order to take art courses. I sat down to talk to my parents about what I wanted to do. My mother became very angry with me, and I must have said something that set her off because she started hitting me and slapping me about my head. She hit me so hard that I couldn't think. She just kept hitting me and hitting me. Finally my father pulled her off of me. I still couldn't think straight for a while and my father tended to me, while my mother said he was babying me. He talked some sense into me about why it would not be a good idea to change schools in my senior year, and that I could do my art even without taking it as an elective. I calmed down eventually, but my mother never apologized for her abuse of me. My father never hit me in all my life, but when I was young, I had been deathly afraid of her spankings with the ping-pong paddle (I guess so she wouldn't hurt her hand); it stung so badly. This was the one time I remember that she had beat me with her hands--fists and slaps. Later in life when I told my therapist about this situation, he had me get a CT scan and an MRI to see if any damage had been done. My head hurt for a long time; I had a headache, and bruises that I tried to cover when I went back to school. Back then, the school did not have to report signs of abuse. There was no agency to handle it. But I did tell my counselor Sister Mary Joseph what had happened. I was so glad I had someone to tell about it. I know I told my grandmother, too, when I went to her house for dinner. But unfortunately there was nothing anyone could do. Thank God that my father pulled my mother off me before she did any permanent damage. I will never forget it. 

That's one reason I only swatted Sabrina when she was little only one or two times when she wouldn't listen. I smacked her hand and I remember spanking her once. But I never physically hit her because I knew what a detrimental effect it had on me. My mother's beatings only served to increase my anger at her for not listening to me nor caring to hearing what I had to say about anything. And most of the beatings came from something I said that my mother didn't like. I will never forget how she looked when she was about to "lose it." She would grit her teeth and growl and hold back her hand getting ready to strike you. She sometimes broke things instead of hitting you. My drawers in my bedroom were broken where she slammed them so hard, and my dad had to glue them back together.

But as I said, especially when we were little, my sister bore the brunt of her anger, when she wouldn't listen as a small child. We also got hit for fighting with one another. Anything that annoyed my mother could set her off. But the beating I got about the art classes and senior year was the only time I remember her hitting us when we were older.

The Best Birthday Ever

My 4th birthday was the most memorable birthday for me. At the time, I was obsessed with Hopalong Cassidy, a cowboy on the television. “Hoppy” wore a dark cowboy shirt with a  bandana tie with a silver slide, black pants, and a large black hat with a wide brim. Wearing black was unusual for a “good” cowboy, since in the 1950s, people usually associated white with good and black with bad. For example, another cowboy of the time, the Lone Ranger, wore all white clothing (he also wore an mask around his eyes to shield his identity).

I had a Hopalong Cassidy outfit. A black hat, a black skirt, a black shirt and a black vest was my outfit. I know my parents must have bought it for me; I don’t think that my mother could have made such an outfit. I also had cowboy boots which were black. In a pinch, I wore white anklet socks and black patent leather shoes. I was totally obsessed with cowboys and Hoppy was my favorite.

For my birthday, I received a wonderful present. It was a 45 rpm record that was Hoppy singing one of his cowboy songs, and at the end of the song, Hoppy sang “Happy Birthday” and said that my cousins John, Mikey, and Tom wished me a happy birthday. How thrilled I was that Hoppy was singing to ME, and he said that my cousins wished me a happy birthday, too. It was like my cousins and Hoppy were friends and they all cared about me.

Usually on birthdays, my cousins would come to the house for ice cream and birthday cake, and on their birthdays, we would go to their house to celebrate. So on my 4th birthday, John, Mikey, and Tom came to our house for my party. (Tom was a baby, so he didn’t really participate much in the festivities.) John was 6 1/2, Mikey was 4 1/2, and at the time, my brother Pat was 2 years old and my sister Joanne was a little over a year old. We played the record over and over. When it came time for ice cream and cake, we had chocolate ice cream (my favorite) and my birthday cake was shaped just like Hoppy’s hat! It wasn’t black, however; the cake was chocolate (my favorite) and it was iced with light blue frosting, because blue was my favorite color at that time. We all sat around the little table that my father had built for us, with four small chairs for John, Mikey, Pat, and me (Joanne was usually crawling around somewhere and Tom was only 6 months old). We have a picture of the four of us with the cake as we were eating the cake and ice cream.

That was the most memorable birthday I ever had and probably my favorite. The best birthday EVER!

Winter Sports and Activities

When I was growing up in chilly, wintery upstate New York. there were many winter activities for us to do. Since there were always heavy snowfalls since we lived south east of Lake Ontario and Oneida Lake, after my father had finished plowing, there was plenty of snow for us to make snow forts and castles from the snowbanks that my father had created with the Doodlebug snowplow. We made castles and forts, with tunnels and pathways through the snow banks. Our dog Sissy liked to play in the snow banks, too. We would have snowball fight and pretend that we lived in an icy faery land.

Back in the woods that belonged to us, my father would often go with us and help us shovel off the snow from a small pond. There we could skate and play hockey on various ponds. Some ponds were good for hockey because they were rather regular in shape. Other ponds were very irregularly shaped and were better for just skating, doing turned and jumps and pretending we were skaters.

One or two years. my father built a skating rink in our back year. He put two-by-fours all around a rectangular layout and then sprayed water on it over and over again until it was the right thickness and level and without pits so that we could skate.

We also had snowshoes and learned how to walk on them on the snow. One year, my parents bought us little skies and we learned a little about skiing--very little. My school had a ski club but I never joined it because it was expensive to go on the ski trips, especially if you didn’t have your own equipment. I would have had to take a couple of lessons, as well. So I was not in the ski club.


Often we would go sledding and tobogganing at the Valley View Gold Course, which had rather steep hells. Sledding and riding on the toboggan was a lot of fun. We always got lots of snow down our boots and snowsuits. My mother would have hot chocolate ready for us when we came home from these outdoor activities.

We often went skating at the Clinton skating rink. It was the home of the Clinton Comets minor league hockey team, and every weekend, they offered low cost skating in the afternoons at the skating rink. Everyone from Utica went out to the Clinton skating rink to skate and meet people. We all had our own skates; I guess our parents bought them because we used our skates so often.

When I lived in Albany, Sabrina and I also went skating quite a bit. There were many skating rinks where we could go to skate. We also liked to go cross-country skiing at the Colonie Gold Course. They made trails and you could rent skis rather cheaply and you could learn to cross-country ski quite quickly. I loved to go cross-country skiing on the Gold Course. You don’t need a lot of equipment or snowsuits. You could ski in just slacks and sweaters.

Those were some of the winter sports we enjoyed.