I don’t remember too much from my childhood of real significance. I do remember a lot of tidbits. I have a good memory for useless trivia and tidbits of useless information. I saw pictures of myself as a kid in diapers sitting with a girl on the back steps of somewhere. My mother said she was my first girlfriend. She was my last. I don’t have the vaguest remembrance of this long last love.
What I have figured out was my earliest memory was riding a train from New Orleans to New Jersey. Actually I had no memory of where we were going but my mother later told me that the ONLY train we ever took was when we moved from New Orleans to New Jersey where my father had already moved to start his first job after college working for RCA. What I remember is a coach room with a large window and watching all the telephone poles going by so fast. I remember a raise bed with a ladder, close to the ceiling with a bunch of magazines spread on it.
We moved to New Jersey in 1959 when I was 2 1/2 years old sometime after my brother Gary was born in May. We lived in New Jersey for three years and this is where my first real memories begin.
We lived at 17 Belmont Lane in Levittown—a city which was later renamed Willingboro because apparently there were too many towns named Levittown! This was the first address I ever memorized and I still remember it to this day!
We lived in a two-story house with all the bedrooms on the second floor. The house looks pretty much the way I remembered it although the wood was painted dark green when we lived and I don’t remember a garage.
I will now recall the lessons in life I learned in New Jersey:
(1) Don’t bite into the red One-a-Day vitamins that look just like candy. They taste good to such the red part, but when black part (iron, etc.) comes up, yecch! Do not bite! I spit it up all over the wall in the dining room. There are probably bits of it still embedded in the wall!
(2) If you wake up in the middle of the night and see a bug the size of a basketball next to your bed, it may not be real. Emphasis is on the word may.
(3) You can’t dig to China. You will stop before you get there.
(4) Don’t think you can fool your parents into thinking you ate all the green peas by waiting until they got tired of sitting around the dining table waiting for me to finish and then going up to their room and saying you ate all of them but one and asking if you had to eat that one. They will tell you, since you ate all the rest, just go ahead and eat the last one! (Later I learned to just stuff the green peas in my pocket and then dump them in the toilet after dinner.)
(5) You can eat butter cookies all the way down to the hole by sticking it on your index finger and scientifically nibbling around the circumference.
(6) Apparently you can do something to a station wagon to make it roll down the driveway, across the street and up the neighbor’s driveway. I know. I did it!
I got my first taste of education in New Jersey. I went to nursery school for some time. That is where I learned about butter cookies. They had butter cookies and milk everyday for a snack. I also remember I had to go on stage at some park and recite a poem at graduation. I went to kindergarten the next year. I don’t remember learning anything there but each student had a cubby where we kept a blanket than we used for taking a nap. And I remember walking home one day and going down to check out a gully and seeing a large black snake. I got out of there as fast as I could!
I also learned about crime and punishment in New Jersey. In the house to the left of our house there lived a girl that I used to play with. When I’d go to her house, her mother would sometimes give me a piece of candy that she kept in a cabinet by the front door. One day I got the urge for some candy and I went over. I knocked on the front door (I think I knocked) but no one was home. Anyway the door ended up being unlocked and I ended up going in and taking a bunch of candy. I remember I sat down on the side of our house and started eating the candy when, all of a sudden, my mother came around the corner of the house and caught me. She found out where I got the candy somehow (like a dummy I probably told her the truth!). Anyway I got punished for a long time. I don’t remember much about the punishment, just the crime (candy-stealing). I think the moral of the story as I got it was “Don’t take the candy home!”
I have a vague impression of visiting Valley Forge which I can’t place in time.
There are some New Jersey experiences that I don’t remember but my mother told me about them later. Apparently I was quite sneaky. One day I started acting quite strangely, like I was drugged. My mother rushed me to the hospital where they had no idea what it was but knew there was something quite wrong with me so they admitted me for observation. When the hospital told my mother to go home, she went home and upstairs to her bathroom to get a couple of tranquilizers to calm her nerves. When she looked in the medicine cabinet she found that the tranquilizer bottle was almost empty and she remembered she had had quite a few pills in there.
She immediately put two and two together to realize what had happened. She had taken us kids over to the neighbor’s house and I must have run back to our house, gone up the stairs, climbed up on top of the sink, opened the medicine cabinet, taken the tranquilizer bottle, opened it and taken a few tranquilizers! She called the hospital right away but they seem to have thought that the danger was over so maybe I didn’t take too many pills. My mom told me the hospital did not pump my stomach.
As to why I did it, my mom thought that I was just copying what I saw her do many times. Kids can be quite stressful!
Another event my mom told me about of which I have no memory is one time I poured a jar a jar of baby food on my sister Cindy’s head because I wanted to feed her!
I almost forgot about the snow in New Jersey. Growing up in New Orleans and Houston, I can count on one hand how many times it snowed, once in New Orleans and twice in Houston. But some of my strongest memories in New Jersey revolve around snow. Being able to walk over your backyard fence because the snow is so deep is a pretty mind-blowing thing! One time, on Christmas Day, I lost a boot running in the snow and didn’t find the boot until all the snow had melted. We have a lot of photos of us kids playing the in the snow and opening Christmas presents. One time my Dad pulled us around the block on a sled.