Back in the days when we didn’t have to be afraid of our neighbors if we didn’t know their names, I was befriended in a way I will never forget. My family lived in Gary, Indiana, which is located off the tip of Lake Michigan. Like Chicago, it can be a very windy place at times. Even though I was only in the first grade, I walked to school every morning. It was only a block away from my home, and diagonally across
My educational career began in kindergarten at Riley School, in Glen Park, one of the suburbs of Gary, Indiana. Keith was three years older than me, and we rode a city bus to school. This was not a school bus, so we had to put a few pennies (I think it was three) in the change and ticket box beside the bus driver every morning. This box had glass sides so you could see what had been dropped into it. It
As told to me by my 91-year-old mother: I ran traps every day except during bad weather. I caught animals for their furs. I caught mostly muskrats, but I also caught one raccoon and one skunk. One day, a raccoon got caught in a trap by just one of its toes. I sic’ed Pup on the raccoon but its toe broke loose and it bristled to fight. The fight lasted a long time and Pup got tired. It was dangerous to
What does it take to make a clubhouse? Some kids and a little imagination. Sometimes parents help too. The first clubhouses I remember were the hoghouses. My grandparents had raised hogs many years ago, but now they were just small wooden structures with roofs on them. They had dirt floors and I vaguely remember something boxy enough to sit on. There really wasn’t much to a hoghouse, but it was ours. My older brother Keith and the neighbor boy Ronnie claimed the
Among my earliest memories of writing my own thoughts and ideas I find myself playing with secret codes when I was in about the second grade. My older brother, Keith, had been using secret codes to share messages with Ronnie who lived up the road, and I thought it looked like fun. The easiest code they were writing called for two sheets of paper and a piece of carbon paper. The trick was getting the papers in the right position before