This whole segment may turn out to be a catharsis for me, so if you don't like unhappiness and complaining, you should probably stop reading. Although I really don't have any idea what will come pouring out of me, I am sure there will be some bitterness involved. Also, this information is all from my perspective. Being the youngest of the 3 children, I am sure I don't have the right info. What can I say? This is just what I recall.
We lived with my grandmother in her house in Cicero, Illinois. My dad was actually born in the house, as women didn't go to hospitals for childbirth unless there was a problem, especially during the Depression. I believe my grandparents bought the house sometime in the 1920's, but I am not sure how much before my father was born in 1930. I seem to recall being told the house had stood empty for a number of years after it had been built. I also don't know how the setup was, bedroom-wise. It was only a 2 bedroom/1 bathroom house and it had a full basement and an attic as well. So where the 5 or 6 family members at that time all slept, I don't know.
Besides my grandparents, I had 2 uncles that were about 10 and 11 years older than my dad, and I know they weren't born in the house. The main bedroom was fairly large, for those days, but the second bedroom off the kitchen was tiny - barely 8 x 11. So I don't know who had which bedrooms then. I also think my great-grandmother (Little Gramma) possibly lived with them. I think she died when I was an infant or before I was born. She had burned to death due to an accident with the stove.
My grandfather had had rheumatic fever when he was younger. I don't know if he worked or not, but he met my grandmother (Gramma) at a baseball game when a ball he hit had hit her in the eye. He died when my dad was 6. Gramma continued to work and support the family. She was a washroom matron at Western Electric, one of the major industries in Chicago. She finished paying the mortgage on the house and raised 3 boys on her wages. I know times were very lean because my dad has the typical Depression Christmas stories, like a shriveled orange in his stocking and one broken lead soldier.
This is a terrible illustration of the house floor plan. I'm sure all the proportions are off! But at least it gives you an idea of what I am talking about.
When my dad married, they stayed in the house to "help" Gramma. She gave up the large bedroom and moved into the small bedroom so my parents could have the larger room. That didn't last long! My parents were married in 1951, and my brother was born in 1952 while my dad was in the Marines. At this point, both he and my Uncle Mel had non-combative service since my Uncle Lenny was killed in the Philippines.
Once my sister and I came along in 1954 and 1956, we kids took over the large bedroom, and my parents slept on a sofa bed in the living room. We graduated from a double bed to bunk beds, and my brother ended up moving out of the bedroom when he was around 12. In the summer, he was out on the back porch, but when winter came he moved into the basement. My dad eventually finished off that half of the basement as a rec room, and my brother had a daybed/sofa to sleep on. A few years later, I moved out to the back porch in summer, then down to the unfinished half of the basement.
It was difficult to have 6 people in a 2 bedroom/1 bathroom house and all having to go to the bathroom first thing in the morning! LOL You'd think we would all be in-and-out of the bathroom, but every one of us used the bathroom as a hidey-hole and brought in reading matter. My brother used to play with his football and baseball cards and a bottle cap, flipping it back and forth. We'd hear hurrahs and crowd roars! LOL To this day, we all like our private time in the bathroom, but mainly working crossword puzzles.
We did not have wall-to-wall carpeting in that house. We hard area rugs that left about a foot of flooring all around. Right outside the bedroom door in the dining room, there were some drops of varnish. It looked like elf footprints! We fantasized a lot over those drops as children. In the dining room by the windows there was a wooden grate which was the ventilation shaft from the furnace. We used to drop wooden clothes pins down the chute. Bad kids! LOL
Around 1961, my grandmother retired at age 65, which was compulsory then. I would have been 6. A few years later, she began to go senile (not Alzheimer's) and all 3 of us kids ended up having to baby-sit her instead of the other way around. For my sister and I, it was bad, because after a few years, Gramma had no control over her bowels and bladder, and we were the ones who ended up cleaning up the mess as well as cleaning up Gramma. :-( Not a good childhood! What ticked me off over it all was that my Uncle Mel (who literally had worked his way up the ladder from the mailroom to an executive position at Elkay) could have put her in a nursing home, but didn't.
While I understand the reasoning against nursing homes, it was very unfair to us kids to have to deal with that much. My mother worked during the evening and my dad worked during the day, but we still had to take care of Gramma body and soul whenever my mother wasn't around. Mom eventually worked at home with her job during the day, but frequently had to take work back and forth. I may go into more gory details later.
It was almost impossible to have friends over, and even when other family members visited, they rarely got to see that bad side of keeping Gramma at home. I think I got the worst of it, being the youngest. My sister was able to get a part-time job at 16, but I couldn't do that. I wasn't able to participate in after-school events either because I had to go home and take care of Gramma until someone else got there or take over from whoever was home.
Having had so much responsibility thrust upon me since I was 8, I became the "watcher" for my friends who were the same age as I. That also did not go down well as I was not given very much chance to be a child. It could be why I still have a youthful attitude to this day, and love to play games, as it was the only happy times I had and I am still making up for lost time. At 11, I did have the opportunity to do some baby-sitting, provided it didn't interfere with watching Gramma. I can't believe, looking back, the things I did with kids that were just a few years younger than I! LOL I took them to the zoo by bus, and when I was in high school, took them to downtown Chicago by the el (elevated train) and bus to the Field Museum because I was researching a project. But, nothing bad ever happened, so it all worked out in the end.
A lot of things happened to me around the age of 8. I started gaining weight, started a precocious puberty, started taking care of Gramma, and had my tonsils out. I was very upset at starting to develop breasts. I was a tomboy, and used to run around in jeans and a T-shirt. One day, some neighbor kids sent me home crying because they said I shouldn't wear T-shirts anymore. I was so embarrassed! I tried one of my sister's bras, but she was already a C cup by that point, so I tried to stuff the cups, and got laughed at even more by my family. It was a couple of years before I actually got a bra of my own. They didn't make bras for little kids my size.
Dad.
Here comes a bad part, so don't say I didn't warn you!
Dad worked for Brad Foote Gear Works on the Chicago side of Cicero Avenue, mainly as a shop supervisor. He also wore 2 other "hats" as Traffic Manager and some other position. His job was so stressful that he would come home angry every day. We all quickly learned to walk on eggshells around him, because he would blow his stack at the drop of a pin. While he never got physically violent with me, and my sister says she's not sure, my brother did get in on some of it. Mostly he would just rant and rave over stupid stuff, and almost always at the dinner table. He and my sister, Vicki, used to get into the most arguments. I eventually would run out crying, while my brother and mother just sat there. We learned to eat fast before the arguments would start.
In Vicki's teen years, he started getting into shoving matches with her, poking her in the chest, that sort of thing. If she sassed him back, he would slap her in the face. But she found out she could give as good as she got. Because he was such a berserker, he didn't realize he'd been hit back. Again, while it wasn't real physical abuse, the mental stress and what we did get was very traumatic for all of us. We learned not to ask for anything, or do anything that could set him off. While this dosn't sound so bad, you can not realize the stress we were all under. It affected all of us deeply.
Before I went to school, and I was home with my mother, I told her I didn't love my dad. When he came home, she made me repeat it to him. I'm not sure what her agenda was, but it sure didn't help things around there. Pretty sad, huh? She was a "martyr" type. She took it all in and repressed it until at some point she would blow her stack. But, big difference, she'd just leave for a while and go have a good cry. She didn't defend us that much either, but there were times when she did, if it would prevent Dad from blowing up. Maybe I should say that she never entered into an argument that she wasn't already a part of, but she would help prevent an argument from starting in the first place, if she could. But, that "desertion" during arguments was also traumatic.
Vicki and I wanted to run away from home. Does that say anything? Vicki, around 6 or 7, packed a brown paper bag with her goodies, and made it down to the end of the block. I never made an attempt, but I planned. I was saving S&H Green Stamps to get me a backpack. Unfortunately, they went out of business before I could get one. LOL I don't know if my brother ever wanted to run away. He represses more than any of us, and will deny a lot of this.
That's not to say there weren't good times. There were some, but the bad so heavily outweighs the good, there don't seem to be as many.
Some of Dad's favorite things to do with us kids ha to be freebies. Some of things we would do:
Dad didn't make much money, and there were always bills, bills, bills, but he made sure his closet had clothes, while the rest of us got skimped on. If you look at the floor plan again, you'll notice there were only 2 closets in the whole house. The one in the master bedroom was shar by 5 of us. We each had a week's worth o clothes - maybe - and the rest of the closet was dad's.
It didn't help that during the late 60's, there really weren't many choices for clothes for fat kids. Lane Bryant was about it, and they mostly had "old lady" clothes. So my sister and I wore a lot of men's clothes, like dress shirts and sweaters. Shoes were also a problem for me as I was wearing a size 10 in 5th grade and shortly got to a size 12, and again, the local stores mainly had "old lady" styles in those sizes. One teacher pulled me out of class to talk to me in the hall about wearing gym shoes to school. She warned me that I would get fallen arches. I told her there wasn't much choice available and I would rather have the fallen arches than wear "those" shoes.
Around 1970, things started to change. Lane Bryant seemed to get a little more youth-oriented, and clogs came into style, so I could get a men's pair and no one knew. Entering high school, they had just changed the rules that girls could wear slacks to school. Dad gave us each a $100 budget to buy clothes that year. I got 1 blouse, 1 pair of slacks, and 1 pair of shorts. :-(
So I still ended up wearing dresses or men's clothes to school most of the time, and they barely fit. Very embarrassing. It could be why I like the song "Come On, Eileen" so much, about a poor girl wearing her mother's clothes. yet we weren't really poor.
Thank goodness for the kids in the neighborhood! Any time we were free, we'd escape outdoors to be with friends, even in winter. We had many kids on our block. Our side of the street was single family homes, and many of the ones across the street had basement apartments. Here's a list of our gang:
So you can see we had plenty of escapism! We taught nearly everyone to play Canasta, too, even the younger kids. For instance, Robert Yannotti was 10 years younger than Roxanne and I and at 5 he played a very decent game of Canasta and at 6 was beating me at chess.
One year, we got together and organized a kid picnic, with most of the above going, and we all paid for it ourselves. Our folks dropped us off at a forest preserve a few towns away, and picked us up at dusk. No parents around! Just us kids, and the ages ranged from 2 to 22 or thereabouts.
Our parents never really gave us any encouragement, self-esteem, ambitions, or even basic things that we would need as an adult. I guess they figured we'd know how to do stuff automatically. We girls (and we were always clumped together - no individuality there) knew we wouldn't be able to go to college, but even my brother had to pay for the little bit of time that he went. Dad could have had the money, but his clothes, hobbies, and keeping up with the Jones's was more important to him than anyone else's needs. We had 2 out of 3 basics - food and shelter. Clothing wasn't important - for us. But, my! Didn't he always look spiffy?
So long as we weren't failing anything, grades didn't seem important to them. I have no idea why either. All 3 of us kids are smart as whips - our IQ's are in the 125 - 135 range. But they never pushed us, so we never pushed. I know *I* rarely studied. I've always been a very intuitive guesser and got through high school with a low B average on that alone.
My only ambition was to get married and have 3 kids of my own, then start adopting "trouble" children as our budget would allow. Well, I'm still single and currently 48, so that's never gonna happen! LOL So I was totally unprepared to get a job. Never took typing in school - hated it, wasn't gonna have to deal with it. BIG mistake! I now can type fairly quickly for a 3 finger typist, but I am nowhere near any speed needed for a job. So my first jobs were basic office work - filing and receptionist. I managed those very well, for having no training in anything.
Eventually I got into working with computers, and fell in love! The very first one I worked on was a DEC-Writer - no monitor, just type on greenbar paper and wait for the response to be typed back. Very cool! The next job after that, I was doing some data entry on a real computer, but it was the job after that that was the real kicker for me.
I worked for GTE as a field dispatcher for the engineers who fixed stock quotation boards and the monitors brokers used. Besides our network system for entering the repair data, there was an alternate operating system we could switch to and watch the stocks and learn about them. Several of us got bit by the investment bug, me included, but only a little bit. The best part was a second system that was used for word processing and inventory control. I found out I could manipulate the data, so long as I was careful, and create new ways of looking at the reports. I even helped one of the engineers, who knew programming, to debug a program with him. Even though I knew nothing about programming, the pattern of the programming made sense and I was able to pick up on differences that should or shouldn't be there. I also learned how to set up the big reel save tapes for the mainframe. I thought I was so cool! LOL
But, all good things come to an end, and the company merged with another and my position was made redundant. So I ended up at Spiegel in the Customer Service Department. More computer training! But, only the kind you need to get the job done, and that's it. My next job at American Chambers Life Insurance Company started the same way, but I ended up learning quite a bit anyway. I was very trusted by my supervisor and the VP of the Customer Service Department, and I eventually became an untitled administrative assistant. I became privy to personnel information for our department (until they hired a full-time Human Resources person) and typed reviews, did heavy duty audits, developed procedures, etc. Even with my 3 finger typing! LOL I kind of learned a little bit about desktop publishing, making forms and doing paste-ups. By hand. Hand drawn. Very amateurish, but that's all they wanted.
But then I got injured in a fall at work, and after a second injury at work, I became totally and permanently disabled with a ruptured disk in my back. That was in 1994, and I haven't been able to work since. The disk has since dissolved, so it's now bone-on-bone, and I can sit comfortably for 2 to maybe 3 hours at a time, then I need a good 2 hours of bed rest.
Since I was injured at work, I ended up with a Worker's Compensation settlement. Not very big, but it was enough to get me a small home office setup with a computer. I had never really had my own computer, but for the year I waited for the settlement, I read computer magazines, so I knew what to do, somewhat. I basically had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Rehab wasn't possible, so this was it. At 38, that's kind of hard to digest. But I got on the Internet, and found a whole new world! Mainly games, as you can tell from my game page here. LOL I always loved my Atari 2600, so I was looking for replacements for it. Found a few, but also found a slew of other stuff, too!
My sister and I shared an apartment at that time, which worked out well, as she could do the housework I couldn't. My dad had previously been selling used records (he used to have a store called Pinkywink Records & Tapes in Palos Hills) at local bourses but it had gotten to be too much as the records were so heavy. So we convinced him to let us have a shot at it. I typed up inventories into a database on the computer to mail out to interested parties. That turned out to be very expensive to do. But I then got an email (spam LOL) talking about cheap web hosting, and I thought that might be a lot cheaper in the long run.
When I discussed it with my sister, she agreed that it sounded like a good idea. So, not knowing how to set up a web site at all, I signed up for the year, got a domain name, ordered a special program to convert my database to web pages, and within 3 days, I was up and running! However, the records proved to be too heavy for both of us, so that went by the wayside. In the meantime, I had gotten into collecting cigarette lighters a few years before I was injured. Not the Zippo kind, but the more old-fashioned kind. I had a bunch of all varieties, and finding out how huge the lighter collection field is, I decided to concentrate on just a few types. So I've been selling off my "extras" ever since.
Last Updated 08/25/2004