(Author's Note: The preceding episodes are the graphic presentations of my earliest memories. At age 83, it's become apparent that I probably have too little lifetime left to try to continue in a self-illustrated mode, so going forward I'll turn to written form and include as many old photos as possible to augment my sometimes hazy recollections.)
My early years, from birth to age 5 or so, became increasingly punctuated by a series of health issues, perhaps related to my premature birth, perhaps partially psychologically based, impossible for me to really define the causes.
The earliest "infirmity" I recall is just a sliver of a memory: I'm in a small snack shop near Huntington Park High School with my parents and my Mom is explaining to the clerk that I am wearing leg braces to correct "knock knees." I remember absolutely nothing more about the braces, don't recall how long I wore them, and in fact, don't recall any other instance of being aware of them. It would have been when I was a wee toddler, age 2 or 3. There are no photos of me in them among those saved from the family collection. It had to have been while we were still living on Seville Street.
I underwent a tonsillectomy when I was perhaps 4 years old. It was at Doctors Hospital, where years later Mom would work and would meet her second husband. I had to spend a night in the hospital and was terrified. Where was Mommy? What am I doing here? I cried and the night nurse scolded me, which didn't please Mom when she heard about it. But I enjoyed the post-surgery diet of ice cream and Jello back at home on Hood Avenue!
Other health issues were more recurrent and a bit more serious: a years-long series of allergies, asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia. This seems to have begun after Mom and Dad enrolled me in kindergarten at a local Catholic school, the name of which I don't recall. It may have been St. Matthias, now the only Catholic elementary school on Cedar Street in Huntington Park. I was frightened and uncertain in my first days of school. I didn't understand why I was there, nor the routines. I was reprimanded by the nuns for trying to sit somewhere I wasn't supposed to sit. That embarrassed me and increased my anxiety. At recess one day, a bigger kid pushed me out of line at the water fountain. I had no idea how to handle that or why he did it. I guess I hadn't yet had my Mom's lesson on the necessity of defending yourself.
I really don't recall going to kindergarten more than 3 or 4 days. I hated it so much that it may be Mom intervened and pulled me out of school. Or it may be that I was ill so much that going to school was impossible. I do remember that period as one where I was ill much of the time, no doubt further frustrating my Dad's need for his son to be "manly." Good ol' Dad.
Meanwhile, things weren't going well with Mom and Dad's marriage. They were often at odds over various things. I recall them arguing over whether I should wear my bobby sox rolled down or pulled all the way up. Dad said rolling them down, as Mom preferred, made me look like a "sissy." I felt guilty at causing such a conflict.
On the plus side, I recall Dad bringing home and setting up a Lionel electric train for me, but I was too ill to really be able to enjoy it. I kept that train for 20 years, should have kept it forever.
Then came the biggest argument I ever saw between them, an almost-physical confrontation in the living room that ended with my Mom grabbing a broom and brandishing the handle at Dad, warning him not to touch her. I had no idea why they were arguing, and as on other occasions, wondered what I'd done to cause it. I am certain now that that argument was most probably triggered by Mom's finding a lipstick-smeared shirt among Dad's clothes in the laundry basket. I unknowingly met the source of the lipstick when Dad took me along to the SPRR offices to pick up a paycheck and introduced me to a receptionist who was to become his second wife. More about that later. She turned out to be a much better match for Milton than Ruth. Mom and Dad were such opposites. Milt liked to spend money even when he didn't really have it. He'd buy a car on time credit and keep missing payments, making up excuses to string the dealers along until they sent a repo man to take back the cars. Mom was a true child of the Great Depression, intent on saving every penny she could in case those harsh days returned, upset and embarrassed at the cars and the repossessions and impatient with Milt's laissez-faire money attitude. The lipstick stains spelled the beginning of the end.
But I do recall Dad once trying to do something for Mom that he must have thought would please her. Before I was born, they'd had a toy bulldog named Ladybug that Mom loved. When I arrived, she decided they should find a new home for Ladybug for fear she might be jealous and harm me. So, on this occasion -- I don't recall if it was a Mom's birthday or Mothers Day or what -- Dad and I went and picked up Smoky, another little bulldog, as a gift for Mom. Smoky was nice enough when all was well, but we soon discovered that if left alone in the house while we were out running errands, he would pee and poop indoors. He doomed his future with us when he got into the cupboard under the kitchen sink and pulled out all the paper bags Mom was saving and ripped them to shreds scattered across the floor among his bodily dog waste. Bye, bye, Smoky. Dad had to return him, the good-will gift a failure.
By that time the Milton Loomis-Ruth Love match was crumbling anyway. Whatever flame once burned had turned to ash. Hard to rekindle ash. Sometime around then Milt became busier driving World War II war-materiel trains and Mom and I moved into a 12-by-12 sleeping shack that Uncles Joe and Paul had built behind Grandma Love's house on California Avenue in Bell. We would live there and/or in apartments next door and behind Grandma's for about 10 years, until I was around 15 and Mom remarried.
Which brings us to Part Two,
World War II and Apartment Living, 1945 to 1955.
