OVER HERE

            Our first (and only) home ownership occurred about 1945, when dad paid the aforementioned $7,000 for the ivory-colored, two-story, 3-BR frame house at 137 Rae Avenue, in Mansfield, Ohio. Although the property came with an oppressively-small one-car detached garage and a front lawn the size of a modest walk-in closet, a lovely and spacious back yard, replete with an ample rock garden area, was more than large enough to compensate quite nicely.

            The house itself, however, clearly had been designed with smallness in mind. Everything was perhaps 10 per cent smaller than rooms and hallways in similar frame houses of the day. Thus, all but the rumored “master” bedroom were absolutely four-wall-jammed by a mere single set of twin beds and modest desk or dresser. Meanwhile, the capacity of the one and only bathroom did not exceed a relatively impractical 1½ persons. (Two people entered its shoulder-squeezing four walls only with the clear understanding that any unnecessary rocking could conceivably have capsized the entire tiled cube! Likewise, three bodies carelessly changing places, for whatever reason, could’ve just as conceivably created a need for emergency extraction assistance from outside forces ... and this, mind you, before such as the “Jaws of Life” were even known to humankind!).

            So it was. The three-story house had but one small bathroom. Period! Not even a mini-crapper in the basement, although a single metal wash tub did generally serve a boy’s basemental urinary requirements. (I still remember with undiminished awe the sheer regality I felt when several years later I would be introduced to my first apartment with an actual toilet in the basement. Just a simple toilet bowl, mind you, located a step or two from a pair of pocked gray washtubs. Immediately to the left of the anything-but-spotless commode, a sturdy 2x4 shelf had been mounted between two studs for the express purpose of holding items of special interest: nearly-used and clearly bruised rolls of toilet paper [upstairs cast-offs routinely arriving via the nearby clothes chute], an empty, unmarked jug of what probably had been bleach, an ancient ring of assorted keys belonging to nothing and no one in particular, a cracked, long-petrified partial bar of soap, and the inevitable mystery toothbrush that lacked both purpose and ownership history. But, I felt as if I had “arrived” at last! The historical throne did not exist on which more matters of supreme urgency were attended, and eliminated one by one, than were experienced by that dark and grungy basement porcelain from critical moment to critical moment in its history!).

            Except for the on again-off again presence of a young father with a quick and nasty temper, the house was a place of relative comfort and security. When dad was away from the home, which was a good bit of the time, it was also more or less a place of peace, although mom was known to raise a broom on occasion for purposes apart from houseflies, ceiling cobwebs, or an occasional errant wasp or bee. (The time she actually drew a smidgen of blood on my hand by unthinkingly swatting it with a metal spatula as I reached for some off-limits cookies on the stove might today have brought kitchen brutality to national attention. Mom was momentarily devastated by her otherwise ordinary lack of culinary caution. I, of course, wiped off the droplets on an available pants leg and proceeded to milk my role of distraught victim for a good several hours thereafter. Had today’s idiocy been in place, of course, she would have been summarily hauled off, in cuffs, to the slammer, and probably hit with a felony charge akin to Felony Boy-Pest Cruelty or some such! In my mental picturing, I hoped at least, on her behalf, for probation!).

“Mom” was the former Daisy Downing, a Midwestern girl who’d met my father while waitressing at the Greer-Lincoln Hotel coffee shop in downtown Danville, Illinois, directly south of Chicago and a few short miles from the Indiana border. Several of the Downing clan, accordingly, had years before strayed ‘cross the border like ornery cattle and settled in as Hoosiers, although every one of mom’s ten brothers and three sisters were born and bred English-Irish-Cherokee-Illinois stock. One can only imagine the shameless intra-family hostility that must have gone on the day of the Indiana-Illinois Big 10 football game! (Assuming, of course, that any of the hard-drinking male Downings were still on their feet, which come to think of it would have been an altogether improbable scenario).

Grandpa Downing, a small, finely-sculpted, extraordinarily handsome man, labored all of his life at a nearby brickyard. The fourteen kids absolutely doted on their dad. To the days of their individual deaths, most of them had at one time or another mentioned the “wonderfully clean” smell of Grandpa Downing’s sweat! (I just report the facts, folks. I don’t explain them). Grandpa Downing’s only vice was chewing tobacco. He never swore, he never smoked, nor did he drink, although he did sire ten sons, most of whom were drunks throughout great portions of their hectic lives. Go figure!

Grandma Downing prayed a lot, made clothes, had her fairly extensive garden out back,