Us kids used to play up in the hills a lot. Sometimes we'd crawl through the huge pipes that ran underneath the N.Y.S. Thruway and play on the other side. There were lots of trees with vines on them and we'd swing on them like monkeys. Other times we'd play in the old cemetery. We'd scare the crap out of each other, especially when it started to get dark. There was an old building with the door partly open. I guess it was an abandoned mausoleum where they used to keep the caskets. That was real spooky when the night shadows started playing tricks on us. Yikes! We'd get out of there fast and head home. The other kids could run. I had to walk as fast as I could..
Mackin's Hill was fun in the winter. The Mackins were an old couple that lived down the road and had a few cows. My brother, Jim, used to go help old man Mackin with the milking and he'd come home with his dollar for the day and some cream to make butter with. The hills were perfect for sledding. I can remember almost hitting the barb wire fence a few times. It was fun coming down but an awful climb back up. Lots of fun though. The whole neighborhood would be up there sledding. Sometimes even a few kids from in town would be up there. And there would be fights too. My sister Chris would get into a fight with some girl or the boys would be fighting with other boys. Guess that is normal, or so I thought.. The only one I ever got into a fight with was my sister Jeanne. She had a wicked temper and seems like we hated each other for a while.
I had a room to myself when I was about fourteen years old. My Aunt Dorothy bought me paint. I picked out yellow, so it would be bright and cheery compared to the rest of the dull looking house.
I enjoyed fixing up that little room. Aunt Ruth and Uncle Joe gave me a single bed that had a headboard that he carved himself. It was very nice. I got a new linoleum for the floor from Aunt Dorothy also. I put a lock on the inside of the door for privacy. I didn't like all the little kids coming in and bothering me. There were eight kids under me at that time. I loved to read and would stay up till the wee hours of the morning just to finish a book. No wonder I hated getting up for school in the mornings. Ha! Books were my way of escaping reality.
I don't remember why I didn't stay in that room too long. It might have been too cold in the winter. I ended up sharing a room with my sister, Jeanne. At first we were in the middle bedroom, sharing one bed. Then we moved to the front bedroom and each had our own bed and dresser. It was the nicest bedroom in the house really. Had a big window that looked out into the front yard. We could see the main road and the railroad tracks and the canal from there. We kept our room very neat and clean but Jeanne and I didn't get along that well and we'd draw a line down the middle and didn't dare step on each other's side of the bedroom. It's funny how kids can be as teenagers.
It was my parent's bedroom at first but they moved downstairs to a small room right over the furnace. They were nice and warm. We didn't have any heat upstairs. It was so cold in the winter that ice formed on the inside of the walls and we could make snowballs out of it. There was no insulation in that old cement block house and my father never let us have any heat upstairs. He shut off all the registers and hung blankets across doorways so no heat could get up there. It was cheaper to heat the house that way. He didn't care that we were freezing to death and the little ones were getting frostbitten from peeing n their beds and kicking the blankets off. In the mornings we'd all run downstairs and stand next to the kitchen stove to get warm. It was terrible and when I think back on that now, I really wonder how we lived through it.
One winter we were rolling snowballs in the front yard. We'd roll them till they were so big we couldn't budge them another inch. My father didn't like that too well when he came home drunk and saw the whole yard filled with giant snowballs. I heard him bitching to my mother about them. He didn't say anything the next day though. He just liked to argue when he was drunk. And whoever got in his way would get hit usually. Most of time it was our mother that got the batting around. But he didn't care if it was three in the morning. He'd always find something to yell about. One night he got us all out of bed in the wee hours and made us go outside and pick grass for the two rabbits that he said we didn't feed that day. We did, of course, but he was just a sadistic bastard.
The Griffin boy next door was a very mean kid at times. He and my brothers would get into fights all the time it seemed. Freddie would kick my brothers in the head or anywhere on their bodies. Other times he'd be all nice to them.
My mother was deathly afraid of snakes. She couldn't even look at a photo of one. Well, my father was outside when Freddie came down from the hill with a small grass snake in his hand. My father told him to take it in the house and show my mother. She about had a heart attack that day. I guess when mom was a little girl she got scared real bad from a snake and then she said when she was a little older someone gave her some meat that they said was chicken. After she ate it they told her she had just eaten snake meat. She said she threw up all the rest of the day and actually got sick from it. It bothered her that much. So you see how bad my father was.
In the summer we'd go up in the hills and pick apples and pears and whatever we could find. There were always berries to pick up there. It's amazing that so much fruit grows wild like that. So at least we'd have fresh fruit. Sometimes we'd get a bunch of apples and then make applesauce.
We didn't have it too bad those first few years we lived there in North Ilion. My father had a job and my mother even went back to work at Remington for a while. It was the only time in our young lives that we got an allowance! We felt rich! Our father gave us each a quarter and so did our mother. I almost felt normal that year in 1961. Then it all came to an end very fast. I remember my mother getting done. I think she was pregnant again and maybe that is why she quit. Or it's because my father was too jealous of her working. I know he beat her so bad one night that she went to work with two black eyes and the other women wanted her to have him arrested. But of course she could never, ever do that! He'd beat her worse!
I've added one of our Christmas photos from 1960. Those little kids looked so cold.
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