The Couch

Much of our family time was spent in the living room. We got a television when I was around three years old. My dad was always someone who wanted to have the newest “gadgets” that were available and although we were not a wealthy family, I suspect we fell right in the middle of the bell shaped curve for SES, we were usually the first family on our block who had the newest piece of technology. Television was a big thing for that era. I can remember neighbors gathering on our front porch to watch it through the living room window. I was so young that I don’t remember the experience but remember feeling that this whole thing was weird. The first television we had was really awful. It had a tiny little kind of oval screen, black and white picture, and a lot of snowy interference. Television shows were not predictable and there were usually lots of time slots in the middle of the day when nothing was being broadcast. The television had tubes that were forever blowing out and so Daddy had to constantly fiddle with them, trying to get the set to work properly. I can remember going to the store with him while he tested the tubes to see which ones were working and which ones weren’t. The vast majority of the first few years we had the television set it was usually turned so the back of the set faced the middle of the room and daddy was usually on his knees trying to get the tubes in or out depending on where he was in the process of trying to fix the darned thing. Gradually Portland got more than one station and we were able to watch shows regularly throughout the day and evening. By the time I was in high school there was some kind of programming until about two in the morning when the stations would have terrible programming and really horrible B movies. I watched a lot of these when I was babysitting into the wee hours.

Beverly & Karry

Television 1957

(Updated from our first TV)

There were lots of times however, when we would sit in the living room and not watch television, but read, or play the piano, or just talk (I know that this is unheard of today, but honestly we TALKED to each other). Daddy usually had the newspaper or a magazine in front of him and I was an avid bibliophile with my mug in a book most of the time. I read frequently but not particularly widely, although I think I read well beyond my years. For example by grade five I was reading things like The Silver Challis, Jane Eyre, and The Robe. Obviously I spent a lot of time in the library at St. Rose School! So when I started ninth grade at Mark Morris, I was exposed to new and interesting reading material. I had spent a lot of time at the city library as a child but it was always in the children’s room in the basement, and the collection there was very curtailed for the little one’s safety. However, Mark Morris was a public junior high school and there was no telling what those heathens might have on their shelves! Naturally, I had no idea of what I might find and so just started picking up whatever was within my reach. One Saturday afternoon Daddy and I were alone at home. He was in his rocker and I was on the couch reading my library book. I must have been really into the story about the young man during Revolutionary times when our forefathers were forming our nation, because I had no idea that I was reacting to what was on the written page. I must have made quite a few shocked inhales of breath because Daddy finally turned to me and said, “What are you reading?” I responded by innocently showing him the cover of the book, but he was having none of that. He told me to turn it over and let him take a look at it because something was certainly shocking me. I can clearly remember that I sure didn’t want him to see that I was reading my first few lines of what I considered to be real smut! Here were the briefest of descriptions of a young man feeling up a girl, tweaking her nipples. I’d never seen the word “nipple” written in a book before, so I was really shocked! However, there was no going back, Daddy was not backing down and I was going to show him that book. So I finally handed it over. I’m sure that he had great difficulty not bursting into laughter, but he controlled himself and asked me what I thought of what I was reading. I exclaimed that I was shocked and dismayed by the fact that this kind of garbage could be present in a school library. He asked what I was going to do about it and I proclaimed that I thought they shouldn’t have that kind of book in a library where children could be exposed to it. I thought it was obscene and that we should get the book thrown out of the library. This was my Dad’s first inkling that I would one day become an activist of some kind and if he had known it, I’m sure he would have stopped me in my tracks, but I was off to see what I could do. Naturally, I didn’t get far because, thank goodness, there were saner and more mature heads around to stop my rabble rousing. In retrospect I really appreciated the fact that Daddy didn’t laugh me out of the house, but made me think through what actions I should take if I thought something was wrong.

Family comes to visit

Family Comes to Visit

The vast majority of my Mother’s extended family lived in Medford, Oregon while I was growing up. My maternal grandparents had settled there by the time my Mother was a young girl. Grandpa was a pharmacist and owned Hunter’s For Drugs but by the time I can remember much, he was retired and they had a lovely home not far from Medford High School.

Grandma & Grandpa's House in Medford

My mother’s sister, Auntie Jo and her husband Uncle Jack also lived in Medford. Uncle Jack had started a construction company and they had a passel of kids, seven in all, two girls, Mary Jo and Laura (both older than I) and five boys (John, Jim, Bill, Andy and Russ). It seemed to me that when I was growing up Auntie Jo was perpetually pregnant or had a tiny baby. I thought the whole experience of growing up in a big family and continually having new babies around was quite romantic and just the most perfect way of having a family.

The Batzer Clan

I loved to take our many trips to Medford and spend as much time as possible with the Batzer clan. I fell, age-wise right between John and Jim so I always had a friend to play with and when they boys got to the age where they didn’t want to play with their boring little cousin, I got to stay with Auntie Jo and play with the new baby. Mother’s brother, Uncle Jerry and his wife and family also lived in Medford although we spent much less time with their family (I think it was because Jerry’s kids were quite a bit younger than we were and Mom and Jerry never really got along). The fact that Medford was a good half a day’s drive from Longview may have been an advantage for everyone involved since we were far away from Mother’s family so that we didn’t get used to each other and close enough that we could visit them, or they could visit us every once in awhile. This made both groups have the excitement of the occasional out-of-town visitor come and the joy of seeing them leave once they’d gotten tired of having them around.
Occasionally Grandma and Grandpa would come up our way for a visit and eventually every Medford cousin got a chance to have an individual visit up north (I didn’t realize that the Kavanaugh kids never got individual visits to Medford until I was writing this story!) When Laura and Mary Jo came to visit, the oft’ told story goes that, all four girls came down with the chicken pox all at the same time and Mother nearly tore her hair out trying to get them all taken care of and healthy again so that they could go back to her sister none the worse for the wear. I think that the reason the Batzer kids got to come to visit us in Longview was because Mother and Auntie Jo thought that each kid needed a special time away from the incredibly rambunctious tribe of children; an individual time where each one was focused on and life was kind of quite (I’m sure they thought it was at least boring).

Mary Jo & Laura

Visit Longview

By the time that Bill came for his visit I was in eighth or ninth grade and he was probably in fourth or fifth. Bill Batzer was always onfe of my dad’s favorites. I think Daddy always rooted for the under-dog and Bill always seemed to be the one who stood out in the crowd simply because he seemed a little out of stepped with the rest of them. Bill was born bigger than life and laughed harder, joked more and seemed to be more of the bull in the china closet than most of the other kids. Dad thought he was a hoot. Bill always made him smile. Bill seemed to fit right into the family and Daddy was having a great time during his visit, mostly because he was glad to have another “guy” around rather than his overly female household (all of my brothers had grown

Bill Batzer

About the age when he came to visit

up and moved away from home by this time). Daddy’s usual evening schedule brought him home by 5:30pm. He would walk in the front door, sit down with the paper and rest for a few minutes until supper was ready. Our job was to make darned sure that dinner was on the table by the time he’d finished his daily read of the Longview Daily News. After dinner Dad would get up from the table and head into the living room for a rest on the couch. He would flip the television on turn the sound down a bit and ramble over to get a little nap while the women folk cleaned up the dishes from dinner. Bill caught on to this ritual very quickly and, since he wasn’t really part of the family, he was not instilled with the respect (and almost fear) of my father. As the days went by Bill got the idea that the nap on the couch could be made into a competition between him and Daddy, and that if Bill could get to the couch fast enough then Dad would have to sit in his rocking chair and Bill would get to stretch out on the couch. Daddy caught on to this ritual as soon as it started, and the compitition was on. Each day Dad would find a way to distract for Bill by asking him to take out the garbage or do one little thing for him. Bill always fell for it so Daddy never lost his resting spot. However, on one of the last days that Bill was visiting, Dad hesitated and a bit and Bill took a flying dash across the living room floor, landing fully spread out in Daddy’s nap space. Oh dear, all of us thought, what’s going to happen now? Will there be a battle of the wills or will dad just dump him off and recapture his territory. We all stood behind the kitchen door holding our collective breaths as Dad sauntered into the living room. Bill rolled over feigning sleep, and Dad without a pause Daddy said, "Bill, did you hear that the Barnum and Bailey Circus is in town today?" Bill groggily replied that he hadn’t heard that. Then Dad went out the front door and said that he could see the elephants coming down the street. Well, that did it for Bill he was up and running down the front steps as fast as he could to see those elephants, while Dad quietly slipped back onto his couch for his regular nap after dinner.

Living Room: Cleaning and Mom

Cleaning was kind of a perpetual event especially in the living room. It wasn’t that we just had to pick up on a daily basis but in addition there was the frequent dusting and making sure that the house was in order, the house really meant the living room because the living room was the first impression that people had when they entered the house. Mother always believed that if you spent good money, you got what you paid for and so with appliances she always wanted to buy the very best that we could afford. Then, as cognitive dissonance would have it, she would defend that purchase to the bitter end, even if the appliance was a lemon. For example, when she got a new vacuum cleaner she insisted on an Electrolux because it was the best vacuum cleaner made, not the cheapest but the best. This decision caused quite a row on the home front because it was, to our family, a huge expense, but mother insisted and when she insisted, Daddy found a way to figure it out and get her what she wanted because, if he didn’t he would pay in other ways. So we got the Electrolux and we used it and as was usually true, it was a work horse that never let us down. That machine must have lasted at least thirty years because it was the same vacuum that they had until Daddy retired and it was one that took a lot of abuse, especially from the kids in the family.
One of the things that I liked best about it was that my favorite cat, a long haired black beauty named Sam loved to have his tummy vacuumed. Whenever he would hear me pull out the appliance, he’d come running into the living room and throw himself on the floor so that I could give him a good vacuuming. I always thought it was strange that he didn’t mind the noise and he loved the results. He always looked beautifully groomed and that’s not easy for a long-haired feline. I never saw this with any other cat until our old boy Bandit lost his hearing when he was around 17 years old and then he didn’t run and hide from the vacuum any more, he’s let me give him a good old suctioning. That, of course, was because he couldn’t hear a blessed thing and so the noise didn’t scare him.
The windows in this room were Mom's nemesis. The house did not have a foundation and Longview WAS in Washington State, not exactly the driest climate in the nation. These windows had small panes and were wooden framed, so they sweat a lot. All of us hated cleaning the windows, the bottom pane was large and not so difficult to clean but the top of the window was separated into six small panes and the work was always painstaking and monotonous. There was a constant mildew problem in the house and Mother fought it with a vengeance. But, these windows were a constant reminder that she was defeated.

Bev, Mom & Me

1948

The One thing that you could depend on when I was growing up is that when we were expecting company Mother would spend at least two days tearing the house apart making sure that every tiny place in the house was spotless. This tendency grew exponentially worse after the boys left home and joined the service. First they were off to boot camp for what seemed like forever and then they would start coming home on leave. As soon as they that they would be coming home for a visit Mom started to go nuts preparing their special foods, cleaning house and making sure that everything was absolutely shipshape (or at least shipshape for Arlen since he was in the Navy, it was probably spit and polished for Larry and Bob who were in the Marines!) If, per chance, they were sent overseas then the cleaning frenzy got worse because they were gone for a longer time and the expectations for their home coming was enlarged. As the cliche' goes, it's always darkest before the dawn, and this was certainly the truth when in came to the cleaning frenzies; the house always looked much worse mid-cleaning than it did at any other time pre OR post cleaning. The vacuum temporarily took up permanent location in the middle of the living room, cleaning rags laid helter-skelter throughout the house, the sink was constantly full of hot soapy water. Mother would race from room to room in a nasty old house dress with a bandana around her head fussing and shouting orders to whoever might be within hearing distance (probaly including anyone within 100 feet of the property line).
When Bobby left home permanently he joined the Marines and one of his longest times away from Longview was when he was stationed in Hawaii. We all thought it sounded really romantic to be in the Islands and we were sure he was having an incredible time. There was great concern when he was hurt (I think it was a broken clavicle) while playing football for the Marines. He was not one to write home frequently like Arlen or Larry. I think Arlen wrote every week and Larry though less often, at regular intervals, but Bobby would never pick up a pen if he could avoid it. I can remember that Mother would get exasperated with him and then contact his commanding officer and then it would hit the fan! Bobby would be beyond angry with her, but it was the perfect plan because she would start getting letters fast and furious. The first time he came home from Hawaii (I must have been about 11 or 12 years old) he wrote and said that he thought he’d be home sometime around a particular date, I have no memory of what the date might have been but I do know that it was during the late Spring or early Summer. Mother took this to mean that it was exactly that date and so a day or so beforehand she started her race for the cure, cleaning and moping and waxing and fussing. Everyone of us was pulled into duty, we rubbed and scrubbed and made every place shine like the top of the Chrysler Building. I remember thinking to myself that she didn’t seem to like him too much when he was home, why all the fuss now that he’s gone? So the last day prior to his arrival I heard Mom and Dad talking about not really knowing which day he was arriving, and it gave me an idea. Now was the time when I could fix Mom for good. So as she was mopping the kitchen floor for the third time I stood up, looked out the opened front door and yelled in a delighted voice, “Bobby! Bobby! We’ve been waiting for you!!” At this point Mother let out a terrific cry of despair. She knew that she and the house were a disaster area and that she couldn’t do a thing about it. Of course Bobby was nowhere in sight, I was just pulling her leg. But, when I rolled on the floor in laughing fits, she didn’t think it was anywhere near as funny as I did. To say the least, she was none too happy with me. I’m not sure that we ever had the same sense of humor, but I still look back at it with a twinkle in my eye, because I got her good that time.


Bobby 1966

The Living Room

The downstairs of the house consisted of a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, a bathroom and a large back porch. The living room seemed quite large to me. The majority of my preteen/teenage years the room held a couch, Mom's chair, Dad's rocker/recliner, the piano, and the television set. The floor was a dark brown tile that was made of a composite material. Mother would keep it dusted, and we knew someone special was about to arrive when it got a new layer of wax. The room faced South and you entered it from the front porch, the kitchen or the hall. This was the room that was most “lived in” and whenever we had guests, this was the room where we entertained. Most every night we watched television in the living room. This is also where we practiced the piano and sang along to old songs with mother. The living room didn’t always have this appearance. Before I was born and when I was very young a lot of one corner of the room was taken up with a large, dark behemoth of an oil heater. I hardly remember it, but the little I recall it was enormous and blazing hot. This was eventually replaced with baseboard electric heating which was a huge relief to everyone in the family since it gave us consistent warmth and less danger of getting burned.

Beverly & I in the living -room

Christmas 1958

Entering the House

Beverly & I 1955ish

The front door opened from the porch into the living room. It was the one door in the whole house that was built from some kind of solid, heavy wood. It was dark and had a large metal handle that was extremely difficult to open for the youngest one in the household (that would be me). When I finally grew old enough to have a key of my own I seldom, if ever, used the one to the front door; I much preferred going to the back door, even if the way was dark and scary. On dates, however, I could always have the young man leave me at the front door since Mom invariably left it unlocked. The ritual for returning home when I was out after hours as a teen was that I would enter the house (alone through the back door, on a date through the front door), turn off the light on the stove in the kitchen and head for bed. Usually I would stop in the folks bedroom for a brief play-by-play of the evening’s activities. Mother told me much later in life that Daddy thought this ritual was hysterical since there was never any question of what I’d been up to, I always spilled the beans, unlike any of the other kids in our family, my life was an open book. I was always more than willing to tell all…mostly because there wasn’t that much to tell. This ritual was not one that Mom and Dad had concocted, but one that I had devised. Why, because there wasn’t anything to hide…I was a pretty straight shooter, with little to keep secreted away from my parents (no wonder my sister and her friends thought I was a little goody two- shoes!)

Karry, Dad, Mother, Larry & Bev

in front of "the door" 1959

The Front Porch

The front porch was a large wooden structure that was covered by a roof that reached from the upstairs bedroom windows to the front steps. This was held up by four white wooden pillars that I thought were quite stately, but upon adult reflection look kind of puny and only substantial enough to hold to roof up. The front porch held the mail box, the milk box, and a whole lot of bicycles. Whenever someone who had never been to our house before called and asked for directions, Dad would tell them how to get onto Fifteenth Street and then how many blocks to drive away from the lake before they would be on our block. Then he would say, “Just look for the house on the right with all the bikes on the front porch.” This never failed to help the visitors spot the correct house. The front porch was the main portal into the house and a natural place to use as a backdrop for pictures, so we have pleanty of photographs taken from that vantage point.

Karry & Bev

Circa 1950

One of my favorite pictures of the five kids

Christmas Petticoats

The steps to the front porch were framed by two small bushes that Daddy kept clipped down neat and tidy. One Christmas evening when I was about seven, Beverly and I were the happy receivers of one of the most popular items of the year, Alice Faye petticoats. Alice Faye was a dancer on the Lawrence Welk television show and she always wore these huge petticoats and every little girl just had to have one of those petticoats. The ones we received were nylon on top with rows and rows of netting below. We were so proud of those slips! This Christmas evening had been a long one, but eventually we were sent to bed, and we grudgingly dragged our exhausted bodies up stairs. At the same time Mother was extinguishing the candles that sat atop the television in the front room. For some reason she became distracted (undoubtedly she was yelling at us to be quiet and get the heck in bed, for once and for all) when one of the candlesticks fell over and caught the living room sheers and drapes afire. Mother yelled for Daddy and immediately screamed for us to get out of the house. Naturally, our curiosity was more important than following orders, and we fussed wanting to know what all the screaming was about. Daddy immediately ran to the living room and pulled the drapes down flinging them on the bushes by the front steps while Mother called the fire department. Before too long we could tell from the frantic sound in our parents’ voices that this was no time to ignore orders, and we scurried out the front door. The neighbors were out of their houses and standing across the street to watch the action as they stared in horror at the two little rag-a-muffins in their new Alice Faye’s bouncing down the steps inches from the flaming drapes. Blithely we ran into the arms of our “Grandma” Burr who gave us such a scolding. This was one Christmas that would allow us to stay up later than ever before and one that we would never forget.

The Front Yard

Viewed from the street our house sat back from Fifteenth Street about in the middle of the lot. There was a large green grass lawn that ran from the main street sidewalk to the house bifurcated by a cement walkway. The front porch was surrounded by gardens on either side of the wide set of three stairs to the porch. On the left side of the porch was a rock garden that held various perennials and sedums making a beautiful entrance to the front of the house. On the right side were various bushes, a very large blue hydrangea and a fence that separated the backyard from the front yard. The sidewalk that ran down the length of Fifteenth Street separated the parking strip from the front lawns and held magnificent maple trees that ran the length of the street on both sides. In the fall they would drop their leaves in the street, parking strip and lawn giving the kids in the neighborhood many hours of chores and a lot of fun piling them up and jumping in them. As we grew older, we found them less entertaining and more of a pain in the butt. In the winter they stood as naked sentinels and in spring they would sprout to life spreading seedling whirligigs across the yards. The most beautiful season for these towering giants was summer when they were fully leafed out and would create a magnificent tunnel covering the entire road, and shading and cooling the yards and houses that they protected.

(Above Karry & Beverly

Circa 1949)

Roller-skating Cracks Me Up

One of the few negative results of having these lovely monarchs guarding our homes was the fact that they were so large and therefore their root systems were likewise enormous. The sidewalk displayed this problem quite vividly where huge roots would gradually heave the sidewalk up and crack apart the cement leaving uneven pavement along the length of the street. Although it didn’t disrupt foot traffic except for the occasional trip of the unsteady walker, it played untold havoc on anyone who wanted to roller-skate, and I always wanted to roller-skate. When I was young every kid on the block had a pair of roller-skates and from the time I was very little I wanted a pair more than practically anything else. I thought it looked like so much fun to glide down the street; it looked like you could almost fly. The kids who had them looked like they really enjoyed them. I thought it was fascinating because boys and girls took on completely different personas when they had skates on. The boys would hunch over and race up and down the street pushing each other and seeing who could make the other one fall over, but the girls coasted by as if they were flowing across space not simply perambulating down the street. Naturally, since I was the youngest of the kids on the block, I had to wait the longest to get a pair of skates, but eventually I did. The roller-skates that we all had were not shoe skates like you might see in roller rinks or on television in a roller derby, they were metal shoe plates that had four, inch and a half metal rollers on the bottom. They were held on to our shoes by a heal that fit over the heals on our shoes and the fronts were held on by clasps that attached to the front of our shoes. These clasps had some flexibility so that several kids could share the skates even if they wore different sized shoes. This was accomplished by the use of a skate “key” that tightened or loosened the clasps. Most kids on the block would wear these skate keys on a string around their neck so that they wouldn’t loose them, and so that they could take the skates off if they got themselves in a jam somewhere down the block, away from their own front porch. When I was finally old enough to have my own pair of skates I discovered that being able to roll down the sidewalk was not as easy as I had guessed it might be. I had to find my balance and it wasn’t easy. My sister really helped me by talking me through the first few experimental rolls, but from then on I was on my own. To my surprise, it took a lot of practice and the result of not learning quickly was a lot of nasty falls on extremely hard and rough cement. As a result of the first few tumbles, I decided that I should only roll horizontally across the sidewalk because this sort-cut would allow me time enough to get my sea legs without permanently scarring my knees. I spent several days practicing before I dared to try to first stand up from the front porch steps and then try to roll up and down the smooth, straight sidewalk in our front yard. The biblical quoting, pride goeth before the fall, fits perfectly here, because I did not consider the differences between the nice smooth sidewalk in our front yard and the root-broken cement walkway of the main street. By the end of the first week of skating I boldly thought I was ready to skate up and down Fifteenth Street, and decided to escape the confines of our private sidewalk. Filled with self-esteem and pleased to be flashing through the neighborhood for all to see, I picked up my speed and headed out onto the main drag. The crash was not a pretty one and both knees took time to recover as did my dignity. Eventually, however, I learned to take it easy around the cracks and to leave the speed to the boys of the neighborhood.

Karry 1955ish

More Bits from the Side Yard

The DesJardins and the Gang

The house that was right next door to us on the West side and next to the side yard belonged to the DesJardin’s when I was quite small. They were a family with several children, all older than me and some quite a bit older than I was. They had children who were my brother’s age and the youngest one was Beverly’s age. The girls that I remember were beautiful and somewhat tom boyish, which I admired. The DesJardin kids ran with a pack of other kids in the neighborhood. When My brothers were in grade and high school, they seemed to be the center of the action in the neighborhood. If there was a baseball game, it was in our front yard, if there was trouble to get into, the Kavanaugh boys were right there and if not instigating it, at least participating, though I doubt much went on that they didn’t instigate. By the time the boys had grown up, Beverly and Kathy DesJardin were good friends and kind of ran at the back of the pack trying to keep up with the boys and watching and learning all they could about how the big kids did things. When brother and Larry was 16 years old, Bobby was 13 and Beverly was six the gang was going strong and Beverly, the precocious thing she was, learned fast. At this time I was only three and so I was still under Mother’s strict control. It would take several years before I was able to scuttle about and learn from the big kids, but by that time the boys were well into high school and wanted little to do with some little one following them around. On the other hand Beverly didn’t want me hanging around with her and Kathy either, since I was just the annoying little sister. However, every once in awhile I would be allowed to tag along and learn all sorts of big kid stuff.

The Gang of Kids From the Block

The Little girl in front is a DesJardin

The DesJardins had a woodshed like we did only Daddy turned our tool shed into a workshop by the time I was old enough to really remember very clearly so the woodshed next door was quite intriguing to me. It was a small shed that was filled with wood and the floor was covered with wood chips. It was warm in the cold wet winter and it smelled wonderful with all those woody scents filling the air. The one time I remember being allowed to tag along with Beverly and Kathy and their gang of kids, we went to the DesJardin’s woodshed. They were going to have a “meeting” (whatever that meant, I’d never heard of a meeting before). So everyone gathered together in this tight woody space and someone had a cup as a gavel and started the event saying in hushed voices, “Order in the court, Judge Roy Bean, Wife’s in the bathtub shooting submarines.” The room burst into giggles and I stood there completely be befuddled. I didn’t know what was going on but I guessed that it was something naughty, but I had no clue as to what any of it meant and I probably just wanted to go home. I sure wasn’t going to tell Momma about any of this stuff…it must be really bad. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to grow up any more, if I didn’t understand what the big kids were talking about, I’d just stay home where it was safe and I was pretty sure I understood most of the stuff that was said.

Karry & Her Kitty 1953 Side Yard View

Conservative Christianity Comes to the Neighborhood

The next family to move in stayed for several years. Their last name was Heimbach and they became close friends of my parents. They had two children, a boy and a girl and were generally nice people. I was particularly interested in the kids because this was the first child I’d ever met who had the same first name as me and this Kari was a BOY! It seemed strange that I had never met another Karry nor had I ever met another Kavanaugh (much later in life I would learn that Kavanaugh is a very popular name in Ireland). I really believed that I was unique from the whole rest of the world. I knew other Beverlys and I knew other Bobs and Larrys but no one else had my moniker. To me the new family was perfectly fine, and my folks seemed to like them a lot. I guess I originally thought that this might be a potential baby sitting opportunity for me and that I might earn extra bucks by finding another family that I could wrangle out of a few dollars in exchange for occasional child care. This, of course, never amounted to anything and I soon learned it was because preachers from this church didn’t earn a hill of beans. They were the truly poor, perhaps not in spirit but certainly in currency, but they were lucky because they lived next door to Pete Kavanaugh who was forever hiring people to drive school bus for him. Before every long, Daddy had Mr. Heimbach driving bus for him on a regular basis.
The next thing I learned about this family came from Mrs. Martin the Catholic lady who lived across the alley from us. One day she came over to our house and said that a friend of hers lived right next to the church where Rev. Heimbach preached and that every Saturday morning he would come to the church, open the windows and then begin practicing his Sunday morning sermon. These sermons it seemed were continually becoming more anti-Catholic every week. If this was not the truth, then something very strange was going on. Why would someone who purported to be a friend of the family and who was able to feed his kids better and raise their standard of living because of my Dad, preach bad things about the church that our family attended? But when we looked into it further the truth was that was exactly what he was doing. He would say horrible things about Catholics and then treat my Dad like his best friends. It didn’t take long for the friendship to cool off on the home front, but Daddy continued to keep Heimbach on the job and never said a thing to him about what we had discovered. Daddy didn’t seem to care if the other guy was a two-faced jerk, the preacher needed Dad's help and he kept his job.

Beverly & Karry in Side Yard