I had about six weeks remaining at the end of seventh grade when we needed to move from Cedar Street, because Mrs. Andrews, having increased our rent, found new tenants willing to pay what my father would not. In order for me to finish the schoolyear without changing schools, my parents decided to live with my father’s parents, as well as with his two brothers, Joe and Frank, and their sister, Mary, in the family homestead on Robbins Avenue. For my mother, it was Hell; for me it was merely a nuisance. My mother had little to do when we lived there except to be lonely. Most of the time, my father’s family spoke only Italian. My grandmother maintained that’s all she knew. She tried to hide the fact her understanding of spoken English was more than adequate. The subterfuge was very useful for her control of everything up-the-hill.
“Up-the-hill.” That designation resulted from the geography of Niles. Robbins Avenue rose from the Mahoning Valley, downtown, toward McKinley Heights, east of the city. Several years previously, my grandparents and their adult children had moved to this location from their home on Vienna Avenue, where my cousin, Fremont, and I had played for many years. For reasons unknown to me, their move had been very rapid. The Vienna Avenue house must have been a rental, and new tenants were due to arrive imminently. The home on Robbins Avenue was the first one my father’s relatives owned. In fact, ownership, rather than rental, was highly uncommon among almost all of my relatives.
My father’s family actually lived in a modified garage instead of a real house. My grandfather, Luigi, had been a house-painter-paperhanger with his own business, which was now run by his son, Joe, aided by any of his five brothers when they were not otherwise employed. The garage had been built early to accommodate all of the equipment needed for the business. Although a separate, formal house had been planned, it was never built. The remodeled garage became their home for the rest of the lives of my grandparents, their unmarried daughter, Mary, and their oldest son, Joe.
The garage’s masonry structure, with a few shingles to give it an appearance more suitable for the neighborhood, had two floors. The lower floor had a modest kitchen and a larger “storage room.” The kitchen contained a family-sized table and a bench along the wall for kids. The other three sides had chairs for the real adults, which did not include my mother, who was consigned to the bench. On the wall above the bench there was a painting of an old man praying over a bowl and bible. It was one of my favorite recollections of the house’s furnishings. Years later, Uncle Joe gave this illustration to me. Since then, it has hung near my kitchen table everywhere we lived.
Another large piece of kitchen furniture was a sideboard for dishes, cups and glasses. Aunt Mary also used it for every knickknack she owned, many of which were plastic birds. I once swore that my own house, when I had one, would not be cluttered with such doodads. I was wrong.
The kitchen area also had a couch/daybed where Uncle Joe napped when he could. In addition, Aunt Mary kept her sewing machine there. This room, of course, was the focal point for family gatherings. During warm weather everyone sat outside, on Adirondack chairs with cups of coffee resting on the flat arms.
The storage room adjoining the kitchen was divided with sheets to make it into three spaces, one for home-canned produce, other foodstuffs, and everything else that needed to be stored. The second space held a very large, roll-top desk Uncle Joe used for all of his paperwork. (I loved that desk and, for much of my life, wanted one just like it.) A third area, separated off by the roll-top desk, held the true kitchen, the one used for all of the family-cooking on a large, wood-burning, gas-converted stove. The electric stove in the other kitchen was used for only very special events.
The first floor, off the kitchen, had a bathroom with a toilet and primitive shower for everyone who lived there. In the shower, I had to pull a cord to turn on the water for rinsing, after a previous application of soap to my damp body, as I balanced on a wood-slated platform, which allowed drainage during the bathing procedure.
The second floor, accessed by an oak staircase, consisted of an unused parlor, a music room, a bedroom for my grandparents, a second bedroom for my Aunt Mary, who now shared her bed with my mother(!) and a dormitory. This common area is where I had my own narrow, brass bed, as did my father and each of his two brothers living there at the time.
The Robbins Avenue property, itself, consisted of eight, home-sized lots. Behind the garage-cum-home was a smaller, wooden building filled with ladders, painting supplies and Uncle Joe’s truck. Most of the rest of the property was dedicated to an extensive vegetable garden. Plastic flowers were placed in sites where vegetables could not be planted. A tub of rainwater, collected through a drain from the roof, was used to irrigate all of the edibles. Throughout the summer, my grandfather sold his excess vegetables from a produce-stand near the Avenue.
We moved “up-the-hill” in early spring of 1948. My mother survived, as did I, until very early June, when we moved to the country and my maternal grandmother’s farm where I had been born. During the several months we lived on Robbins Avenue, I found that living “up-the-hill” was not much different from being “up-the-creek.”