It is often claimed the success of any enterprise depends upon “location, location, location.” This summary is equally true for life, itself. The beginning decades of mine depended upon location, location, location, even when the sites were limited. I’m told the first one for me was 20½ N. Cedar, the second-story apartment above a hardware store, one for mechanical tools, not electronics!
I was born on my maternal grandparents’ farm in Mineral Ridge, Ohio. My parents and I lived in the Cedar apartment for only a short time after my birth. The first house I remember was a mere block away, 44 N. Cedar. Technically Cedar Street was divided North and South by Robbins Avenue, but few made the distinction, unless you lived south of “The Avenue.”
I lived in the Cedar Street house until the seventh grade. Toward the end of that school year, we had to move from this rented house. I don’t know why. Perhaps Mrs. Andrews sold it to someone else. My father did not believe in owning a house. In order for me to complete the seventh grade at Washington Junior High School, the middle school I attended after Lincoln, we lived for several months with my paternal grandparents on “The Avenue.”
Then, in the summer of 1948, we moved to Mineral Ridge and lived with my maternal grandmother, while I attended the eighth grade and the first six weeks of the ninth at Mineral Ridge High School. The months I lived there were the happiest of all my years prior to going away to college.
After a little more than a year of country living, we moved back to the old neighborhood and rented another house owned by Mrs. Andrews, 440 Seneca Street. This was where Jim Corbett and his mother, my onetime piano teacher, had lived while we had resided on Cedar Street.
For the Cedar house, I remember the living room, or parlor, was the first room entered through the front door. It had pink wallpaper with large white flowers and bright green leaves. I don’t remember anything about the furniture, but there must have been an upright piano, since this was when I began lessons at our future-home across the street. There was also a walled-in fireplace with its still-visible mantle. Santa Claus would never be able to enter the room, but my father once showed me an opened vent in the furnace pipes in the cellar that Santa used one year.
To the right of the parlor was the room filled by an all-purpose dining table with its chairs and sideboard. Directly behind the parlor was the kitchen with its attached pantry that included a sink overlooking our future home on Seneca. The kitchen led to the back porch, without any railing to keep kids on or off, and to the backyard with its victory garden with rows of corn, tomatoes and green vegetables that added to our meals during World War II.
The second floor, accessed by an enclosed staircase from the kitchen, had two and one-half bedrooms and a bathroom. My parents’ room faced Cedar Street, mine Senaca. There was a small area, a one-half bedroom, between my room and the bathroom. I don’t remember much about my bedroom. I must not have spent too much time there. At times it blends into my images of my bedroom in the house across the street where we lived during my teenage years. The half-bedroom held a narrow bed which my mother used on the nights she bailed out from her snoring husband.
The scary, dark, and damp cellar held a coal-burning furnace with its adjoining storage bin for black rocks delivered every few weeks through a small window near the ceiling. The open space at the foot of the stairs housed tubs for soaking clothes before they were placed in the washing-machine with its noisy, back-and-forth rotor and attached wringer through which clothes were passed before they were hung to dry, during the winter months, on lines in the cellar. The odor of wetness evident on the first floor indicated which days were wash-days. Spring, summer and fall allowed for lines in the backyard and the magnificent fragrance of clothes dried outdoors.
I, myself, spent as much time outside as I possibly could. It enabled me to escape from the constant arguments which occurred within the walls on Cedar Street during each season of the year.