As I mentioned before we moved there before Christmas and it was
kind of a tough adjustment.. My sister and I started to get settled in and
adjusted after Christmas. My sister hung out with the girls, Mary and Ruthie. I
hung out with John who was a grade behind me but only six months younger and
Bob who was a couple years younger than us. For me it was like having brothers.
John was a little crazy and always hurting himself or getting into trouble. Bob
was a follower and often got hurt trying to do the things John did. I sort of
fit in the middle. There were also the younger cousins who were twins, Karen
and Keith. They were quite a bit younger so they just spent most time with each
other. They were pretty much opposites. Karen was small, quiet and good in
school. Keith was a big kid and not that bright. Keith often got in trouble for
doing silly things. One time he put a washcloth over the shower drain and
thought the shower would fill up like a swimming pool. Of course the door let
the water out and ran down into the finished basement.
The stories are not in chronological order because between Easter
and May my uncle Pat and the rest moved to their new house they had built on an
acreage near Wilmington. It was a two-story with the finished basement. More on
that later I will go back to the house we lived in when we first moved to
Illinois with them.
The house was an older two-story house, quite large. I shared a
bedroom with John and Bob. There was a double bed and a twin. We rotated so
that one out of three nights we got to sleep on the twin by ourselves. Of
course we always talked a bunch at bedtime and would often get in trouble for
being too loud and not going to sleep when we should. Especially a school
night. We had a game we played where the guy on the twin bed would dive onto
the double bed and punch the people on the double bed through the covers. This
was great fun. One time John was on the twin bed and dove on to double bed
yelling bonsai when he did it. I had coached Bob that we should scrunched down
to the bottom of the bed and get our legs ready for John's attack. When he dove
he landed right on our coiled up legs and we threw him into the air and he
missed the twin bed and thumped on the floor. I'm having trouble dictating this
because I keep laughing. Of course the big bump brought uncle Pat up and we got
our bottoms paddled. John had advised me that you take two or three swats and
then act like you're crying. Then it will stop. This works pretty good except
two or three swats left Bob still crying while John and I started laughing
uncontrollably.
I would often awake in the middle of the night when everything was
quiet. There was no air-conditioning so the windows were open in the summer.
The little town we lived in called Symerton had a grain elevator and the
associated railroad tracks. There would often be a train come through at night
and for some reason I found the click clack of the train on the tracks
comforting.
I have so many stories of that short time that we lived with uncle
Pat and aunt Beverly I'm not sure I can list them all. That spring and summer
we lived with them in the old house and then in the new. In the new house John
and I shared a basement room with bunkbeds and Bob had a bedroom with Keith.
The girls which included my sister were in the upstairs. Without Bob making the
three of us like the Three Stooges it was nowhere near as fun.
Our big thing to do at the old house was to play baseball in the
vacant lot next to our house. That was when I became a Cub fan. Back then they
had only day games at Wrigley Field. These were all televised so we dropped
everything when they were on and watched them on TV.. So mostly I remember the
bedtime bonsai games and playing baseball. My cousins add a set of cousins who
lived near us. This man we usually had enough people all to play some sort of
baseball game. Wilmington and the town we lived in were near the Joliet
munitions plant. Homebase was this artillery shell casing. I thought it was pretty
cool and John told me I could have it. It was quite a joke because it weighed
about 30 pounds. There was no way anyone would want to drag a 30 pound
artillery casing around and that's why it was home plate.
As I mentioned John was a little crazy and the loved Pete Rose and
acted like him, diving head first into the base and do almost anything. One
time he dove back to second base which was a metal lid to something and he cut
his hand pretty bad. We suggested he go home and show at Beverly but John would
not quit playing. He rubbed some dirt in it to clot the blood and we kept
going.
Well that's enough for today I will try to have more
later. Ithe
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