Recollections

The first thing I can remember in my life, I was about 4 years old, setting at the kitchen table eating breakfast. I must have had swollen cheeks because I can remember my mother looking across the table and saying, "Dennis looks funny." Then . . . "My God Bob! He’s got the mumps!" I didn’t know what the mumps were, but by the expression on my mom’s face, I figured it was deadly! So, I thought to myself, "I guess this is the end to my life already." I went to the living room, knelt on the couch and looked out the window, watching the drizzling rain, and waited for the end to come. Of course, it never did.

The year was 1959. I don’t know what time of the year it was, but I know there was six of us kids by then. Mother had "had us all in 5 years time", she would later remark. I was too young to really know each of them very well yet, but I was beginning to catch their names. The twins, Garry and Larry were the oldest, Robert was next, then Ronald, then me, then the last baby . . . the girl . . . Debra.

We were sharecroppers on what they called, "The Kenny Sisters Farm." We had the outside toilet and a tub on the back porch with a hand pump in the kitchen. There was a trough that went from the pump and through the kitchen window to fill up the tub. There was no hot water heater, so they heated the water up on the stove. We had an upstairs, but the most I remember about the house is the Easter baskets I found on the steps. I learned later that it was one of the nicer houses that we had lived in up to this point. It seems that dad would farm until he was broke, then go to Michigan to work in the car factories so we could eat. That’s why I was born in Flint Michigan.

The next thing I can remember in my life is moving. I would hear of the great mansion we were moving into by listening to the grown ups. They kept talking about a place where you could go to the bathroom inside the house! I was perplexed by that, wondering how that could be.

I didn’t mind leaving the old place, for I was too young to have grown attached to it. But, I do remember walking down the gravel road by it, north a little ways, with my brothers to a big ditch were we played. I remember them talking about how our dad had ran into it once. Once, we walked to our neighbor’s house south of us. They were called the "Parris’s." We were walking there once and saw a snake so we ran the rest of the way there and told Mrs. Parris of the "great serpent" we had just encountered. My brother Larry told them that it had spit at us and almost got us!