As to owning rental property, my parents would learn some very valuable lessons. One is renting to a relative. My Uncle Al worked for the railroad - he also drank a lot. Most of his paycheck went for beer - his preference was Carling's Black Label. My mom was close to her sister, however, rent is rent and my dad and mom couldn't keep on subsidizing. My poor Aunt Hope always loved Uncle Al, but she had her hands full, she had two kids to care about - trying to handle an alcoholic aged her quickly. Let me say that this is what my mother told me, although, I cannot document it - so this is very open to argument and inquiry. However, she kept it together right up to my uncles' death two decades later. But that's getting a little ahead of the story.

As to me and Dan, well at such a young age, my mom had her own hands full. Again, I can tell you she was dealing with a marriage that found her jumping from the fire directly into the frying pan - in the early days she was striving to be the dutiful wife and mother. There were lapses to be sure, but she made an effort. My dad turned out to be a mistake early on - and she felt trapped. Being born herself with Vitamin D Resistant Rickets, mom felt she would do no better and felt especially with two kids, it was better to coast in the marriage than divorce heading into the unknown. My father knew how to take advantage of her insecurities by threatening to throw her out and gain full custody of Dan and myself. She didn't have any real job skills, so she really felt at a loss. Aside from that, divorce still held a lot of social stigmas.

One incident my older brother and I shared as toddlers was the famed nudity show of 1954. Dan and I were still in diapers and my dad was at work while my mom fell asleep forgetting to lock the door and not realizing we were in an adventurous mood. Dan and I managed to open the front screen door and crawled down the steps. Let me mention being a warm and humid summer day, we were only in diapers. Here's the thing about cloth diapers, they are heavy and there's no elastic waistbands - they were held together by safety pins. Get them a little wet and gravity really comes into play. While walking or more accurately toddling down the street we both managed to have an in-flight dump and pee, causing the diapers to drop away. No problem, on a hot summer day it was a little cooler and our wet bottoms would air-dry a lot quicker. As we made our bare trek down Woburn Avenue, my Aunt Connie caught our act from her living room window. My Aunt Connie is pure Italian and married to one of my dad's brothers, my Uncle Herb. Connie was a close childhood friend of my mom's and through that connection managed to meet Herb. My Aunt Connie got a better deal! In any case, my aunt quickly called my mom on the phone, waking her from her sleep and my mom caught up with the bare-bottomed duo ending their brief Burlesque career.

While living on Woburn the first time, I was witness to a changing era. Electric street cars in Cleveland were quickly coming to an end. And one day I had to go to the dentist, my mom didn't have a car (my dad never drove) at this point. So she, my brother Dan and I got on board the rickety old electric mass transit and headed to the dentist. I had to have a baby tooth pulled. At that time, there was no Novocain, they used ether gas or laughing gas to put the patient asleep. I was a really little kid, but I can sure remember crying and screaming when the dentist strapped this big black mask over my nose and mouth to put me under. After I came to, I was upchucking all over the place. It was a very unpleasant experience and I found nothing funny about it!

While living on Woburn, my parents got their first car, an old 1940's Dodge. It was a very plain vehicle with no frills, and a very gray paint job. Its possible it was only covered in primer, I'm not sure. The inside interior was a gray felt. It was v-e-r-y basic transportation. I can remember my parents buying gas from a Shell station on Memphis near Pearl. I got the feeling even that young, that an attendant or two took a shining to my mother, and she wasn't all opposed to the attention - however, nothing ever came of it. Carol Boggs was an unhappy housewife, but she was no slut and certainly not an adulteress at that point.

There's a story about the Dodge. Very early on I had nightmares about my brother and I sitting in the back seat side-by-side. No one is in the front seat, yet the car is speeding down a roadway that can't be seen on a dark and foggy night. Its scary, however, the car does not crash - it just keeps going like a juggernaut out of control, even as I come out of it. Perhaps it means there was no one at the wheel when it came to parenting, Dan and I were left on our own. My mom and dad deciding they didn't want to be married with children after all and wanting to go their separate ways. As to the actual meaning, I'm not into deciphering dreams, so your guess is as good as mine. I've had this dream repeat itself for several decades every few years. Haven't had it in the last two decades, however, I'm now on the threshold of my senior years, thus I've assumed control of myself awhile back. 

Dan and I didn't go to school yet and we didn't see too much of the outside after the diaper incident. I think I spent a little more time in the playpen to keep me out of trouble.

My parents finally decided to put the Woburn house up for sale and my Aunt Hope and Uncle Al decided it was time to buy their own home. Their kids, Hopie and Mikey were a few years older than Dan and I, and my Aunt knew that the low rent days were over. They found a nice 1940's slab floor bungalow on Clifford Avenue in Cleveland, right around the corner from John Marshall High School. Meanwhile, my parents were looking for a more modern home of their own.