ME -- BEGINNING TO BE -- CHAPTER 5 -- I GETS BORN

 CHAPTER 5 

In 1985 my parents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary (photo, 1975). I wrote a speech honoring them and my mother gave me a list of notes about how they met and some of their early life. According to her notes, “Bill lost his job just before the wedding, which is why we couldn’t afford to get a place together for a period of time. (She did not indicate what job he held. I discovered that later).

His father died in February 1937. Sometime within that year he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps for two years.

It was probably in the spring of 1938 he took the ill-fated boat trip

where he first met  mother and he was newly home. He then proposed in 1939 and they were married a year later. If he proposed marriage it is likely he had a job at that time. (My parents, 1938.)

I doubt this was the job at Lukens Steel. I feel confident he had that job after the marriage. My dad told me he knew Isaac Tipton while at Lukens. It was September 10, 1941 when Isaac Tipton received a Lukens employee identification card.

Reading over my mothers notes now I see she told a little white lie. In her notes she says, “Finally, though, he got a job in a Modena scrap yard and his grandfather let [us] rent one of his apartments in Modena.”

It is quite possible my dad worked at the Modena Scrap Yard before working at Lukens. However, it was the job at the scrap yard he lost before their marriage, so unless he returned there afterward, which I don’t think was the case, she was confused. The rest of her statement is true and I bet it was not easy getting his grandfather to rent them that apartment. Of course that old man owned that building by the tracks. Why not? He apparently owned everything else in town.

It is her next statement that rings false:

 “The three of us lived in that apartment until 1943 when Bill went into the Navy in March. Then I packed up as he shipped out and you and I went to live with my parents in Downingtown.”

I do not know if my mother’s memory was having a hiccough. We did not move to Downingtown in 1943, we moved in December 1941. My mother and grandmother were compulsive picture takers, something I inherited from them. She and/or her mother snapped dozens of photos of me as a baby and young child. There is not a single photograph of me in Modena, but there is plenty of me at Whitford from August through November 1941. In fact, the first photograph taken of me was on August 2, 1941. I am lying in a basket at Whitford (photo left). In December 1941 the photos of me are at the home on Washington Avenue in Downingtown. (One photo shows me on December 27, 1941 in front of 424 Washington Avenue, Downingtown, Pa. It is my six-month

birth date.) 

 We didn’t move because my dad entered the Navy either.

Maybe my mother didn’t want to share the real reason with all the guests at their 50th Wedding Dinner. 

I was born on June 27, 1941 almost a year and one week  after they wed. My parents did not make the mistake their own had and become pregnant before the nuptials. It is true some people called me a bastard occasional; it is not true that I am one. At the time of my birth they were living in that apartment in Modena and it became my first home.

They moved out when the first year lease was up about one month after I was born. The reason was not war, but bugs – bedbugs to be specific. The apartment building was infested with bedbugs. (I wonder if my Great Grandfather charged extra for that?) These pests were feasting upon me in the night and they moved to Whitford in with my mother’s parents to escape the creepy-crawlies.

(Photo of dad holding me at Whitford on September 14, 1941.) 

It all fits together like a puzzle. My parents lived separately immediately upon marrying and then a few weeks after, probably on August 1, 1940, they rented the Modena apartment. I was born a year later and about a month after I came they moved again, just when the one-year lease would expire. The photographs of me begin in August 1941 at Whitford, the month after the Modena lease expired.

 I never learned the reason for the whole family moving from the George Thomas III estate after all those years there. If my father didn’t enter the Navy until 1943 that was the reason that the first pictures I have of him in uniform are dated 1943, so that is probably when he did (and it was). It isn’t a matter of my mother moving in with her parents, everybody moved. There is the possibility this is when Grandfather Brown began working at the Iron Works and he wanted to be nearer the job, but I really don’t know.  (Photo right: me in my highchair on the back shed of 424 Washington Avenue, January 1, 1942.)

None of this mattered to me at the time anyway; I was only a baby.