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From the living room, turning south, you will go through a door frame doorway and walk over a floor
furnace and turn left andgo to mom and dad's room. Go straight ahead to the single bathroom,and turn
right, west again, and go to the second bedroom. Lorraine and I shared the bedroom with bunk beds. I
don't remember when but Ron is 4 years younger than I am so he must have to come along in
1950 1951 or somewhere around there, when we moved. Don't let me get ahead of myself.
I found it was within a short walking distance to an railroad yard. That was our house. if you went
out the back door just saw some grass and then a detached garage and the sunshade, or our patio.don't
really have any pictures of this area, except in my head.
Dad went to work every morning, he was working as an electrician. I found this out later on.
I remember that Wes and I used to go over to the rail yards and play on the cars. Around and
underneath them. There were a lot of tracks there, like 7 or 8 so it could have been the switch yard. I don't
know the street that was a single Street right off of some Boulevard I got the look up the name and at the
end of the street which would be on the south end of our street but there was a gentleman, who lived there
and had a wielding and steel shop next to his house. His name was Mr. Ussery. Dad helped him and they
built a Fishing boat. Dad used to go with him and take it fishing. A couple of times they took me along go
with him fishing I did get to go a couple of times and I remember that it was really dark when we left (it was
very early) and we were driving out into the ocean someplace. We would get there when it got light. I did
catch a fish but I remember being seasick all the time.
In 1948 we had a very freak snowstorm in Los Angeles and we woke up to having snow on the
ground. This was new to all of us kids. We went out and played in it, for a while and threw snow balls. The
rest of kids had to get ready and go to school but we didn't want to stop the snow ball fight. I remember
when the neighbor kid and myself were too young to go to school so we stayed out there all morning and
made snow balls with coffee cups so we could fight later. They were starting to melt so we decided to put
them in the freezer to keep them cold until the other kids got home. for our first snow ball fight in Los
Angeles. We went toget them out of the freezer and show the other kids got home. Of course now they
were balls of hard ice and snow. We still threw them. Ouch.
There was another time, early on after I started school. We were older than 5 years old then we
were playing Army, of course because this was during the war with other kids, with stick guns. I remember
another friend of mine and I were laying on stomach. The other guys were about two or three houses away,
and I felt something hit my left forearm and it was a BB. It hit me and I didn't care because the girls were
watching. It didn't hurt. I didn't talk to my mom or dad about it, they would want to know who was shooting
the BB gun at me nothing ever happened.
We got our first television (1952 or so) so instead of listening to radio we got to listen to the TV. The
picture was so small that you could hardly see it. It was of course Black and White and it had three
channels. Mostly the local news. I do remember on Saturday night or Friday night one of them, channels
had wrestling matches on. I can still hear the whooping and hollering about who was winning from Dad and
his friends.
I remember watching The Lone Ranger and the Flash Gordon, how many do you remember that?
So we got to watch shows for the kids and later shows for the grownups. This was like maybe 1951-
1952,but we were one of the first ones to have a television on our block. We had to put the antenna up on
the house and because my sister and I were living in the same bedroom. I had gone next door to my
neighbors and found a book of matches and I was laying in bed in the summer, and I was still light outside,
but I had to go tobed anyway because it was bedtime and I was playing with matches and struck one of
them and it was underneath the top bunk. The bed caught fire. I didn't know what to do, up until that time
the only information on fire were from those of Golden Books where when there's a house and you stood in
the street while the fireman came and put out the fire. We were waiting for the fire department while Dad
took the garden hose and put out the fire. Boy was I in trouble, again. I got in trouble for that and I was
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