My earliest recollection in life is of a cat having kittens in our cellar and my grandmother told me I couldn’t watch.  Which of course made me all the more want to see it; but I was not able to sneak down there.

In those days a child of 6 could walk to school for blocks and no one had concerns of safety other than learning how to look both ways for what little traffic there was in a small town.  One day while dawdling on my way to school a lady out in her yard and I heard the school bell ringing and she told me you better hurry up your going to be late.

My mom, my younger brother and I lived with her mom and dad for awhile.  They lived next door to an amusement park in West Virginia called Rock Springs Park.  I have many fond memories of that park: Live music at the band shell, bumper cars (that went a lot faster than the ones these days), dance pavillion, where in later years my sister in law and I used to rock n roll.

Another park in my childhood memories was Myers Lake Amusement  Park.  The Pottery workers in the tri-state area of   East liverpool, Ohio would have a Potter’s picnic once a year there and kids would get ride tickets to the park in our report cards at the end of the school year . Kids would look forward to it every year.  One of the main attractions of the picnic was the penny toss.  In a great big auditorium a couple of men would have boxes of pennies and differant age groups would line up and the men would throw the pennies on the floor and you scooped up and kept what amount you could get.  A penny went a lot farther in those days.  They also had a beauty contest for kids and my brother and I won a prize of roller skates.