Good Times, Despite some Family Friction

In My Neighborhood

Good Times, Despite some Family Friction

My father’s parents came from Bavaria and they came to the United States. My grandmother used to tell me there was a lot of religious persecution and Bavaria was predominantly a Catholic country.

My grandfather was a butcher but I don’t remember whether my grandmother worked - I have their pictures upstairs. She was very rigid and all her children married Irishmen and she didn’t like that.

Our family wasn’t exactly favored, only her daughter and it was made very evident. “No, you can’t have that because that’s Cher’s.”

But in my mother’s family it was nothing like that. It was a very loving family so I spent more time with my mother’s parents. My father did too. We visited, like we could only go there a certain time because the other family was coming.

We walked everywhere. We walked long distances because we had no car and the only time we took a taxi was at night, you know? But, my mother would push the baby carriages and we would come home.

I remember Christmas all the time. I loved coming home at night because we’d count all the lighted Christmas trees. We had good food on the table but we didn’t have a lot. I had to share and since I was the only girl I didn’t get to buy, you know, the boys got to buy. I had dolls, but, it was just friction between the families basically.

Like when my godfather, he married an Irish girl and my other uncle, and then she died, and then he remarried. My grandmother was not as warm to me as my other grandmother. Then of course I had younger uncles, six years, nine and my one aunt was 12 years older than I and 15. My grandmother lost one child to diphtheria and my other grandmother lost another child besides that twin.

We had a very nice park that had a carousel and so I always took my brothers there. My youngest brother is 16 years younger than I am, so, I had to carry him a lot because of that.

There was a lot of, you know, German food people. My father liked beer, so on Sundays we would have beer with dinner and we’d be allowed to have a little taste.

Another thing as a child, we would go to my father’s aunt and she was the sister of my grandmother but she was totally different in that family. They were very warm. So we went there more than we went to my own aunt’s. We had to travel a lot to do those things.

The neighbors were nice. I had children to play with but they were mostly boys. I used to love to play a game called Ring-A- Levio. It was like a tag game that the girls would be on one team and the boys and they would try to get you and capture you. We thought that was very exciting (Laughs), but I always liked being around boys.

I didn’t have very many girlfriends. I think it’s just because there were more boys. There was one thing that was very unique in the area, there were some gypsies and they had a shop and people told us, “Don’t go near the gypsies! They capture children!” So, I would walk all around. I would go way around just to avoid the gypsies. Then when I was a nursing student we had gypsies in the hospital and they were very difficult sometimes because they would crowd, you know, in the hospital.