During that time in Park Ridge… let’s see. I got bit by a dog and had to have the first in a series of rabies shots because they weren’t quite sure if the dog was rabid or not. I can remember it took about an army to hold me down, because they give the shot to you in the stomach. It wasn’t pleasant. 

Also there, I set my first fire. I was playing with matches and almost burned down a garage. I started kindergarten and attended first grade, at Eugene C. Fields Elementary School.  Another memory: my grandparents had gone to Florida, came back, and I brought with  them a beautiful scooter. While riding the scooter one day a thunderstorm came up and a lightning bolt came down, hit the front wheel of the scooter, bent it up, sent me to the ground, and I  ran home scared as Hell. Apparently big rubber tires and my feet not hitting the ground at the time it hit saved me from harm.

At any rate, during that time my mother met a fellow that would later become her husband—my stepfather Arthur Miller. I called him uncle Art. He was a meat cutter. He was one of about five kids from a home where the father had just disappeared deserting the family, so  he had to go work at a very early age. Then my grandparents moved north to Twin Lakes, Wisconsin. They had built a home on the lakeshore and I remember the cost of the house was $6,000. All brick, basement, the whole thing.  A man by the name of Hans Dietrich built the house. He was a local builder. Much of that area was essentially Germans. My grandparents had come from Germany, and though they spoke English around the house, there was a lot of German being spoken. But I was never taught German; I just heard it a lot.
 Twin Lakes:  I would say that was one of the happier times of my life during childhood .Because it was such a beautful and relatively undeveloped area. We were out in the middle of nowhere. I doubt if the population was a hundred people. There was a two-room schoolhouse and most of us walked there. During the winter we walked across the lake to get there. Miss Vincent was  teacher of our class, grades  one to four. We sat in rows and she would teach first grade and then second grade and so on.. In that setting the youngest ones were given the opportunity to really move ahead because you were hearing a lot of the other grades lessons. Often you'd get what was being taught at another grade level,
Those years were just very pleasant. The leaf changing in the fall, bitter cold winters.  I was there until about age eight. At that time I guess I became too much for my grandma to handle. I don’t know all the particulars because I was really too young, but I went back to Chicago and was placed in a children’s home. My mother apparently was still working. I later found out that she had married but nobody knew about it. This home was not great. It was apparently a city or a county home and subsequent events took place that concluded with t Ma and Pa Schroeder being arrested and either jailed or fined for the way they ran this place. It was really not great.
One things remains in memory:  on Sundays there was visiting and you had to sit in the outside courtyard in good weather, and you sat there and you sat there waiting for somebody to visit. And if they didn’t visit, you’d continue to sit there while all the other kids had somebody to visit.  Some kids never had visitors.
Yeah, it was different, you know? But I learned there how to make a military bed.   We had to scrub floors before we went to school in the morning. I was ahead in school because of my upbringing in the two room schoolhouse, I was advanced a grade. But at some point—I don’t know if it was complaints from my mother when I did see her, or if she and Art were ready to have me—I went to live with them on the South Side. 78 East 68th Street.  Art had a butcher’s shop on 71st. There I continued  school, and it was my first experience there of some bullies confronting me on the playground, but that was soon resolved. I became a crossing guard, which was a big deal. You know, you wore the white belt around your waist. And then we moved to the North Side. 4504 North Paulina Ave. During this time we would on occasion go up to Twin Lakes to visit my grandparents.
My Stepdad’s mother lived fairly nearby —I called her Mother Miller—and she was in our lives from time to time. My paternal grandmother---I called her Nana—she worked as a secretary and was a singer with the Apollo Music Club. Her office was in the Lion and Healey  music store down in the loop. So I would get on the el when we were living on the North Side, because the el was very close, I’d take that to the city and visit her.

She was the one that sort of kept me in touch with that side of the family, because all these years my father—my birth father—lived in  Cleveland. He eventually returned to Chicago, residing out in Wilmette north of Evanston and near what is now the Bahai Temple. He and Jean, his wife, had a daughter Claudia.  So I have a half-sister. And I would visit from time to time. Not often but from time to time. 

While on the North Side, I became twelve and I joined the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts were sponsored by a church, the Evangelical and Reformed Church, which was just a block from Ravenswood Grammar School where I attended. The pastor there later became president of Elmhurst College. I went to Confirmation class there largely because I got caught stealing bottles off back porches and the guy who caught me was a sheriff's deputy.. He and my mother decided well, maybe I should go to church. Needless to say, I went. At any rate, then Marjorie Perlette entered the picture,when I was  in seventh grade, and she was the first love of my life. So I for the most part during those years I had a pretty active life. There were the Scouts, I delivered groceries with a baby carriage. During the regular times I’d stand outside the A&P and deliver groceries for ladies when they came out. And then during the winter I’d just lash it to a sled.  I went to work at a Montrose Ave. pharmacy.When I first went there, when I got the job, it was about nine cents an hour. When I reported to my parents one day that I had a new job, my stepdad asked, “Where’d you get a job?” And I said, “Well, at the farshmist.” And he said, “What?” And I said, “At the farshmist.” I didn’t know how to pronounce pharmacist. So I worked there off and on doing odd jobs. Just a very innocent kid. I remember one day—in those days, women’s private supplies were in plain wrapped boxes— a lady came in one day and sort of whispered to me she’d like a… and I couldn’t make it out. Finally she said, “I want a box of Kotex.” And I thought I’d died.  It was interesting growing up and learning life’s secrets.