The Terrible Catsafterme

Denise was a bit luckier than I was. I received my first black eye when I was only nine months old and I took a tumble down a long flight of stairs inside my walker at my Grandma Murphy’s house. Denise didn’t get hers until she was two years old. Mine was a bit bloodier and entailed stitches in my lips and missing pieces of ear.  But Denise’s story is a bit more colorful. Mostly purple. It starts a little something like this: I hit my sister in the face with a baseball bat…

The Summer of 1978 was a relatively quiet one. We had just moved into our new house on Winterset Drive a couple of months earlier, on Denise’s second birthday in fact – April 8. My Kindergarten class let out on June 19…and the world was mine for the taking. I hadn’t started any sort of day care at this point because Mom wasn’t working at this time. She wouldn’t return to her job at Connelly & Company until October. So she was home with Denise and me every day for this one and only time on Winterset.

Getting used to my new surroundings by hanging out in the kitchen

Denise is not old enough to be ashamed of the orange laminate on the kitchen countertops

Mom gets ready to spend her last Summer as a stay-at-home Mom

Mom was a bit worried about our finances though, so I think she was anxious to get back to work. We had nearly completely drained our savings in order to purchase this new house. She wasn’t working and Dad was hellbent on building an additional two car garage, which he started just about a month and a half after moving in. This would provide him for a ‘working garage’ to house his black 1949 Hudson…as well as several future cars.

Shortly after the garage was completed, he purchased a 1964 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight. Although he only held onto it for a year or less, at the time it was one of my favorites. For a car of this age, it seemed quite state-of-the-art – being the first car we ever owned that had automatic windows that you didn’t have to hand-crank. We seldom took this one anywhere in the short time that we had it.

The snazzy new old car – which we kept for less than a year

Consequently, we didn’t do much fancy traveling this summer, spending a few days in Youngstown, Ohio for the Hudson National and another week in Virginia with relatives. Instead, we made do, playing around the house and neighborhood all Summer. I had my friends Chris Demeter, Kenny Carroll, and Carlos, Cormac, and Christina Acevedo at the end of Winterset to entertain me. Denise had Mom to entertain her. And we had the reel-to-reel recording of the Grease soundtrack album, that we had paid Bev the sum of $1 to allow us to copy her LP, to entertain us all. Yes, Bev was pirating records in 1978.

Below are are a smattering of (mostly discolored) photos illustrating a typical day of outdoor activity around the house during the two-month Summer ’78 – one that included hiding my bottle cap collection in the vacant lot caddy-corner to us, Stevie Mayne immersing himself in the creek running through said lot, and Kenny and I creating a ‘dirty’ guide to baseball, which involved the baseball and various parts of the human anatomy.

The house next door to us was being built during our first Summer on Winterset. This location also provided countless hours of amusement, playing amongst the mounds of dirt, creating tunnels and raceways for our Matchbox cars.

Dad tosses the football in our backyard. I have no idea who might be capable of actually catching it at this stage in our lives.

Kenny didn’t ever mind being the Indian. Our patio had not yet been carpeted.

Bev, Susan, and Chris play with me on our short-lived swingset. Chris still needs assistance on devices such as these.

Denise goes for a swing with her Bert and Ernie finger puppets

Playing in the driveway, in front of the new garage that was being erected. We had to re-position the basketball pole from the rear of the turn-around to the side of it.

Oh, yes. There was one other thing that kept me occupied during this time. I had joined an early Summer t-ball league. As with most sports throughout my young life, I wasn’t all that good. So Mom and Dad bought me one of those makeshift tees that could be affixed atop a toilet plunger. We would set this rigged device in the backyard and I could practice my awkward swing. One fateful day, I was practicing my home run posture when two-year old Denise ventured right into my bat’s swing path.

The next thing I know, Mom and Dad were yelling at me, my bat was making contact with Denise’s skull, and a big patch of skin on the side of her left eye was swelling up much like the croaker chin on a frog. It was turning purple right before my very eyes. Dad couldn’t ever stand to see Denise or me hurt, so Mom had to get Bev to accompany her to the hospital while he stayed back and watched me at home. Fortunately, there was no permanent brain damage and soon the swelling went down and Denise was left with the cutest little shiner I’ve ever seen.

Denise’s shiner, but more importantly, the long-forgotten dancing Mickey Mouse toy on the dining room table. This photo was taken on June 3. Mom captioned it “Denise’s 1st Black Eye”. I wonder how many she thought she’d end up getting??

Okay, who can resist this? Taken the same day as the one above. Different hat. But anyways, directly behind Denise’s head is the vacant lot/woods caddy-corner to our house. I built a fort in here, stored my bottle cap collection, doused Stevie Mayne in the stream, and managed to climb to the very top of a huge pine tree, much to Mom’s dismay.

Kenny’s Mom, who adored Denise, took this photo in her front yard…and quite possibly was coaxing her to exact revenge on the perpetrator…

We all got tired of looking at the cute black eye, so we forced Denise to wear shades whenever she rode her tricycle around town

Not long after this, Mom rewarded us with a trip to Kings Island. As I recall, Darlene went along with us and all I remember is seeing a show where a giant chicken pulled down the pants of a man (supposedly) from the audience. I laughed about this all the way home and described this scene in detail to my Grandma when we dropped off Darlene, who was just 15 years old at the time.

Meeting one of the Banana Splits at Kings Island. I’ve never known which one this is.

Denise sees me licking Scooby-Doo and is consequently ready to vomit

Our first vacation of the Summer came in mid-July, and we brought Darlene with us on this venture as well. She must have liked us.

Up next: the Youngstown Hudson National…

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