We moved here right after I finished 3rd grade at Edwin D. Smith School in all white Oakwood, the first suburb immediately south of Dayton, where National Cash Register honchos first settled in the early decades of the 20th century.
In 1954, my dad had taken a job as Technical Director at Dayton Chemical Products, an 8-person company based in West Alexandra, a town of about 1,000 people 20 miles west of Dayton. Thank God he decided that we move to Oakwood to a small brick cottagey bungalow on the east side of Far Hills Avenue, the unofficial demarcation between the "haves" and the "really haves."
In the summer of 1960, we moved to the west side of Far Hills to 106 West Peach Orchard, a larger frame house at the top of a hill flanked by larger homes with more trees, but no apparent peach orchards.
We only locked the house when we were out of town. Built most likely near the turn of the century, the house's one garage was a narrow cavern accessed in the house's rear, as part of the basement, the structure having been built into the side of a hill. Too small for a car, so we used it for storage.
My brother and I each had our own bedroom on the second floor, as did our parents, all with doors that I remember were seldom closed.
Shortly after we moved in, the country started celebrating the (American) Civil War Centennial, and I quickly aligned myself with the South because of their dashing, successful, doomed leaders. I bought a faux gray kepi as well as a half-sized toy rifle, voraciously read Life Magazine's CW series, and helped organize mock battles between like-aged local kids on a field between my school and the library, complete with battle cries and rules requiring one to dramatically fall to the ground when 'shot' for a count of 10 (no cheating!), before reanimating and rejoining the fray. It was only much later that I realized the South was fighting to maintain slavery, but that didn't enter my little brain at the time.
In our basement, I constructed an edged sand box only inches above the cement floor where I water-shaped hills and coffee-grounded roads into battlefields peopled by my growing hordes of gray and light blue Civil War plastic soldiers courtesy of the Marx Toy Company gifted to me by my dad at Christmas. Our cats – Mittens, Patches, and Willie – later started to regularly use my dreamscape as a litter box, prompting me to literally raise the playing field to ping-pong-level, where it then became the North African desert of the 1940s where Rommel's Afrika Korps and Montgomery's 8th Army maneuvered bloodlessly with war game codified rules.
We had a Black maid, Mary, who was driven from Dayton's West Side (much like Chicago's) several times a week to clean. My mother didn't allow her to come in the front door, and I remember her in our dark basement operating the ironing machine, a large horizontal cylinder over which damp sheets rotated into dry crispness.
My 4-years-older brother, Fred, had my number, frequently punching me (at times when his control was in question) in the solar plexus, leaving me gasping for breath. When I grew bigger, he stopped that, but his influence morphed into other behavior. We both loved baseball, and we regularly pitched to each other in the front yard, taking turns protecting ourselves with an old, minimally padded catcher's mitt while the other wound up and threw as hard as he could in our direction. Twin bare spots on the grass marked the ritual. Later still, Fred and I went to the same field where our mock Civil War battles were waged several years earlier, and he would hit me fly balls that I'd try my darnedest to chase down.
My mother had become a good cook after she married my dad, never having to do any while growing up, because her Kentucky family had a Black cook. Mom was very fastidious and even though she prepared a wide variety of chicken dishes she made sure they all required utensils. No fried chicken.
And it was important to her that we had family dinner together at the dinner table. In response to my dad's, brother's, and my habit of wolfing down the beautifully prepared and tastefully presented meals in a matter of minutes, she instituted a reading from a daily devotional booklet, published monthly by the Presbyterian Church (our faith tradition of choice – a compromise between dad's Methodist roots and mom's Christian Church). We took turns reading a short prayer, slightly longer passage of scripture, and finally a slightly longer sermonette. It slowed things down a little. I do fondly remember our dining room, with its large windows, gauzy curtains blowing gently in a late summer breeze, and mint sprigged chilled iced tea. And a glass chandelier above the table.
I remember sitting on the toilet in our tiny first floor bathroom, studying the close-by garbage can bearing the printed first pages of famous classical music pieces, with Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony particularly memorable.
When I was home from college, I hung out in the kitchen where my mother baked gingersnap cookies and angel food cakes, while continuously drinking cups of black coffee from the 20-cup urn that had been on since early morning.
The refrigerator was always full, my mother the first person I knew who bought skimmed milk and margarine because it was "good for us." Paradoxically enough, she died suddenly of an aneurysm/stroke at 59 when she and my dad were out to dinner with friends.
I was a compulsive kid, keeping all my movie stubs, penciling on them the film's name and date seen, then pinning them to my bulletin board in the order in which I'd seen them. I had a large poster of Cincinnati Reds' Pete Rose on the wall next to my bed, and we regularly drove the 45 minutes south to Crosley Field to see the likes of Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, and Jim Maloney. The right field bleachers were the sun deck by day and the moon deck by night.
We always had real-thing evergreen trees for Christmas purchased in the bowels of a nearby college football stadium, chosen with great care by Fred. When we got the plant home, he single-handedly put it up and brought out the host of lights and ornaments, many of which he had scrounged from neighbors' December 26th discards. He was particularly proud of the dozen or so colored bubble lights that started silently boiling a few minutes after having been turned on. And he loved tinsel, which I helped festoon the tree with.
Christmas morning was another story. Fred was regularly unhappy about his gifts, one in particular being a model of the White House, complete with realistic miniatures of all the Presidents through Dwight Eisenhower, including Mamie. Upon realizing what the 'gift' was, he stormed out of the house, while I tried to be appreciative for the both of us.
We had a 'portable' Fisher stereo, that an adult could barely carry single-handedly, which played a steady diet of classical music (dad was a tympanist who played briefly with the Akron Symphony) and pop trumpeters, a la Al Hirt and Herb Alpert. And comedy records: Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, Charlie Manna, and, briefly, Vaughn Meader, with his Kennedy impersonations that became taboo after November 22, 1963. My first record buy was Simon and Garfunkel's debut that I listened to over and over when no other family members were around.
My Peach Orchard memories end with my sudden March 1974 return to Dayton from Florida for my mom's funeral (first-time hug from my dad, open casket for the family, a bodyless public reception, and her ashes burial at the family plot in Stanford, KY's Buffalo Springs Cemetery). Stuck around for a few days, went with my dad to see Marcel Marceau perform at Dayton's Memorial Hall, then back to Florida and short-order cooking for my buddy Jack at his Sanibel Island restaurant.
The next time I was in Dayton, the house had been sold, and my newly married dad had moved in with his second wife.
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