Alley Kids: the woods remembers the big fun we had in the virgin wooded land, before our architect neighbor bought the land and built a house in it. The alley kid story continues here.

At Oakwood Elementary School, we had special interest groups that taught us old fashioned crafts. Mommy taught the sewing classes, which I was not allowed to take, or I didn’t want to, but all the tough mean girls in my class took them, and they loved Mommy! I took the cooking class taught by Mrs. Schauman, my Brownie leader.
There was such excitement in the air about the Bicentennial. In the alley, Mrs. Daneen taught the other grown-ups how to make a piñata. It was a big papier mache ’76, covered with red white and blue crepe paper. Mrs. Daneen was from Ecuador, and she explained that they celebrated with piñatas in her country. The giant ’76 was filled with candy and hung from the Miller’s tree swing branch.

Earl swung the piñata up and down while the rest of us took turns wearing a blindfold, being spun around, and swinging at the piñata with a bat. That may not have been my first piñata, but it was certainly the first one I saw being made. It was thrilling to celebrate the Bicentennial. I knew that the next time the country had a centennial, it would be the tricentennial, and I’d be 109 if I was still alive.

I was 9 years old at the bicentennial, and it was an exciting time to be alive. I had on a red white and blue striped polyester tank top. Everyone else was dressed pretty much the same. We started our celebration with a parade. We walked through the alley ringing different sized bells from Mrs. Miller’s bell collection. All the grownups happily joined in our glee.

Then we occupied ourselves by lighting snakes and smoke bombs. Snakes were little black pellets that gave off a thick, acrid black smoke. When you lit them, an ash would slowly curl out of the pellet, like a snake. There were fancy snakes that gave off colored smoke, too, but they didn’t curl as cool as those plain black ones. Smoke bombs were colorful balls that gave off a lot of smoke, usually white, but sometimes colored smoke.

Some time in the afternoon we had an alleywide potluck, which culminated in the piñata.
There was space dust in the piñata! That was so much fun to eat. It was like dry pop—it would explode in your mouth. It didn’t taste good—it was just fun! Mrs. Miller made a red cake for the potluck. It was too pretty to eat. Daddy horrified me by smoking with Mr. and Mrs. Averet, and generally getting very loud while they played cards.

The grownups really enjoyed the potluck, and sitting in the vacant lot talking while the kids played games until dark. That’s when we had our own fireworks show. The teenagers lit fountains, and pinned spinners to the tree. It was thrilling to see the show so close up, and the danger made it all the more exciting. Somewhere around 11 we packed it up and went home. It was the beginning of a tradition.

The next year: “I like coffee, I like tea, I like Char to jump in with me! Uh-Oh!” Suddenly, I found myself jiggling harder than usual—my bra broke! I was too embarrassed to mention it out loud—I just raced home to change. And that was one of my favorite bras, too! This fourth got off to that rocky start, but it had a similar finish as the year before. Just, since it wasn’t a special year, it seemed kind of—weird to get all worked up over it. I know, we still had fireworks and the piñata. We still had the potluck, but it wasn’t a bicentennial; that was once in a lifetime.

All the Alley mothers had a ‘thing.’ Mrs. Urban took us on field trips. She took us down to South (Junior High) to fly kites, to the fish hatchery, to the water slide. Mrs. Miller had another thing, and so did Mrs. Averet. Mommy’s thing was candy houses. Every Christmas season, Mommy would throw a baking party for the alleykids. We made candy houses out of graham crackers, decorated with candy, stuck on with frosting. One year we made bread in a bag. Mommy put all the ingredients for bread in a sealable plastic bag, and we squeezed the bag for kneading. Somehow I remember that not turning out too well; I think my bread rose right over the top of the bag. Also, I ate enough dough to be burping up something that smelled like beer all day, plus we turned it into sweet rolls with raisins and brown sugar and cinnamon. I never liked sweet rolls growing up; they were way too sweet, and the raisins always tasted burnt. Mommy remembers this experiment working out really well.

We would also make Christmas ornaments with our neighbors. Nell tried to eat our gingerbread ornaments that came from Denmark. Mommy was angry about this, but also showed Nell how to make and decorate bread dough ornaments. It wasn’t actually bread dough; it was homemade play dough, which was cut into shapes with cookie cutters and then baked hard in the oven. We painted them with poster paint.

I also remember making shrinky dinks with the alley kids, and this cool craft from Denmark. Shrinky dinks were a kit you bought at the craft store. It was a large sheet of plastic that you could trace designs upon from the book. You’d carefully color the whole thing with markers or something, and then bake them. They would shrink to a fraction of their original size, and you’d have a bracelet or a keychain, or whatever little thing you wanted to make. It never quite worked out the way it was supposed to, though. Everything was warped, and usually ended up in the trash. I kept thinking that I would get it right if I kept trying; the shrinky dinks were more hype than fun craft.

That thing from Denmark was more fun. It was a plastic bead craft. There were these little plastic boards, like a geoboard, that came in various shapes. They were covered with very small pegs. We covered each peg with a thin, small bead. The beads came in many different colors. Most of the boards were some geometrical shape, but you could find a butterfly or something else, too. After you’d cover ever peg with a bead, you would put the iron on top of your design for a few seconds, just long enough to melt the beads, not the board. That, of course, would ruin the board so you couldn’t use it again. We made these for hours on end in Denmark, and made them when we got home, too.

I think we must have made them at one of the Christmas craft parties. We spent a lot of time this time of the year making our own ornaments, too, not just with our neighbors. Mommy also did advent with us. She made the advent calendar which tracked every day in December leading up to Christmas. We’d also light candles every Sunday in December leading up to Christmas, culminating in the big homemade candle on Christmas night, which represented Jesus. On the actual Christmas morning, we would get up at the crack of dawn to see what we got. We had unwrapped ‘Santa Claus’ gifts, which always included a board game or two, dolls for me, and cars for Zeke.

These would keep us occupied until after breakfast, when we could open the presents under the tree. There would be candy in our stockings and on the table for us to eat before breakfast. Christmas and Easter always meant early morning candy. Mommy would make fried apples, biscuit, ham with red-eye gravy, fried oysters, and cheese grits for Christmas morning breakfast. I didn’t like all that stuff. I just liked the cheese grits, biscuits, and apples. There’d usually be some type of sweet roll, too. Zeke and mommy really liked the Christmas breakfast, but Zeke would be in a hurry, along with me, for it to be over, so we could open the presents.

After we opened the presents, then we could go to our friends’ houses in the alley, look at their goodies, and invite them to see ours. A new Barbie was always more fun playing with Char and her new Barbies. We also managed to milk a lot more fun out of baby dolls and board games that way.

I don’t remember spending an Easter with our alley friends. We usually went to Cleveland for Easter with Grandmommy Alma and the Cleveland cousins, David, Leah, Julia, and later on, Lara, and early on, Cathy and Buddy. Easter was a big deal there, with Grandmommy’s activity and high status in the church. She was Reverend Andrews’ second wife, and after his death in 1974, we still sat in the front with Grandmommy when we visited Cleveland. She and Aunt Mollye were very active in the church’s ceramics club, and Grandmommy was on the flower committee that decorated the church for the holidays. We’d get a visit from ‘the Easter bunny’ at Grandmommy’s apartment, but the big deal with Easter was the resurrection. There was no misunderstanding about that.

Birthdays were always a big deal at our house. I had several theme birthday parties as I grew older, until I reached 12. That was the year we did the movie, I think, the 12 dancing princesses, with some of my school friends. After 12, we didn’t do any more birthday parties. The one I remember celebrating with the alleykids was the first one I had in the house: 9. In Nashville, it was nothing to have warm weather in February. It was always warm in Nashville. In Kalamazoo, that was a different story. It was a big deal for it to be warm in February. Well, it was warm in 1976—warm enough to have cake outside on the picnic table. We have pictures of that birthday party, with Char and Andrea and the other alley kids smiling and laughing in windbreakers in February.
I don’t remember anything else we did for that birthday.

Zeke had a party with a gun theme. He had silver bb’s in his cake, and he had the cap guns to shoot off. I think that party had Sam and Richie Shaw at it. Was that when her turned 7? I remember going down the alley in December to celebrate Char’s birthday one year. I just remember sitting in the dining room with Char, guests, family, and a cake. I don’t remember what else we did. Funny how the birthdays fade from memory. . .

Halloween was always an alley affair. The Haabs, across Parkwood at a diagonal from us always threw a haunted house. We went in it one time, I think, and decided we could do that, too. Mommy wasn’t too big on all the horrors of Halloween—poisoned candy, razor blades, vandals tearing up everything– (we did come from Chicago)– so she was wary of trick or treating, especially when we were very young.

We threw an alley-wide Halloween party one of those early years. It was at our house. Mr. Urban got some dry ice for the occasion, and Mrs. Urban wore my witch dress (I had been the lead in my 5th grade class Halloween play, a witch who was a teacher), and stirred a cauldron full of the dry ice in our yard, welcoming neighborhood children to our haunted house. K.C. stood under the basement stairs grabbing at people as they walked down to the ‘dungeon.’ Earl, dressed as a mummy, jumped out at people from the supply closet. Jim lay on top of the pool table (he eventually broke it, I think) in the furnace room. He was supposed to be a dead body. Children were blindfolded to feel his ‘body parts.’ We had peeled grapes for eyeballs, spaghetti for brains, etc.
Mommy said some little children were so scared that they never returned to our house for trick-or-treating in later years. After we’d done a little traffic of neighborhood kids, we had cookies and other treats in the family room. It was fun having all the neighbors over, and working together for something even if it was scaring the neighbors. In the years after this, we always went trick-or-treating in a group.

We covered a large part of the neighborhood, usually as far south as Edgemoor, as far west as Wildwood hill. We always went to Law lane, and the alley behind the Upjohn house, where those rich folks gave good candy. Johanna Jacob’s house on Wildwood was always a favorite destination, while we usually avoided Carrie Shaw’s house. She was from my Girl Scout troop. She was nasty, had a big yard with a big fence, and a big dog.
We generally stuck to our side of Westnedge, too, and didn’t even trick-or-treat on Westnedge itself.

Mr. Lett worked at Post Cereal in Battle Creek, and he always handed out tiny cereal samples. It was good to know the people whose homes we visited. Mrs. Lacko, my 5th grade teacher, lived on Edgemoor, a few houses down from Amy Reyberg. We’d always go to her house. We didn’t stay out too long; all the parents were concerned about all the bad Halloween stuff, plus, your feet would get tired, you’d be sick of telling everyone what you were for Halloween (I was a piñata one year), and you’d want to get to eating that candy. Mommy would go through that stuff with a fine-toothed comb, throwing out anything suspect. We’d usually get a pretty large amount on that route we took.

We tried the Congregational Church in Kalamazoo. Nobody looked at us, or spoke to us. It felt cold and unwelcoming. Daddy was Methodist, so we tried First Methodist Church downtown. Same reception. Odd. I wondered why we didn’t try Mt. Zion Church in Kalamazoo. I found out it was Baptist, and we WERE NOT Baptists, no matter what!

We tried Allen Chapel, the AME church. Daddy liked it, but it reminded Mommy of the Baptist church they attended in West Virginia—her grandmother’s church. Allen Chapel was across the railroad tracks, past downtown on the North Side, a poor neighborhood. Mommy didn’t like the church, so we looked for a different church.

We noticed that most of our neighbors stayed home on Sunday. The Averetts were Catholic—they sent Nell and Mack to Catholic school when they got older. I don’t remember them on Sunday. I don’t think they went to church. The Urbans did, sometimes. They invited the whole alley to their church, People’s Church. This church was way across town. We had to drive past Western, where Mommy and Daddy taught, and then down West Main to the country. It was way down 10th street, off West Main. It was like going to the Nature Center to get there.

The people there were friendly, or at least some of them were. The speaker—he wasn’t a minister, Roger Greeley, was very nice and smart. He lived down Westnedge from us. This church had children’s church during the sermon. I was in class with kids I’d never met before. Zeke was in class with Sam Urban.

Mommy really liked this church—it made her think. They respected her ideas; she felt accepted. Daddy liked Roger and what he was talking about, but he didn’t like the people there—he didn’t feel accepted, and neither did I. Zeke liked that you didn’t have to dress up, or sit in church—his class was always on the playground!

We had lots of workshops. I remember learning to make candles one time. It was in the fall. They taught us to make jack-o-lantern shaped candles for Halloween, dipped candles, and sand candles. I thought this was a boring class; I hated the way my candles looked, but Mommy loved this class. We did a unit on Chinese New Year another time. Mommy made this huge papier mâche dragon head for my class to hide under. The dragon body was made of fabric.

It wasn’t until I was in High School that I realized People’s Church wasn’t Christian. We had a class on world religions, and Christianity was presented as one of the religions. All of the kids in the class except me rejected Christianity in that unit. People’s Church was Unitarian—they didn’t believe that Jesus died for our sins. They thought He was a man that lived long ago and was a good guy. They rejected miracles, healings, death and resurrection.

I believed in all that stuff. So did Mommy, but she liked the culture of the place. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the music those other kids listened to. I liked disco, funk and R&B; they liked Heavy Metal. I didn’t drink or party; they all did. And I couldn’t believe that no one else was a Christian in my Youth Group. I went to two retreats with them; one was at our church. I felt alienated and alone.

Once our youth group spent the night at the church making orgami paper cranes to send to our sister church in Japan—some peace gesture. They were big on fighting world hunger, too—all beyond UNICEF. I grew more and more resentful of this place the older I got. Besides the cultural differences, I longed to learn more about Jesus. That little unit on religion—where we studied all religion—left me hungry for more on Christianity. We had a written test on it, and I’d gotten it all right.

We went to Allen Chapel during People’s summer vacation, and I liked it there. They had better music, more Jesus. Daddy wanted to go there too. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the Beatles. My senior High school class picked music for the Valentine’s Day service. The music played in the sanctuary for the adults. It was supposed to be a love song, and they chose All you Need is Love, by the Beatles. That made daddy so mad! What are they doing playing the Beatles in church? he thought. I knew my class had played much worse, like Love Stinks, and I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Another one Bites the Dust, etc., but Daddy was just now hearing what I always had to put up with. He asked me if I wanted to leave as much as he did. Of course I did! Mommy wanted to stay, and she was mad at me for agreeing with daddy. I hated that place.
I had lied to people when they asked me what church I went to.

Most people I hung out with at school talked about what church they went to—it was a social thing. “What church do you go to?”—meant “I haven’t seen you at mine. Where do you go?” I would answer, “We’re visiting churches,” meaning, “We don’t have a church home. We’re shopping around. You might see us at yours soon.” Mommy said she wouldn’t break up the family by staying at People’s, so we all left to go to Allen Chapel.

I was 16 when we started going there full-time. I had been going into 6th grade the first time we went to their summer vacation Bible School. When I joined the church, my friends Wyndi and Monique joined, too. I was SO relieved to be at a real church! I stayed there from 1983-1997, when I started going to Christian Life Center with my husband and children.

I was in the choir at both churches. At Peoples, we sang a variety of songs. It was kind of like singing in a school choir—the songs usually didn’t have anything to do with God. My favorite was Morning has Broken, which was almost religious. People’s had a lot of families with one Jewish and one Christian parent, and several folks who really fumed if we sang Joy to the World at Christmastime. Christmastime was when Roger would dress as Santa and give each child a present their parents had brought in for the special program.

Allen Chapel didn’t do that, but the choir sang about Jesus. I learned They that Wait upon the Lord Shall Renew Their Strength from the Allen Chapel Inspirational (Youth) choir. I also learned The Lord is my Light, I Have never seen the Righteous Forsaken, and whatever other scripture lurked in Gospel songs.

Our first director, Lee, played the organ, and made up his own songs sometimes. He was pimply faced, funky, and although was probably in his 20s, he was rumored to date young (13 yr old) girls. He was replaced by Sheila, a Western student. She played piano very well. She taught us Marvelous. Then I graduated and went to college. When I got back, Mrs. Hampton, our YPD (Young People’s Division) leader, was the choir director. She liked simple anthems, like I Have Never Seen the Righteous Forsaken, and lots of instruments. I played my bass with her a lot.

And then, in 1992, I took over as choir director! I directed the Inspirational choir, even after all the teenagers left it and I had younger children in the choir. My younger peers came back to form the Young Adult Choir my last year as Choir Director. They didn’t take to me well as their director, and I eventually left the church after a dispute involving the Young Adult Choir and the Pastor.

Char’s family didn’t do church, although Jim eventually became a pastor. When Mrs. Aldag was tragically killed in a car wreck, I went to the memorial service at First Presbyterian Church downtown. That was a big, popular church in town. It was the first time I had been in church with all my alley friends. It was odd, and very sad.

(Ed. note: I wonder now if it was a City Recreation program held out at the fairgrounds).

We did arts and crafts, got our faces painted, and participated in a huge, camp wide musical. It was the Yellow Submarine, by the Beatles. I remember learning at least that song.

One day I got my face painted like a clown, and then someone drew my portrait, imagining what I would look like when I was grown up. It was an ink portrait, not colored in, just a sketch. It was a beautiful sketch, but I decided that since it was supposed to be of me all grown up, it should have wrinkles on it. I ruined the picture by drawing wrinkles all over it. Mommy wasn’t happy about that.

Another day, I made a fish out of tissue paper. It was a wind catcher, or streamer, or something like that. I thought it was beautiful, and couldn’t wait to get it home. I must have fallen asleep on the bus or something, because I almost missed my bus stop. I grabbed my fish and ran off the bus. I left my red and white hand knit poncho on the bus. Mommy had made me that poncho when I was 5. She was really mad at me about that! To this day she talks about how stupid I was for leaving the poncho on the bus and bringing home that fish. I had the fish hanging up in my room for many years. Grammy later knit me a bigger, more colorful poncho, that I never lost. In fact, Yani wears it now. It is red, yellow, green, orange and white.

One thing Mommy really liked about Kalamazoo was the Nature Center. It seemed like she was always dragging us out there for one program or another. I took every class they offered, I’m sure. I didn’t like nature or science as a child, because, for one thing, I was allergic to everything outside, it seemed. I would get terrible hay fever every August and September; I’d sneeze every time I went outside, and when I went around hay, my eyes would get all puffy. I also thought all that science nature stuff was really boring. I never wanted to follow or collect bugs. I didn’t find plants exciting, what with all my allergies. Animals were interesting toys; I didn’t care what they looked like inside.

I did like rocks, though, until I took the Nature Center class on rocks. We took an incredibly long walk to a quarry, looking for different kinds of rocks, rocks that were different from the sedentary rocks all around us. We got there, and still found nothing but sedentary rocks! I never did see a different kind of rock up close—except moon rocks. Those were cool; you break them, and they had all kinds of crystals inside. But you find those in gift shops; not on the ground. Pyrite was pretty cool, too—fool’s gold. You knew it wasn’t real gold, but it was fun to pretend.

One of the Nature Center Day Camps we went to had a sleepover. It was on a Saturday night, and the Sunday morning, when we went home, was Father’s Day. Daddy didn’t want to go. He said that growing up in Vincent, Arkansas was enough like camping to him to last a lifetime. Mommy had used to be a Girl Scout Leader, so she was excited to camp out at the Nature Center with us. Char and her mother went, too.

Well, mommy said that the ground on the way to the camp site was ‘uneven,’ and she stepped in a hole and twisted her ankle. She could barely get around the rest of the night. Mrs. Miller took up the slack and carried stuff and got us to the camp site. That night, Char and Zeke flopped and swam in their sleep, and every time they moved, Mommy sprayed them with bug spray. Consequently, they didn’t have barely any mosquito bites the next morning.

I, on the other hand, had slept without moving at all, and had a face and body full of mosquito bites! We made a Father’s Day card for Daddy out of painted pine cones, and then we went home. Daddy still has that card in his office.

The last Nature Center class I took was about pioneer life. They have an old house a few miles away from the Nature Center, called the Delano Homestead, which is supposed to give you the feel of life in the 19th century. We spent a day out there in the late fall, making sauerkraut and generally being in the house. When you take a tour of the homestead, there are parts of the house that are roped off, and you just get to look at them from a distance. During our day at the homestead, we got to go behind the ropes and really see the house up close.

I played the old piano, and looked at the old quilts up close. We all took turns churning cabbage with a lot of salt to make sauerkraut. I had never known what was in sauerkraut before. After a day of laboring in the cold house (I think this was in December), we got to enjoy a feast of the sauerkraut and other foods. I think we had it with sausage. By the end of the day, I appreciated the time spent in the house. It took awhile for my nose to warm up after Mommy picked me up.

I also went to several overnight camps: Girl Scout Camp at Merrie Woode for three years, then several years of music camp. Overnight camp, of course, took us away from the alley entirely, and thus wouldn’t qualify as AlleyKid stories. I may tell them some other time. Suffice it to say, we went away for a week or two in the summer, and came back and appreciated our alley friends all the more. It was fun sharing the day camp experiences with our friends throughout the summer.

Their house overlooked Glenwood, and their back yard was the woods. It was a Tudor style house, beige with dark brown trim. It wasn’t all pointed like the Tudor home next door to us, it was big and rectangular. They had a long staircase that went all the way down to the street, and their garage was down there. We’d sometimes spend time just sitting in those woods, watching cars go by, admiring the plants and flowers whose names we didn’t know. There was one yellow flowery bush that I especially liked. That section of woods always tempted you to wander on, seeking out new places to see. It also beckoned you home. It was the signal after a long walk that you were almost home.

We knew that the Schmidts were German, even though I don’t remember them talking about Germany at all. They were an older couple, though not as old as Mrs. Freidmann, maybe, but they seemed that old at the time. They were like grandparents to us all. I remember Mrs. Schmidt bringing out those grandparent-type candies. Mints, meringues, hard candies, stuff you never saw at the store, never got for trick-or-treat, never would buy for yourself. It was always so good coming from them, though. I remember laughing at the Worthers commercials, where they’d talk about candy tasting so good because it came from your grandparent. They were on to something, though.

Our favorite part about the Schmidts’ house was the veranda. Their house was built into the side of Glenwood hill, and they had woods behind them. There was an outdoor porch that ran across the whole back of the house. It’s actually hard to tell which was the front and which was the back of that house. The veranda (porch thing) ran across the side of the house that faced Glenwood. It was under the house , so you would be sheltered from the rain, but it wasn’t inside their house. This is where we’d play the most.

They had some kind of outdoor oven, like the one that used to be at our house, I think. It wasn’t one of those barbecue grills on wheels like we have now. I think it was like part of the house. We’d pretend this veranda was our house, and sit around talking about what we did in our great life with those woods in our view.

Sometimes we’d walk around to the side yard where the fountain was. They had a large concrete fountain on the side of their house. There were large fish in it, and the trickle of the waterfall in the fountain was very soothing. Of course, it was turned off in the winter.

One of the things we did every Spring was to go through the woods and see if the Schmidts’ fountain was on yet. Little birds liked to visit the fountain, too, as well as the Schmidt’s birdfeeders. Although they didn’t have any yard with grass, they cultivated beautiful potted flower gardens. I think they had a flower bed near the front of the house. Char and I especially loved the spring flowers. There were so many beautiful colors. We wanted to pick them all and have them around us all the time.

Mommy was very serious about flowers. We were to leave them where we saw them. Under no circumstances were we to ever pick anyone’s flowers. When we were children, especially being alleykids, we never recognized the difference between our yard and someone else’s. Of course, we knew we didn’t live in the yard across the street, but we thought we could go in anyone’s yard and take anything that was growing there. Our mothers had to tell us otherwise.

One year, Char and I celebrated May Day by collecting woods flowers near the Schmidts’ house. We made little paper baskets and attached the little flowers. Mommy kept the ‘basket’, which has the note, “Happy May Day, Mommy. Please don’t be mad that we picked the flowers. They were from yards where they won’t be missed.” I think Mrs. Schmidt encouraged us to make May Day baskets. I don’t remember exactly, but I think we gave one to her, too. She would encourage us to enjoy the flowers. We knew that we couldn’t pick hers, and she didn’t have to tell us not to. It was enough just to look at her flowers. Also, she had a way of bringing out the good in us.

Mrs. Schmidt was such a friendly contrast to Mrs. Freidmann. Mrs. Schmidt was always kind, never cross. Mrs. Freidmann was always irritated about something, or so it seemed. It didn’t look like you could ever do anything to make Mrs. Schmidt mad at you, but it was very easy to make Mrs. Freidmann mad. Mr. Schmidt was also very kind. Yet, they were all older people with similar accents. Just the spirit of the Schmidts was enough to keep strife and fighting away from their house. That was a quiet refuge for us.

After I’d grown up and gotten married, I saw the Schmidts at Meijer (grocery store) a few times. I went out of my way to reintroduce myself once, and they were very nice, but they were much older, more forgetful. I wasn’t sure that they really remembered me. Then, when I saw them again, and saw the similar blank expressions, I didn’t bother to reintroduce myself. It was a little sad. Like I’d lost something. The house has new owners. They repainted it. Now it’s blue, and it really stands out. Then it almost blended in with the woods. It doesn’t look like a refuge anymore.

Daddy got us a piano from a family member down South, or down home, as he called it. I think Memphis. (Ed. note: Auntie). Anyway, I was so excited! It was a tall, old, upright piano. A few keys stuck, and one didn’t play. When we called Mr. Boyce, the piano tuner over, he told us it could break the strings if he tuned it to the right pitch. Instead, he tuned it a whole step flat, but in tune with itself. So middle C was tuned to a B flat. This messed with my sense of pitch, but did wonders for my transposition skills.

Pitch means knowing what a note sounds like—an A is an A. I thought a G was an A. The good thing about that was that I could play stuff in several different keys, to hear it in the right key. Transposition is playing the same music in different keys. I was excited to finally get a piano, and to teach myself how to play by ear. Mommy said that I should take lessons, too so I could learn how to read music. I argued with her that it would ruin my ear, and she said, “Nonsense! Angela Jones you are going to learn how to read music, and that’s final!”

So, soon after the piano arrived from Memphis, we went down the alley to hire Mrs. Freidmann. Her house was in the woods behind the Vicar’s house. You had to go down the Hammarskjölds’ driveway to get to Mrs. Freidman’s house. The Schmidt’s house was behind the driveway, and Mrs. Friedman’s house was almost straight at the end of the driveway. You couldn’t miss it. She was a little old woman with a thick, foreign accent.

I was 10 and already her height. She had white hair, was very thin, and had bad breath. Her fingers were very bent and crooked, but she could still play the piano very well. She was very serious, and took music very seriously. She didn’t care about chopsticks and Peter Peter. None of those songs had proper fingering.

 I got the red Music Tree book and immediately learned my landmarks: C, G, and F. I started piano in the fifth grade. This was after fourth grade, a year that I had stumbled through first beginner violin, and then cello. I had even played cello in the school orchestra in fourth grade and could barely read music. It was good to finally learn how to read music. I started the bass at school the same year I started piano, and now I knew how to read music!

I zipped through that first book. Mrs. Freidmann was strict. She pulled technique out of me. Curving fingers—playing on the tips of your finger, and the five finger pattern do not come naturally.

I’d taught myself typing the year before, and I understood about hand position—fingers have a different name in piano though. Discipline of practice everyday is foreign to me. I’m used to everything coming easy to me, so I’d rehearse my victories, and get stuck on new challenges. Mrs. Freidmann didn’t stand for that kind of thing. I thought she didn’t like me, she was so tough. Then one day my mother sat in on a lesson, or I had a lesson conference, like parent teacher conferences at school. Mrs. Freidman asked me questions about my music. I answered them. I knew what I was supposed to do. I just didn’t always do it. “Angela is very musical,” she told my mother. “None of this is too hard for her. She just doesn’t practice as she should.”

That word, practice sounded like prawwwctis when Mrs. Freidman said it. It was a bad word. It was hard for me to practice what I was supposed to everyday. And when I hadn’t practiced at all, I tried to avoid Mrs. Freidman. One day, I had a piano lesson after school. I went home from school to get my piano books to go to my lesson, maybe quickly practice the music so I could get through the lesson. The door was locked! I had forgotten to take my keys to school with me, so I couldn’t get in the house! That meant I didn’t have to go to my piano lesson that I wasn’t prepared for anyway!

Yeah! I went down the alley and found Char and Jenny. We decided to go down to the Schmidt’s house. They had a cool fountain outside their house with big fish in it. We went down behind the Miller’s garage, through the Hammarskjöld’s driveway to the Schmidt’s house. We were walking around on their balcony, talking loudly, and fantasizing about living out in their terrace, yard area.

I was startled by a rough voice. I looked up and saw Mrs. Freidmann next door. “You have a piano lesson today and you’re outside playing!” She accused. “I, I, I’m locked out of the house. I don’t have my music. . . “ I stammered. “I have copies of your music,” Mrs. Freidmann answered. “Come in and have your piano lesson,” she said. I was very embarrassed. I sheepishly told my friends goodbye, and went to my piano lesson. I was dirty and unprepared, but I learned a lesson. I couldn’t get out of my lessons that easily. I took them more seriously after that incident.

Mrs. Freidmann and I got through the red book, the green book, and the brown book, the, whole Music Tree three book series together that year. During the recital, where I heard her other students play, I heard some music I would like to play too. There was a procession she would follow. After you finished the Music Tree series, you’d move on to the Contemporary Music Literature book, the Sight Reading book, and your first Bach. I couldn’t wait to get to the Bouree from the Anna Magdelina book.

Zeke started taking piano lessons during my second year of lessons. He was in the third grade, and didn’t practice even as much as I did. He had things he’d rather do. Like watch TV. He never got out of the red book. By now, Mrs. Freidmann and I were getting along better, although I still thought she was mean and strict. Sarah Douglas, another of her students, and I used to joke about her dying so we wouldn’t have to go to our piano lessons.

One day, Mrs. Freidmann had a pool of blood in her eye when I went to my lesson. She said that she had popped a blood vessel in her eye, and it bothered her as much as it bothered me to look at it. I saw her in a different light after that. She was a frail old woman. She was also vulnerable. She wasn’t the all powerful person that we’d made her out to be. Mrs. Freidmann died a few weeks later. I felt horrible that I’d ever joked about her death. I was very sorry that she had died. She was a great piano teacher, and a good person.

After she died, some of us got new piano teachers. Zeke quit piano then and there. I think Sarah did, too, but her big sister, Sue got a new teacher. I tried out one new teacher in the Oakwood neighborhood, near my third grade school building. I didn’t think she was as good as Mrs. Freidman. Daddy had heard about Mrs. Christian, a serious teacher who lived pretty nearby, off Bronson blvd.

 I had thought that I’d stay with that woman in Oakwood. She was ok, and a bird in the hand, after all. Daddy convinced me to try Mrs. Christian. I had to audition for her; show her what I could do. She said I was pretty good, and she could put me in group lessons. She didn’t have room in her studio for me by myself yet. Daddy said that was a good idea, and I started with Mrs. Christian in group lessons. I think I only had one group lesson. After that, Mrs. Christian took me on as a private student. My good start with Mrs. Freidman enabled me to skip from level three to five, and enter a piano competition my first year (seventh grade), with Mrs. Christian.

I remember all the babysitters: Laurie Lett, from down the street on Glenwood (the opposite direction from the hill), Kimmie Wade, George, (the man who sold us our house)’s daughter, and Jim, Earl, and Andy Miller. I don’t remember much about Laurie and Kimmie, except they were both pretty, and one of them really cleaned up the kitchen. I had a hard time telling them apart at the time.

Jim, Earl, and Andy were. They played with us. Jim was Zeke’s favorite, because he was all play, all the time. We could try to tackle him, but he was like a mountain. He wouldn’t budge. Zeke would hurl himself at the mountain, and Jim would laugh. The only way would we could get Jim to go down would be to tie his shoes together. The house would be a mess when my parents got back, because Jim would encourage us to pull out all our toys, or we would just volunteer to see how he’d carry on over them.

Earl was my favorite, because you could tickle him to make him go down, and his fall when you tied his shoelaces together was in slow motion. The scholar of the Miller boys, Earl would bring homework, and try to be serious at first, but that didn’t last long. I remember hurling my favorite doll, Clara, a brown-haired poseable Barbie across the room because I was trying to impress Earl. “What’s this?” He’d said, with a nasty kind of tone in his voice. “Oh, that’s just a doll,” I said, throwing it across the room. I was horrified when I saw that I had broken her arm off, but I pretended not to care.

One time, neither Jim nor Earl was available. When Andy came to babysit, he even played my cello! It was a surprise to see this oldest brother up close. He was less playful than the other two, but he was still a fun babysitter. He liked changing voices for the different characters when he read us a story.

That was fourth grade. When I was in the fifth grade, I got my babysitting badge in Girl Scouts, and my parents never got another babysitter. They thought that I, at 11, was qualified not only to look after Zeke, 8, but also to earn money as a babysitter. My babysitting certification came just in time for the AlleyBabies.

Mrs. Urban and Mrs. Averet both had babies that year. Mrs. Urban needed my services first. They had also just gotten twin cats from the Millers. I was much more interested in the antics of Ricky and Tavi than of little Benjamen Urban. He was a tiny thing, newborn, pretty wrinkled up, and bald. The twin siamese cats were jumping and chasing through the house. They were a boy and a girl; Sam had originally named them Ricky and Tiki, but when he found out that ‘Tiki’ was a girl, he renamed her ‘Tavi.’

The Urbans lived in a tiny two bedroom house with a wooded back yard. They built a huge deck off the back of the house, then changed their living room to take advantage of it. They had a wall of windows across the deck, and they put a skylight in their living room. Their house was also untidy. I wasn’t a neat, cleaning up type babysitter, but felt like that was something babysitters were supposed to do, like either Kimmie or Laurie had done for us. The thing is, I didn’t know how to clean up and watch a baby. It was a little intimidating being given charge of the tiny infant. The biggest task was to keep the kittens out of the crib. Sam helped by wrangling them into the basement.

Our time together was without incident the first time, and I was called back at a later time.
Ben was allergic to wheat, so I had to feed him rice cakes. Back then, rice cakes were a weird, hard-to-get health food. I had never seen one before I fed them to Ben Urban. He’d drool all over it, and it would stink. I was more confident watching the baby this time, so I let Alex in to help set a fire in the fireplace to warm us up. Mrs. Urban never invited me back to babysit again. Later she mentioned the Alex fire incident was the reason.

Mrs. Averet hired me to babysit Nell and Mack a few times. They were the rich kids of the alley. That’s the way they acted, and they had a whole lot of stuff. I could get through babysitting by playing with them and all their toys. It wasn’t so much about being in charge at their house. Nell pretty much stayed in charge, and then when Mack would cry, you’d do what you had to do to make him stop crying. One time he put his head between my legs and told me it stank. I told him not to put his head between my legs then. The thing is, I had told him not to do that before he’d done it, too.

I was always counting the minutes until Mrs. Averet got home again. Their house was pretty disorderly too. The parents were going through rough times then. Sometimes I’d be asked to babysit while Mrs. Averet was still home.

Through the Averets, I got another babysitting job outside the alley. It was just up Glenwood, a few houses down and across the street from Laurie Lett’s house. This was for a big girl, around Zeke’s age. She was about my size, though, and didn’t listen when I told her not to squirt water in my ear. I did not return to her house.

When the Johnsons moved in, Daddy went right across the alley and told them that his daughter was a certified babysitter. They hired me a few days later. Emily was Zeke’s age, and Marcy was Nell’s age. They were no trouble at all. It was more like a play date than a job. Their house was a small tudor style home where the roof slanted in the upstairs rooms. It was fine for children, but adults had to duck their heads. (This was the Hammarskjöld’s old house). They had a nice sun room that overlooked their wooded back yard. They liked to read in that room. I liked their living room the best, because that’s where the piano was. Babysitting would always fly by if I was playing the piano. I babysat them enough times to almost get the opening phrase of the Entertainer down. Mrs. Johnson had the unabridged Scott Joplin book.

In junior high or so, my piano teacher, Mrs. Christian assigned me to another one of her students, Bette (pronounced Bet-tee’) Stallman. My job was to help her practice her lesson properly. The Stallmans lived right down the street from us, in the alley that ran behind the Upjohn house. All the houses in that alley were very big and expensive. Depending on which side of the alley they lived, most of the houses had a wooded hill for the front or back yard. Those on the east side of the alley had Glenwood hill for their front yard; those on the west side of the alley had Wildwood hill for their back yard. The Stallmans lived on the Wildwood side, and Bette had that air about her of Nell Averet, but she wasn’t as spoiled. It was easy helping her, and I liked this work better than babysitting. I did end up sitting her once, I think, and we got along fine.

When I entered High School, I became less available to babysit. My music commitments grew to the point where I just didn’t have time to babysit. I’d be tied up in rehearsals and performances from December ‘til May, what with the Christmas concerts, the musical, spring competitions, and commencement exercises. Mrs. Averet called me during my sophomore year to babysit. I told her I couldn’t, because I was in the school musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. She said, “No! What? I thought you were still in elementary school!”

I was offended. I didn’t give her a chance to explain. Maybe it was one of those ‘my how fast you’ve grown’ situations. No, I jumped right to the conclusion that she thought I was immature. That I was too old to still play in the alley. Remember my examples: Jim and Earl. “What am I going to do about a babysitter, then?” Mrs. Averet wanted to know. “Oh, you can ask Zeke,” I told her. Zeke was 13 at this point. She did ask Zeke, and he ended up the babysitter of choice, even when I was available. I may have missed the money, but I didn’t miss the work. the thing is, though, that I for many years afterward had the lingering feeling that Zeke was better with kids than I was.

Char’s brothers would still be asleep. Jim was someone you’d usually want to avoid, because he was the grumpiest, but it was fun to wake up Earl. His hair would stand straight up, and he’d be disoriented. The brothers usually had some kind of put down, like “Who’d be up this early in the morning? Must be old SL and Charley Barley.” They could push Char’s buttons by teasing her, and they used to call me SL, or skinny legs.
It always felt like you were going to the land of the giants when you went to Char’s house, because everyone was so big and tall (except Andy), so they made me, who, everywhere else was pretty big and tall, too, feel petite. I thought it was hilarious that they called me SL. Anyway, after making Char’s brothers get up, or if her mother said that was enough, we’d go outside. When we were younger, we stayed in the alley and had a ball.
When we got older, we ventured out of the alley. We lived on the top of Westnedge hill, so if we walked North or South, we went down a hill.

To the North of us was a grocery/drug store combination, and various small stores. To the South of us was a few restaurants and party stores. There were plenty of places to spend our allowances.

Char and I both loved candy and junk food, and sometimes we were in the mood to walk to the store and buy some. We liked to go to Party Port, mainly because we liked that name, Party Port. It changed names to Minute Market while it was still there, but we still called it Party Port. We’d leave from my house to get to Party Port, because it was south from the alley, and I lived south of Char.

To get there, we’d cross Parkwood and walk on the Westnedge sidewalk past the light at Inkster, down past Montrose, and Fairview. We’d pass Sean Smith’s house, which was the last house on Westnedge before you got to Whitcomb, the little dead end street that ran beside the Party Port. It was a liquor store, dark and small, but it had kid stuff in there too, like candy and pop.

My favorite candies were m&ms with peanuts, junior mints, Hershey’s special dark, Hershey’s with almonds, and Peppermint Patties. We also had a raging debate as to what is better, Bubblicious or Bubble Yum. I thought sugar daddy was the best tasting gum, but Bubblicious and Bubble Yum blew bubbles longer. Of those two, I think Bubble Yum blew the best bubbles, but Bubblicious tasted better, or maybe it was the other way around.

Char liked to buy Space Dust and some other cool candy that exploded in your mouth. It didn’t really taste good, but it was cool! Neither one of us understood why all the kids at school liked Nowandlaters, (which we called Noworlaters), or Jolly Ranchers. Nowandlaters were these hard taffy-like candies which were too hard to bite unless you sucked them a long time. They didn’t taste good to me at all. I preferred starburst, which was also the same kind of texture, but soft enough to bite right away, and they came in real fruit flavors, as opposed to those pure candy flavors of Nowandlaters. You know how Smarties and Sweet Tarts don’t taste like anything but really sugar, with some real faint nondescript flavor? That’s how Nowandlaters tasted. We also liked to buy those Koolaid type candies, like Dipping Sticks and Pixie Sticks. Pixie Sticks were like paper straws filled with dry Koolaid, while Dipping Sticks were candy sticks that you dipped into packets of dry Koolaid. Those were fun candies to eat on the way home.

Sometimes we’d prefer a snack, like Hostess Cupcakes or Funyuns, and then we’d walk North down Westnedge to Jewel/Osco. I don’t ever remember calling it Jewel when we went for our candy and junk; it was always Osco. Jewel was the grocery store; Osco was the drug store, where they sold all the junk.

Daddy used to give me $10 in quarters for my allowance, and I usually had enough for some junk whenever I wanted some. I usually got in the mood to walk down to Osco on Sunday afternoons. To get to Osco, we’d walk from Char’s house. We’d walk down Westnedge, past the Westnedge hotel, past Maple street, past the Howard Johnson’s restaurant, to Howard street. We’d cross Howard street to get to the store. Then we’d have to walk across the parking lot to get to the store. We’d go there to get to the mailbox, too, sometimes; there was one at the Osco door of the store.

Across Howard street from Osco was a Chicken Coop. At least once Char and I went there. It felt so grown up to get our own food. The only thing was, though, that we talked about Chicken Coop so bad, “Who would ever want to eat something from the Chicken Coop! EWWWW!,” that we couldn’t really enjoy the food we got from there. I remember that we didn’t go there much.

When we were in the mood for food, we usually went south to Burger King. Burger King was across Westnedge from Party Port. We usually went the same way as we went to Party Port, and then crossed the street down there—illegally. We always thought it was so funny to jaywalk, or cross the street in the middle without a light or an intersection. Occasionally, we’d cross the street at the light at Inkster, like when we were walking to Parkwood, our school. Then, we’d get all the way to Burger King on the right side of the street. Char and I would talk about her brothers having to get Double Whoppers with cheese to get enough, while we ate Whoppers or Whopper Juniors.

When I was a child, I had a big appetite. A Quarter Pounder with cheese from McDonald’s wouldn’t fill me up; a Big Mac was enough, though. A Whopper or a Whopper Jr. would be satisfying. We thought we could make up for all the calories by eating tomatoes and lettuce on our burgers, and by the long walk home.

Sometimes we’d go past Burger King, too, to 7/11. That was right down the street, across Whites rd/Cork St from Burger King. The big draw of 7/11 was the slurpies. I didn’t like fizzy drinks, though I drank them, but I really liked coke slushies. You could also get Hostess and chips from 7/11, but the slushy was the only reason to go there.

The walk down Westnedge was no big deal; it was the walk up that was daunting. That would be enough to limit our trips down the hill if we hadn’t found back ways to get home. The back way home from Burger King, 7/11, and Party Port was to go up Westnedge to Fairview, and then the way we walked home from the Fairview bus stop. That would be up University hill, which was a nothing hill in our world. We could either turn at Edgemoor and then on Glenwood and walk home, or we could stay on University to Inkster to Glenwood. We’d walk past Laurie Lett’s house on Glenwood to the corner of Glenwood and Parkwood. We’d always walk on the brick wall in front of the Haab’s house on the corner of Glenwood and Parkwood. This was right across Parkwood from the alley. Home!

The back way home from Osco, Chicken Coop, and other destinations North of the alley was to walk up Westnedge to Maple Street. We’d walk past channel 3, where the channel 3 clubhouse with Cynthia Kaye was taped. Everyone in the alley had been on that show at least once before rumor had it that Cynthia Kaye had a nervous breakdown and left her local kiddy TV show. We’d talk about the boring (yet, somehow exciting) show, every time we walked past channel 3. Then we’d walk past the Westnedge Hotel and then the Westnedge Hill apartments. Then we’d find ourselves at the foot of Glenwood Hill. Then we’d walk up the Schmidts long staircase to their house, then up the woods, and we’d be at Char’s house. Home again!

Those back ways home were part of the fun of the trips. Westnedge in front of my house did something weird. Right on the corner of Westnedge and Parkwood, it split off into two different one-way streets to our left, and started a two-way street to our right. If you drove North from our house, you would actually be on Park street, while you’d be on Westnedge if you went right. Park street ran on the right side of Jewel Osco; Westnedge was on the other side. If you stayed on Park street, you’d come to a duck pond at the foot of the hill. One day, Daddy, Zeke and I walked down there to go fishing.

We took a couple of sticks with fish wire as fishing poles, and we had a bucket. This was a very short car trip, but it took us half an hour to walk there. We took our time. We caught one tiny fish. We returned it, it was so small. I remember meeting a bum (as they called them then; now they are called homeless), who said how hard it was to fish there. Then we walked home, up Westnedge hill. Westnedge hill was very steep. You didn’t want to walk it very often. If you did find yourself walking up Westnedge, you’d find yourself at the Miller’s driveway, which went both to Westnedge and to the alley. The Westnedge part of their driveway had been overgrown with grass, etc., but you could still walk up it. We took that way home, so we still found ourselves in the alley.

The summer before I started 7th grade, a group of us walked to the Kik pool to take swimming lessons. This was the group of us that didn’t already know how to swim: Zeke, Ken, Sean, Jenny, and I. The walk to the Kik pool was like the walk to the fishing pond. First, we’d cross Westnedge at some point in front of our house or the alley. There was a median, or a strip of concrete that separated Westnedge from Park street north of our house. It grew into a whole island with grass on it. It was easier to run to this and then cross the street. It didn’t make sense to go South to the light, and then head north, so we usually jay-walked across Westnedge for this hike.

We’d take northbound Park down the hill, past Crane park, past Osco, past the bus stop to a little side street at the light. I don’t remember the name of that street. We just turned right at this. This was just south of the intersection where the pond where we fished was. This street took us to South Burdick street. We crossed South Burdick and got on Lake street to get to the Kik pool. Lake street went behind the old Sears department store. It was still there when we moved to Kalamazoo, but by now, Sears had closed up its department store and was only doing mall business. Lake street comes to an intersection, and there’s a fork in the road. We went left, while Lake street went straight. The Kik pool was to the left of the fork in the road.

We’d get up early and walk there every day for several weeks. We took our swimming lesson, and then walked back home together. One week, our Uncle Fellah and cousin Rune were visiting us from Denmark, and we took Rune with is to the Kik pool.

When the class was over, we took a test to see who had passed the Advanced Beginner’s class. I was the only person from the alley to pass the test. Only one other person in the class had passed, but we all had learned to swim. Zeke and I surprised our parents later that summer in Mexico by jumping off a boat and swimming to shore during one of our sight-seeing tours.

The longest walk I remember taking was in the summer of ’82 or ’83 with Charlotte. In the summer of ’82, the Junior Symphony had gone to Vienna Austria to compete in a junior symphony competition, and during our time there, I had bought a couple Rick James albums. I had been in a running disagreement with Brian James, my stand partner, about what good music really was. I had said that Rick James was really good music, but he liked all that heavy metal stuff. He had said that the only good Rick James song was Super freak, and when I bought my albums, he asked me to record Super Freak for him. I was still angry with him saying that that was the only good song, so I decided to record other songs that I thought were good too.

The thing is, I decided to record everything at 45 instead of 33 1/3, making the music sound way too fast. I’d slow it down to emphasize a word or two, but for the most part everything was taped too fast. Char helped with this. Then we decided to walk all the way to his house to deliver it.

He lived in the Winchell neighborhood, this snooty upper class neighborhood on the other side of Bronson Blvd. A lot of the Junior Symphony people lived in that neighborhood, and my visit to Christine Cha’s home told me that this was a rich neighborhood! She had a shining black grand piano in her living room, and gold fixtures in her bathroom. I was scared to touch anything in there!

Sara Cyrus, a French Horn player from Junior Symphony and my High School, called our neighborhood the little kid neighborhood, while we called her neighborhood the (snooty) rich neighborhood. In retrospect, it wasn’t as nice or rich as the Bronson Blvd neighborhood, but it seemed much better then.

To get there, we started on one of our favorite bike routes—to Mrs. Christian’s house. We walked across Parkwood and South on Glenwood. We turned left on Edgemoor, and took it to Bronson blvd. Edgemoor crosses Bronson blvd at an angle, so if you cross it at a diagonal, you’ll be on Edgemoor when you get to the other side. We walked on Edgemoor to its end, passing Mrs. Christian’s house on the corner of Edgemoor and Alta Vista. At the end of Edgemoor is a hill.

We thought this hill lead directly to Woods Lake. We’d never gone to the end of it before. That’s usually where we turned around on our bike rides, or sometimes we’d go down part of the hill and look at this algae covered private lake with this big house on a gravel road. Kleinstock nature preserve is on the right of this road. This time we went down the whole hill. The street is called Chevy Chase. We kept walking, and found Oakland Drive, a pretty busy two lane street.

 Winchell neighborhood is on the other side of Oakland Drive from us, so we crossed it, and stayed on Chevy Chase. We found the Winchell neighborhood to be a confusion of short, winding roads that didn’t really connect to each other. Our neighborhood had connecting roads, and was pretty straight forward; Winchell was more like a maze. After wandering around and getting lost on several dead ends, we finally found the main road, Winchell. Brian’s street was off of Winchell. We finally found the address we’d looked up in the phone book before we’d left home. Brian’s father was a judge who was frequently in the news, so we knew his name and were able to find it in the phone book. After we found the house on Lomond, we put the tape in the mailbox, and walked back home.

By this time, we were hot and sweaty, but we didn’t get lost on the way home. Brian never really mentioned that tape, until I asked him about it. He told me that I didn’t know how to record anything, and that it was useless, and he’d destroyed it. I told him that he had destroyed a little girl’s tape (we’d recorded on one of Nelle’s tapes), and that I’d recorded it like that on purpose. He didn’t believe me, and I felt foolish for the whole thing. One thing had become of it, though. Charlotte and I knew more about our surroundings. it turned out that Woods Lake wasn’t just at the bottom of that mysterious hill. After I got my driver’s license, I found out that Woods Lake wasn’t far from there. It was a left on Oakland Drive from Chevy Chase; just a little south of where we were.

Charlotte’s house was the big white house that anchored the alley. She shared the house with three older brothers, her parents, and one dog and 5 cats. Jim, her youngest big brother was four years older than I, so he was 12 when we moved there. Earl was some unknown age older then Jim, and Andy, the oldest, was just old to all of us. I don’t even know whether he was in High School or college when we met him. He was probably in High School, but he was the oldest kid we knew. Older than Alex’s brothers, even. Deenie may have been the same age, but we didn’t know how old she was, either.

Jim and Earl were giants. They were tall and big, so that added to the whole older brother mystique that they had going on. They would actually talk to you, though. And they taught us some games. They also relentlessly teased Charlotte. Andy was her favorite. He didn’t do any of that other stuff. He was normal size, too, and the best looking of her brothers.

Their dog’s name was Amanda. Char joked that they’d given the dog a better name than hers. Her mother would crack, “We were going to name you Gertrude, so be happy!” Everyone called the dog Mandy. She was a lovable collie that rarely barked. The amazing thing about Mandy was how she got along with all those cats. It was nothing to see her napping with Lotus or Mercedes. Ling Su was the mother of all the Siamese cats. Sissy was the father. Lotus and Mercedes were two of their kittens that the Millers decided to keep.

I can’t remember the fifth cat, but I remember they had five cats. They outlived Mandy. Sissy got cancer. He was a scruffy, beat up cat; we thought he’d certainly outlive the his mate, the heavily breeding Ling Su, but he didn’t.

They later replaced Mandy with a Russian shepherd, a tall, skinny dog that Char hated. They were definitely pet people. They added guinea pigs and iguanas to their menagerie.

Playing at Charlotte’s house was fun. She had a little record player with her own small record collection. She had a record with a bunch of animal songs. “What’s in the Elephant’s Trunk?” was one of our favorite songs. I also liked “Chip, the Chimpanzee.” It had this lyric: ‘he’s at the top of the monkey steeple/not as much monkey as he is people.’ We also liked to pantomime to the song called Zebra’s Stripes.

Charlotte had a record with a disco version of Jesu Joy of Mine Desiring, by Bach. In the 70s, there was a disco version of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, too. I think the Bach piece was a little earlier than the Beethoven. We would make up dances to that one in her room, too.

Later on, she got the soundtrack to Grease, the movie. We would sing those songs over and over and over. We’d watch the movie on HBO when it came out, too. One thing I noticed about Kalamazoo right away was there were no channels on TV without cable. It was one of the first cities in the country to offer cable. I would spend the night at Char’s house, and we’d fall asleep with HBO on the TV. Back then, it didn’t have movies on all night. They’d play music videos between movies, too. The static of the channel going off would wake me up, usually. She slept pretty soundly.

We had fun with Char’s record player, but we also played with music at my house. Zeke and I had a toy record player that played little plastic discs of nursery rhyme music. Those were fun to play with, but daddy let us play with the stereo, too. He had a huge jazz collection; mommy listened to show tunes. I started collecting my own records, too. I would also tape music off the radio in Chicago (there was no good radio in Kzoo), and off the TV—Soul Train was a favorite for taping.

We’d take music from my collection, and create our ‘disco’ that was the site of boogie interviews. Daddy was a TV producer in Chicago, and he had a lot of equipment (movie cameras, reel to reel tape recorders, microphones, etc.), so it wasn’t that hard to get our hands on a tape recorder. It was harder to get a tape.
Daddy would come up with a bunch of old, decrepit, several times used tapes for us. We’d turn on the music, roll the tape, and start talking. We’d make up each show on the spot, often making fun of people that we had a problem with. I tried to have a segment of the show called Learn to Boogie with Angie and Zeke. On one tape, Zeke is screaming, “I’m not doing the bump! I’m not doing the bump!”

We also had fun spoofing commercials. I liked to play the music and start talking about maxi pads, because we thought those were some ridiculous commercials. I also turned on the recorder and had everyone start screaming and made up a commercial about the Kalamazoo Fair. We never could stand to listen to a whole boogie interview tape; they just went on too long. We’d usually tape over them.

Sticking to our disco theme, Char and I wrote a play. It was set at a party or a disco, and it had a theme of acceptance vs rejection in there. We cast it and even talked about performing it, but the work of writing it killed the project for us. Char’s mother was so impressed with it that she had it made into a ditto. It was completely dead by that point.

We came up with the idea to do 4th of July shows for the alley. We started off doing talent shows with the Johnson girls. I was certified as a babysitter at age 11, and that’s what Daddy told the Johnsons when they moved in. They took him seriously, and I found myself at 11 babysitting Emily, 8, and Marcy, 4. They had moved into the house across the alley from us, the Hammarskjöld’s old house.

The Johnsons had a big piano that just begged me to play it every time I babysat. Mrs. Johnson even had some unedited Scott Joplin sheet music, so I attempted to play The Entertainer every time I went over there, too. Then the girls and I worked up the act. I had discovered some best of Aretha Franklin records in Daddy’s record collection, and found the song, “Respect.” I figured out a very crude rendition of it by ear, and played it on the Johnson’s piano. I taught them to sing ‘woo’ on cue, and they were my backup singers. We eventually added Char, and we became AJ and the Whatchamacallits.

Mommy bought us deeliboppers for our costumes, and the main attraction of our 4th of July talent show was born. Deeliboppers were all the rage that year. They were a headband of antennas that had stars or hearts sticking on the end of the antennae. The stars or hearts were made of Styrofoam, and were covered in glitter. The backup singers wore red hearts, and I wore silver stars. I also taught the Johnson sisters how to play some simple piano pieces, and we played trios.

Char played the viola in the talent show, too. Zeke and Sam participated in our homemade Atari commercial. We used a box as a TV, and taped pictures of Space Invaders on the front. We taped the actual game effects and real commercial jingle for the sound effects. Then Zeke and Sam got so excited pretending to play with the fake game machine that they tore it up. It was hilarious.

We did a game show on a different year. The game show was easy to plan and to execute. We got baby pictures of ourselves and asked Earl how old we were. When he failed miserably, and comically, we’d dog him and do a commercial or two. The commercial I remember was for Bubblicious. The commercial that was on at the time sang : ‘the ultimate bubble has the ultimate flavor/tastes so intense/it’ll blow you away.’ I think the commercial was a cartoon of people floating around happy blowing bubbles. We walked around singing the jingle carrying balls of various sizes in front of our mouths. They were supposed to be giant bubbles that we blew with Bubblicious. Even Charlotte’s big brothers laughed at this.

On rainy days, a group of us, usually Zeke and Sam, Char and I would play cards at her house. She had these different games involving actions and animal sounds. The only one I remember is slap jack. We’d slap the jacks, stand up and turn around on the aces, sing on the queens, and bellow on the kings. We’d be rolling on the floor laughing during this game. Even though the Millers nicknamed my brother Shriek, they never told us to keep it down.

We had board games at our house. We’d play everything from Mastermind to Life, to Monopoly, Payday, and Operation. We had Superperfection, where you had to put together these pieces, like a puzzle, and then put them back into a board that had a timer set to blow everything off the board if you didn’t finish in time. Char had the regular version, Perfection, where you had to put pieces into the proper shapes on the board before they blew up.

We also played other board games with little gadgets on them. We had one with a board that had magnets and little game pieces with colored discs in the bottom of them. If you placed them on the right magnet, it would flip the disc to another color. You had to get three in a row of your color to win.

Char and I really played with our dolls, too. We’d hold baby doll seminars, where we’d sit and coo over our babies and teach Nell and Betsy how to care for babies. Everyone loved my black baby dolls especially. We’d discuss the pros and cons of all the trendy dolls of the day. A favorite debate was “which is uglier, Baby Alive or Rub a Dub Dolly?” We agreed that while both were ugly, Rub a Dub dolly was ugliest by far. We’d show off what our new Christmas dolls could do. It was like having your own commercials in your living room.

We liked playing with the baby dolls, but we loved playing with the Barbies. We had quite the variety of these, too. My favorite was Ballerina Clara, which I bought with the $5 I found on the ground at Geagua Lake in Cleveland. Geagua Lake was an amusement park. I think it’s gone out of business now because of Cedar Point. She had beautiful pink pointe shoes, and graceful arms, and she could kick her legs. Char liked to have the Barbies jump off the house and splat into the gravel, or get run over by Barbie buses, but I’d lose interest in that kind of game after a while. I’d rather have them change their minds about jumping off the porch.

Char and I also played four square whenever we could. I could never get enough of bouncing that big red rubber ball in the chalk scribbled squares. We weren’t that good at drawing our own board, but we could play for hours, honing our ‘popcorn” skills.

We’d jump rope and play hand clapping games, too. Char and I made up our own jump roping rhyme. We’d recite it while clapping hands, too, sometimes: