East 33rd

NOTE: the details are not necessarily in chronological order

We moved to 1599 E. 33rd St shortly after I started kindergarden. I think it was in large part to get me closer to school. We lived there until we moved when I was in fourth grade. It was a duplex back house and we had the bottom floor. The upstairs was rented to a biracial couple named Parker who had a son (Willie) my age and a girl (Sandy) a few years younger. The front house had some rednecks downstairs and a caucasian family upstairs (the Ratliffs) who had one son (Robby) a year or two older than me, and a boy (Ricky) a few years younger. 

The rednecks (I think they said that they were from West Virginia) in the front house eventually moved out, but not before they tried to break into the house once while my sister and I were home alone. They knocked on the back door pretending to be a plumber. My sister opened the door but kept the chain on which kept them from forcing their way in. I grabbed a meat cleaver and was more than ready to take a chop at the foot wedged in the door but my sister managed to get the door closed. I think that's the main reason why I have little affinity for rednecks in general and country music in particular.

We became friends with the Ratliffs, who within a year moved into a larger duplex down the street, and my mother arranged for me to go to their place for lunch and after school until my mother picked me up after work.

After the rednecks and Ratliffs moved out, two Chinese families moved in. Downstairs the family's mom worked at the same place my mom worked, there was a sister about the same age as my sister and a boy a few years older than I. Upstairs, a family with four kids (and only two bedrooms).  So in some ways we had our own little enclave, though for the most part, our neighbors were mainly central European: Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, etc. As few of them had kids my age, we really didn't interact with them much.

The house had two bedrooms. My parents had one, but it had no door, so my parents put up a curtain for privacy. My sister got the other bedroom (which had a door), and I slept on the couch every night. Actually, that's not quite true, at first i was still small enough to sleep in my crib. And the crib was closer to the only source of heat in the house: a gas furnace which was just outside my sister's bedroom door. We put a baking pan on top of the furnace and kept that pan filled with water to raise the level of the  humidity of the house. Refilling the pan was a nightly ritual. Bedtime was typically 9pm on weeknights, and so I went to bed after watching reruns of the TV show "Wild Wild West" on channel 43 from 8-9.  

My mother considered the neighborhood unsafe, and so I was seldom allowed to leave the yard. I once walked around the block one day and my mother grounded me.  However on Friday afternoons I got sent up to Stanley's (which was a small store on the same block that eventually got driven out of business as the Eagle supermarket got larger) to get a copy of the Friday paper which included a weekly TV schedule. I'm pretty sure we also got another weekly paper that included all the weekly grocery coupons.

I seldom saw my father in those years. Actually, I rarely saw my father my entire childhood; he typically worked 6 days a week and was still asleep when I awoke for school. When he awoke, I was at school, and when I got home, he was at work. When he got home, I was asleep. His day off was usually Wednesdays - and on those nights we began going to see houses on sale on the west side of town. 

During the summers my sister got a job at the nearby public library. My sister was allowed to bring me along, so I had nothing to do but read all day. But since I enjoyed reading, I never considered it a punishment of any sort. I recall reading (and re-reading) Estes' series about the Moffat family, Sach's Veronica Ganz (who doesn't wear pants!), Encyclopedia Brown mysteries. and another youth detective series whose name escapes me but I recall there being a chauffeur as well as a makeshift office with a secret exit through the floor.  Reading those books and watching TV shows like Leave It To Beaver & Dennis the Menace were all i had to form my understanding of American culture. More on that later.

I had started school in January or February after I turned five. Cleveland was still on the half year system then. Waring Elementary School was only a couple of blocks away, but it was north of Payne Ave. so we had a crossing guard at the stoplight. At first, my mother asked the older brother (Eddie) of a classmate (Sheri Moran) to walk me to school, but soon enough I was deemed mature enough to walk myself to school.  

A few more Chinese families moved into the neighborhood in the late 60's, but the only ones I visited would have been ones that had a daughter around my sister's age. There was a gap between our ages due to the length of time m father spent working in the US while my mother & sister were still in Hong Kong, so my sister did a lot of babysitting while my parents were at work. When she got permission to go visit another Chinese family in the neighborhood usually a family, I tagged along when the family included a boy around my age, which was only one other family a couple of blocks away.

Life changed in September 1969. The Cleveland school system school year elected to end the half school system, and so a decision had to be made whether to push me ahead in fourth grade, or keep me in third grade for an entire year. I got promoted up to fourth grade. But I was in that fourth grade class not all that long before I got pulled out of that class and put into a gifted student program which was fortunately held at my elementary school; other students selected from other elementary schools were bussed to my school every day. There were maybe a grand total of 20 students about half fourth graders and a half third graders. The teacher worked with one grade at a time, and when the teacher worked with the third graders, we were free to get up and walk around the room, or gather at a table at the back of the room. It turns out there was another Chinese in the class, a girl named Ying. She actually lived on my street and had an older sister my sister's age, but we never really connected until we both were sent to this class. We ended up talking together a lot, enough so that the rest of the boys in my class started teasing me about it.

In February of 1970, my family bought a house in Lakewood, the suburb directly to the west of Cleveland.