My earliest memories go back to my first home - our little farm on Perry Road at the top of the hill on the edge of The Kingdom, a farming area on a plateau at a bend upstream on the mighty Seneca River to the west of Baldwinsville, New York. 

My Dad bought the little farm, which we would later call the "Old Home" after we moved to the trailer on Barbara Lane, because he wanted to raise chickens and sell eggs, but he kept his factory job in Syracuse, which was quite a distance to get to work, especially in snow.  At that time Perry Road was a dirt road where it climbed the hill and passed our house.  The little farm on Perry Road was a wonderful place for me as a little boy, and I remember many happy times there with my two brothers, David and Gary.

On January 7, 1949, I was born in a maternity home in Baldwinsville, probably because the hospital was too far away.  Maternity homes were fairly common in those days, but not any more.   My mother had a very hard and dangerous labor with me, and she struggled all night long, because my umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck and I couldn't come out.  In my Baby Book, Mom wrote that Dad said that he was afraid that he would lose us, and he was relieved when I finally arrived.  Nine pounds and ten ounces, a fat little baby, although my brother Gary would grow even fatter after he was born 21 months later, thanks to Rosie, the Jersey cow that Dad bought for $125 the previous year and kept in the barn.  Jersey cows give milk that is much higher in butter fat than Holsteins, which are the standard black & white milking cow .  Gary had rolls upon rolls of fat on his arms and legs, and a double chin, but he was too little to play very much while we lived on the farm.

When I was born Dad was 31 years old and Mom was 25.   David was not quite 3 1/2.  

One of my earliest memories is of a time when I was two years old and I was playing in the driveway to Dad's barn on the other side of Perry Road.  There was a little black puddle of oil from my Dad's car, and I was eating dirt and poking at the black sticky stuff when suddenly an old lady was hovering over me. She said "Nasty, Nasty!"   It was Mrs. Nesbitt, a neighbor from up the road  and around the bend, and she was probably on her way home from visiting my Mom.  David would have been 5 years old, and Gary was a baby still in the house.    Mr. Nesbitt grew tobacco and chewed it, and my Dad told me later when Mr. Nesbitt got sick that that the doctors found a pouch of tobacco spit in his stomach.   I wonder.

We had a platform rocking chair and my Dad would rock me in it, and I reached up and felt his scratchy chin whiskers.  

My brother David was with me all the time, and he watched over me.    He would take me by the hand and we would walk together and explore the woods that were behind our house and across Perry road..  We would go deep into the forest and David knew the way back home.  To this day I am amazed at how far we would wander into the forest when I was only 3 or 4 years old.

In August 1952 we went to visit my godmother, Aunt Winnie (Winifred), my Dad's sister, who lived in an apartment in the city in Syracuse.  We were there because Mom was in the hospital; giving birth to my sister Marilyn.    It was dark outside and the apartment was dark and strange, but Aunt Winnie was very nice, if businesslike. She gave Gary and me our first doughnuts, which started my lifelong love affair with baked goods.   Aunt Winnie asked us if we needed to go to the bathroom, which coming from a stranger seemed a bit odd.    Marilyn was born only two years before we moved from the Old Home to the trailer, so in my earliest memory of Marilyn, she is in a stroller carriage, and a vague memory when we were in the trailer park and she was two.     My stronger memory of Marilyn begins with her as a curly haired Shirley Temple at the trailer.

  There was a farmer's field that ran right up to the house on the side away from Perry Road, and one of my earliest memories was the sound of the big John Deere tractor as it plowed that field making the trademark "Pup Pup Pup" sound of the big two-cylinder John Deeres.   Our house was squeezed into a little triangle between that field and Perry Road.   I am convinced that before my Dad bought that farm, some previous farmers had owned part of that field.   It just didn't make sense that our farm would have so little land , or that the farmer who built our farm house would build the house right on the edge of the property line in that squeezed little triangle.   

Our nearest neighbor across the street was just up the road from Dad's barn, and they had a son, somewhat older than David, and with whom I never played, because he was so much older.  The boy had the little model tractors that I envied so much, and with which I was never allowed to play, and his family owned the little John Deere LA model tractor that I talk about in Hurricane Hazel.  The next neighbors were the Nesbitt's, an older couple with no children at home.  On our side of the road the nearest neighbors were the Clark's, with a daughter my age, Sherry Clark, who would become a classmate of mine.    I only played with her a couple of times.    About a half a mile or so up the road were the Lovelesses, where decades later I would go blueberry picking with my sisters.  It was a really long way to walk, but I remember David and me walking there and watching the Rooty Kazootie show on their television.   They had a big duck pond near their barn which made a pretty sight on the way to Whiskey Hollow a half a mile or so further up the road.

So there were no other little children nearby with whom to play, but I was not bothered at all, because I had my two brothers, one on either side of me.

In the other direction, at the corner of Perry Road and Kingdom Road, there was a white one-room schoolhouse where David went to school.  I remember missing him. He started school when I was just a baby, but when he left the nearby one-room school and started going to Elizabeth Street School in Baldwinsville he was gone a lot longer during the day.    

Our house was painted white, and it had roses growing near the doorway, to which my Mom found she was allergic. Roses don't grow very well in the far north where my Mom grew up. so she may have never been exposed to them before.  They had to be cut back, but we had a painting of pink and white roses hanging on the wall to make up for it.  Our yard had rhubarb and Creeping Veronica , which has a strong vinegary aroma.  I would remember that smell when I found the leaves growing in the yard of our new house on Barbara lane years later.    I asked my Dad what it was and how I remembered it, and that is when I learned it was Creeping Veronica.  Dad knew the names of all the plants and trees.

The house had an upstairs bedroom where David and Gary and I slept when Gary was old enough to leave the crib, and the floor of the attic room had a grate which let the warm air come up into the room, and through the grate I remember seeing Christmas for the first time.  Mom and Dad had put up the tree in the night, so the Christmas lights and the tree were the first things I saw through the grate on Christmas morning that day.  One of my presents was a little plastic model of a Model T Ford car.   Dad would bring home plastic Chevrolet and Buick car emblems from his work, and I kept these treasures with me up in the attic bedroom.   Dad's factory made such things for General Motors, as well as making all the chrome parts for those wonderful chrome-bedazzled 1950s cars. It was the biggest chrome plating factory in the world and did all the chrome work for General Motors cars.  He was a buffer, polishing the chrome parts to a mirror shine.   Some of his work is still on the road today. 

At the side of the entry steps was a dark half-cellar with the furnace and a little red sign from an oil company.   It was scary and not someplace to play.  

David and Gary and I played together every day  We had a little pedal car that was an airplane with a propeller that spun as you pedaled along. One time we put the airplane with me in it at the top of the hill and David was going to push me down the steep hill, which might have been a catastrophe if not for the little wheels having trouble moving in the loose road gravel.     During the summer, a yellow road grader would occasionally rumble its way up the hill to smooth out the road, and the big noisy machine would pass just a few yards from the house. Sometimes a truck would come and spread calcium choride which attracted moisture and kept the dust down.  Our family would sometimes take little metal pails and go berry picking across the road where the road grader came up the hill. 

One day we were taking a bath, and Gary came running into the bathroom. As quick as he ran in he slipped and smashed his face against the bathtub and cried out with several broken baby teeth and blood everywhere.  I was standing by the tub right next to him when it happened.  What a fright.  Until his permanent teeth came in he had snaggle tooth grin.     Accident prone was an appropriate description for Gary.   One night Mom and Dad went to the store and left us in David's charge.  He would have been 6 or 7.   We climbed up on the kitchen counter and fetched some sugar cubes and made sugar water. While up on the counter I could see out the window and I remember my first sighting of a crescent moon.

Decades later my Aunt Winnie came to visit me in California along with her daughter, my cousin Anita, who is Gary's age, and she told me a funny story of a time when she came out to visit us on the farm, when I was probably 3,   and when she arrived, she was surprised to see a little boy's bottom sticking out the window, and when she came closer she found it was me, taking a poop out the window.    She said she split her sides laughing.     Now I am thinking that Mom may have been busy with Gary in the bathroom , and having to go #2,  I made use of the knowledge of climbing up on the kitchen counter, and from there I just opened the window and stuck my little rear end out.

We acquired a television set, and I remember watching Superman, followed by Liberace playing his piano with a chandelier mounted on it.  The episode where Superman was immobilized by Kryptonite was particularly concerning and memorable.  Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and the Chief.   An appropriate introduction to the fantasy world.  I Love Lucy, Texaco Star Theater,  Milton Berle, and the Honeymooners would arrive a little later. Dad liked to watch comedy shows. Mom & Dad both liked shows with music, like Liberace or Lawrence Welk.   Although I was not aware of it at the time, they liked to go square dancing.

One day David came home from the doctor's with Mom and Dad and he was crying.    He had been circumcized and there was blood on his bandage.   The doctor had given him a roll of Necco Wafers candy which I enjoyed.

Years later my parents told me a story of something that happened when I was just three years old.  One night in February 1952  a blizzard came by and an older neighbor couple were stranded somewhere on the road.  Search parties were sent out to try to find the car in the deep, deep snow but they could not find it.  Eventually the snow melted enough, and three days after the blizzard the top of the car was exposed  on Perry road right in front of our house.  The woman said she could hear the footsteps of the searchers but could not make them hear her.   Her husband was dead.  He had passed away of a heart attack during the three days that they were lost.  This would foreshadow a similar event 14 years later during the Blizzard of 1966, when I was old enough to know the fatal consequences of that awful storm.

My first encounter with a dog scared the living daylights out of me and left me afraid of dogs for years.     My Dad's father, Henry Lavallee, came out to visit in his big car and he brought along his dog, a big male collie like Lassie. The big collie ran all the way across the lawn and jumped up and knocked me on the ground with his front paws, then stood barking over me.  It terrified me, the stuff of nightmares. 

Many years later my Dad would tell me a story of a time when I was four (although he said I was three, there's no way) and Dad was driving his my Grandfather back to Syracuse with me tagging along on the seat between them.. 
Dad took the customary route to the city along State Fair Boulevard, which passed by the big smelly factories and the steel mill where my uncles worked, and past a big black railroad trestle bridge that crossed the Boulevard at an angle.  Then there was a billboard alongside the road, and as we drove past it I read the billboard out loud.
"That's a trick,"  my Grandfather said   
"Nope, he's reading it."  said Dad 
"You taught him what it says ".   "Nope". 
My grandfather carried a newspaper on his lap.
"Go ahead, have him read the newspaper". Dad said.

Dad said my Grandfather handed me the paper and so I started reading the newspaper out loud.      My brother David had been teaching me to read and by now I was learning to read phonetically on my own.  Later that summer I went with Dad to visit my grandfather, and he was sick in bed with a large crucifix over the bed that was also a kit with Holy Water and oils for the sacrament of Extreme Unction, which is what Catholics call the Last Rites.   My grandfather died in 1954, and I remember Dad taking us to his grave site at the cemetery in Syracuse. These are the only memories I have of him.    My Dad's mother had passed 13 years before I was born, in 1935 when Dad was 18 years old, so I never met my grandmother Valida, whose namesake is my cousin Valida from my Dad's brother Gilbert Lavallee.    My Dad had an Aunt Elvina, his mother's sister, whom he called Aunt Viney, who was Dad's beloved and treasured parental relation.   On one early visit Up North we stopped by Uncle Arl and Aunt Viney's house and it felt very special.

My Mom and Dad had grown up very close to the border wth Canada, on dairy farms in the St. Lawrence Valley at the top of New York State. Visiting my Mom's childhood home and her family was called "going Up North".  THose were the happiest of times.

On my Mother's side, I have my Mom's old photos of myself, David and Gary during visits in these times with my cousins from Up North, which is where my Mom's brothers Claude and Donald lived with their families, on their own dairy farms.  Mom's youngest brother Gleyn still lived with my Grandparents, as well as my youngest Aunts, Janet and Lois.   I would sleep in the bed with my Uncle Gleyn, and everyone marveled at how much I resembled him. He gave me an old wristwatch wich he kept in his dresser, but which no longer worked no matter how much I wound it. Uncle Gleyn had pin curlers on his dresser to put a wave in his hair to please the girls.    

I fell in love with my cousins and their farms, and the cows, and especially my grandfather's tractor.  I loved the smell of the barns, and the sound of the air compressor and the milking machines that used the compressed air.

My Uncle Don, my Mom's brother, lived on his farm across the road from my Grandparents. His wife was named Rita and they had my cousins Gail and Selva Jean    When I was 3 were were visiting my Grandparents and we were over at Uncle Don's.  They did not have indoor bathroom, they had an outhouse and it had big fat white spiders  in the doorway.  I was so afraid of the spiders that I pooped my pants rather than go inside.  Oh dear.  How embarrassing for my Mother.    On the same visit, my Dad's sister Aunt Winnie was also visiting and had her daughter, my cousin Paula, with her.   Paula bit my arm so hard that it left scars.  I don't remember her biting me, but I still have three little tooth mark scars on my left arm, although now they are each about an inch apart.   My Mom told me how I got them later when I was older.  And on this visit we were in my Grandmother's porch yard, and I was near my cousin Stephen, Uncle Claude and Aunt Rhada's third son, who was toddling in the driveway when a big rooster came up to him and bit his ear and cut it like a scissors.  He screamed and it bled like crazy.

My father's brothers and sisters had all moved down to Syracuse from Up North after WWII.  I remember the visit to my Aunt Winnie and Uncle Teddy, when Marilyn was born, and Uncle Gil and Aunt Vera in Syracuse, who had a plum tree in the yard.   Dad's half-brother, my Uncle Bill, lived next door with his wife and my cousins Sandra, Ronnie, Tommy, and Randy, the youngest, who is a day older than I am.    I remember being at my Uncle Gil's when Dad's youngest brother Uncle Gabe, was in his uniform and going off to fight in the Korean War.   It was evening, dark, and the mood was very grim in the room.   

In 1954, when I was 5 years old, we moved away from the farm to a trailer park, and then to Barbara Lane, which I describe in Hurricane Hazel

In the photo with my maternal cousins. brother Gary is on the lower left corner getting his hair pulled, brother David is in the center with white shirt & suspenders, and I am on the right holding a pocket watch & chain  - a present from my Uncle Gleyn, my Mom's youngest brother  This may very well be my first visit to the North Country and my maternal grandparents, aunts & uncles & cousins

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After college when I was able to drive and had a car, I would always take a little trip back to Perry Road, to the Kingdom, to Whiskey Hollow and to see the Old Home, and whenever I return to Baldwinsville from the West I revisit.    At the time we moved to the trailer in 1954, my father had sold the farm to a black family, holding the mortgage, but I had no idea who lived in the place after so many years.    In 2017 I was sad to see that the house was no longer there.   The house had been knocked down, and there was no trace of it.   But the place of my birth and young lfe holds a spiitual connection over me, and I feel at peace when I am there in the Kingdom.   It is there I wish to take my final rest, in the gentle rolling hills and in the forest of my early days.

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