Carl (born 1932)

First, unedited contribution

My first memory was of being held near a bare light bulb in a darkened room. In time I was told that was the doctor’s office I was taken to when, at 6 months of age, I fell out of a Morris chair. As a child I had napped on a sofa with wooden panels in the back, and when the wind stirred them to a little rattle I placed the sound to be coming from a place called China. That room was dark the evening I stood near the doorway, just where our no longer used gaslight jet hung on the wall. There was the small light of the floor model radio on the far wall and a voice describing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. No one explained what it meant, but this was the beginning of a focus for me that has kept going without letup, like the battery bunny.

There was ritual attendance at Sunday school, confirmation classes and church - memorable Biblical history lessons - but most engaging was the series of films about the Holocaust brought to be shown there on Sunday evenings when I was about 14. And when I came to teach in New York I was soon invited to join the Jewish teacher’s association, all my friends were Jewish, my 7-year partner was Jewish, with her parents we celebrated all the holidays. Many Fridays I went from the blackboard jungle of JHS 99 to Temple Emmanuel for the cantors and service. I had loved the experience of Israel and could readily have been a convert.

The war of my childhood was experienced in the trenches we dug in a vacant lot, the defective grenades we gathered at a nearby foundry, evening war news reading, the newsreels at family Saturday movies, the bringing of ration stamps to the butcher shop on the corner of our street.

Although I heard every variant of the n-word from the men in our family I think they would have been appalled, had they witnessed the lynching that occurred not far away from our home and my mother's family farm in Indiana. Boarding the streetcar for a nickel on the corner near my house, one rode through Cincinnati’s West End, the historic residential appendage to the downtown. Those folks had moved to suburbs with indoor plumbing and African Americans had moved in. I can recall the odor of the blacks who boarded the streetcar. It was quite similar to that emanating from the jackets of my farm family. Out there we had regular baths in a small tub every Saturday afternoon. The Aymara who rode the buses in Peru provided a similar experience. Clouds of dust required the windows be shut, and it was said, they never bathed.

All our [Carl and Peter] histories differ in detail but are in so many ways shared. I was particularly attuned to the way in which your. siblings remember and disremember. My 6-year older sister is from my father's earlier marriage. She came to live with us when I was 4 but, despite my detailed memory  of those years and counter to even the photographic evidence, I didn’t record her presence for about the first five years. (Who is this intruder?)