West 8th Street Years

Me and cousin Terry, obviously collecting beer bottles,
 while  I played tight-rope walker!  Not sure whose house
this was, not Sander Street.  Likely Aunt Clara's or
Aunt Dot's on West 8th.

While things could be crazy at my house when I was a kid, I was and still am thankful for my Dad's family, the Deans, who always picked up the pieces and put my life back together and gave me some wonderful memories.    I remember both of my aunts living on West 8th Street during most of my childhood, one on one side and the other right across the street. 

Aunt Clara and Uncle Ray's house on the left

Aunt Dot and Uncle Bill's on the right

I stayed a while at one house and then carried my bag across the street to spend time at the other house.  Aunt Dot taught me how to cook and iron shirts.  Uncle Bill wore white dress shirts to work every day, and they had to be ironed, so she set the ironing board up in the living room and I got to getting those white shirts ironed and hung on hangers.  I didn't realize it was work.

Then across the street at Aunt Clara's I also cooked.  She taught me how to make chili for the first time.  She sewed on the old treadle sewing machine she inherited from Grandma, and she liked to take in her own clothes to fit me.  She taught me how to apply make up and style my hair.  

I played with my younger cousins and did some junior babysitting too.

Aunt Clara with baby Tommy, her first child.

A few years later, Tommy on the far right.  From left, Billy, Ruthie, and Marylou.
Billy and Marylou were Aunt Dot's first two children.  Ruthie was Tommy's
younger sister.

1950s Dean Cousins:  From Left:  Cathy, Marylou, Susan, Ruthie with arm around little sister Jeanie, Linda, and Billy.
Cathy and Linda are Uncle Norb's children, and so is Terry, pictured above with me
Aunt Dot's Susan is new to this photo

An early photo of Uncle Ray, Aunt Clara's husband

with Grandma in the background

Aunt Dot holding Susan, to right Marylou and Billy

Party at our house on Sander Street

My First Communion -- Uncle Ray in foreground with

hand on my sister Donna's head

Especially fun in my Dean family were the parties.  Oh, how the Deans liked to party.  Besides celebrating every Catholic traditional milestone with table loads of food and buckets of cold soft drinks, commercial sized cans of potato chips and pretzels, and the ever popular beer, they also celebrated New Years in grand style.

This is an early photo of a Dean Party.  From left: Uncle Ray and Aunt Clara,
Aunt Janice and Uncle "Junior," either dating or newlyweds, Aunt Dot
holding baby-pobably Billy, Grandma with my laid-back father's arm around her and
his other hand on his beer.  Foreground left Marylou, right looks like Ruthie?

This had to be taken in Grandma's attic apartment on McMillan Avenue.  Look at the tiny windows.
And I think Uncle Junior is wearing his army shirt.  I can barely see a patch on one arm.  If so, he
and Aunt Janice are still dating.

 Someone said something funny!  Grandma with Marylou and Ruthie on lap,

Aunt Dot with probably baby Billy, Aunt Clara and Uncle Ray laughing,

Uncle Junior and Aunt Janice, definitely still dating, and Tommy in front.

And I love this one!

Grandma, Aunt Clara, Uncle Ray, and Aunt Dot!

"Prost!"

How to Write Interesting Family Histories

Found this gem a while back and pinned it to my Pinterest "Family History" board .  Decided to take a closer look at it today, and, as my Dad used to say, "Katie, bar the door."

Meaning, this is an awesome find!

Just reading the sample gave me more information on structuring my book, and then how to make it a lot more interesting to read, than almost anything I've read to date...and I've read more books than I can count.

Click on the book to go to the site where you can download a sample...best to download the HTML sample, as it is longer than the Kindle, though I purchased the book as a Kindle.

I have to holler when I find something that makes me happy, or something that's just plain good and affordable.  So here it is.

Now back to writing my, now, more "interesting" family history.

Selling Sander Street

St. George and surrounding area (collection of Kevin Grace, Archives and Rare Books) University of Cincinnati.  Used with Permission

Our house was in the block behind the church

In November 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower won re-election against Democrat challenger Adlai Stevenson. The following spring, I was walking a mile farther back and forth to school at St. George because we had moved to Mt. Auburn.

The 1950s saw a lot of changes, and one of those was our street being sold to the University of Cincinnati for construction of a new female dormitory, Sander Hall.

I haven’t been able to find the exact dates of the transactions that caused Sander Street to be sold and demolished, but it was in the mid-’50s. 

In a weird twist of fate, after building the 27-story dormitory, it was demolished in recent years, making national news for being one of the newest buildings in American history to be imploded. It was like Sander Street disappearing all over again.  

You can watch it fall here

Sander Hall Implosion

.  

I wish I knew how much Dad and Uncle Norb, and the other residents on our street were paid for their homes, but I don’t remember ever hearing the figures.

The city directory tells me that Uncle Norb and Aunt Vera had moved by 1956 to Glendora Street. I don’t remember them moving, which surprises me. I’ve remembered so much. Why wouldn’t I recall my cousins and Aunt and Uncle moving out of the Sander Street House?

I really don’t remember us moving either, just that it was in 1957, because I remember walking from our new home at 123 Inwood Place, through Inwood Park, crossing Vine Street, walking up Hollister Street to McMillan Avenue, and then on up to Calhoun Street, to St. George when I was in the eighth grade, which would have been 1957.  The weather was warm, so it would have been spring.

I also remember missing my Sander Street friends, especially Joanie Leminck, who obviously had to move as well, but I always imagined them still living on the old street long after we’d moved.

Leaving the home we had lived in the longest at that point marked the change from child to young adult for me. It signaled my coming of age, and rather quickly at that. Inwood Place was no Sander Street.

I’d lived on a street that, in the 1950s, children played outside until dark and were safe, few people owned cars and you could skate or ride your bike in middle of the street.

The neighbors all knew each other and congregated outside on the stoops in the evenings. You danced and played outside in your bathing suit in the summer rain. The church and school were a block away as was the corner grocery, the “dime store” (think today’s dollar stores), the local saloon, the library, and the “show,” the neighborhood theater, which is now Bogart's, on Short Vine.

A time where boredom was practically unheard of for kids.

I walked to my Grandma's apartment from Sander Street, and learned to take the city bus downtown by myself.  One year I decided to take ballet classes and rode the bus downtown to the Harris Rosedale School of Dance on Fifth Street.  

I can’t say my childhood was all bad, though some parts were. 

At some point, a kid has to grow up and begin counting the good things and chalking the bad things up as experiences that make you who are today: My experiences made me strong and capable, with a motto that everyone makes mistakes, including our parents. You just have to realize they always did the best they could, and then you have to go out and make a good life for yourself.

Korea. People Didn't Care

Been reading up on the Korean War and the communism fear of the 1950s, because my Uncle Frank "Junior" was in that war.  I've been told it was one of the most bloody wars yet.  Hard to imagine, remembering Vietnam.  But I just read that nearly 5 million people died, more than half of them civilians.

Also noted on History.com  that the "... rate of civilian casualties was higher than World War II’s and Vietnam’s. Almost 40,000 Americans died in action in Korea, and more than 100,000 were wounded."

Corporal Frank E. Dean, U.S. Army, Korea

Uncle "Junior" was Grandma's youngest, and I remember her worrying about him, just like she worried about her two older sons, my Dad and Uncle Norb, when they served in WWII.  

I was worried about Uncle Junior.  I was also worried about "the bomb" the adults kept talking about coming for us from Russia.  It was a scary time for a kid who didn't understand everything on the nightly news.  

I watched a YouTube today by a Korean War vet describing the Homecoming, who said when he came home, people in the U.S. really weren't interested in hearing about the war.  It was five years since WWII, and Korea was a different war that didn't get all the same publicity or interest.  

I found that sad.

But then, I find war sad, period.  Still, I'm proud of my Dean family heritage of helping protect our country.  And I thank God they all returned home in one piece.

Grandma's Sewing Machine

 By the time I was old enough to observe a sewing machine in Grandma's apartment, or even know what one was, Grandma had given her Domestic treadle machine to her youngest daughter, my Aunt Clara, the one who sewed.

I do remember the machine at Aunt Clara's house, because she took in some of her own clothes, widening the seams and shortening the hems, to fit me.  I was about 10 at the time.

I remember one summer she sewed one of her bathing suits to fit me.  She was a pretty talented seamstress.

When I was 14 and  taking "sewing" class in Catholic high school, Aunt Clara and Uncle Ray brought the old Domestic to our house in Mt. Auburn and placed it in my room, a narrow, walled-in, unheated back porch that I'd claimed for myself.  I was the oldest, and we only had one bedroom in the house for a family of eight.  A hot water bottle froze solid in that back-porch room in the winter, but it was my own private retreat, for reading, writing, listening to '50s rock 'n roll music on my transistor radio,  and sewing.

When I wasn't sewing, I'd keep the top lid closed, and it became my dressing table, with a round mirror that swiveled on its base from normal to magnifying, a pretty doily, and my makeup and hair brush.

Aunt Clara taught me how to make the treadle work that night when she delivered the machine to me.  We used electric machines in school, but I got the treadle's rhythm going and figured the rest out by next morning, and I began making my own clothes.

I was a small girl, so a half-yard of fabric could make me a pretty skirt, and a whole yard was more than enough for a slim dress.  Eventually I could make a dress in one day to wear to a dance or party that night.  When I switched to public high school, I could make a dress the night before to wear the next day.

I did have one mishap that almost lost me my machine.  I was racing down a long seam one evening faster than I should have been going, when suddenly the needle stopped with a metallic thud sound and a prolonged HUM-M-M.  Dad happened to be in the next room and heard it, came in and stared at the thick needle embedded in my right index finger, a breath away from the nail.

He picked up my finger with the broken needle sticking in it and took me downstairs to the dining room and plunged the finger into a bowl of peroxide.  My mother's face went white and she had to sit down before she fainted.

Dad said, "I told you not to run your finger so close to the needle.  Now look what you've done."
I kept silently repeating in my head, "Don't take my machine away, don't take it away, don't..."

He didn't take it away.  And he couldn't watch me sew anymore.  Neither could Mom.  I never ran the needle into a finger again.  I had a scar to remind me for a long time.

We moved to Klotter Avenue, Over-the-Rhine, in 1961 and the Domestic went into the room I was to share with my three sisters.  I left shortly thereafter to move in with girlfriends.  I did not take my sewing machine with me.  I wasn't sewing anymore.

I came back home for a short time before I got married in 1963, when I moved out permanently.  I forgot about my sewing machine until 1987.  I'd bought an electric machine when my daughters were small so I could make dresses for them.

In 1987, however, when I was living in Tennessee, I visited my parents and Dad made the comment, "I have something of yours in my room."  This was by the time he had a room crammed full of stuff upstairs that nobody was allowed to enter.

I thought for a few minutes, and then I remembered.  Grandma's sewing machine?  He confirmed that he had it.  And I suddenly wanted it.

He said, "I've been keeping it all these years.  It's the only thing of my mother's I have."

My eyes got tears.  Serious eyes looked at me, "Do you promise you'll keep it, take care of it?"

"Yes," I said, "I'll keep it forever."

"You won't spill any more paint on it?"  He grinned.  Referring to the time I painted my back-porch room a light mint green and failed to cover my sewing machine.

I said, "That paint is still on it?"  He replied he kept it just like it was when I left it.

I wondered if the green paint held a memory for him.  You never knew with my father.  He didn't say a lot of things he felt.

People have asked me if I planned to ever refinish the machine, but I haven't and I won't.  Green back-porch bedroom paint will always be a memory.

And it's the only thing I have of my father's mother.

Challenge Writing!

Today, February 1st, starts the month-long Family History Writing Challenge and I've been taking a critical look at my outline, the one I started last February and have edited and changed more times than I can count.

I changed it, hopefully, one last time yesterday.  I'm mostly in the rewrite stage, which will take me most of the way through the month.  Then the last edit (I hope).

Then comes the publishing, which I'm doing through CreateSpace and Amazon.

I haven't been letting myself think too much about the publishing and having a book on Amazon, but now those thoughts are starting to creep in at all hours of the day and night.  I tell them to go away, because I still have much to do.

Over the past couple of years, I've had lots of ups and downs with this book.  On top of the world one day over discovering some fact or person that had stayed hidden from me for so long.  And then a few days later telling myself to just quit because the project was too big, it would take me the rest of my life.  And I'm sure not getting any younger.

What kept me going was telling myself to just keep writing.  Don't think.  Just keep writing.  Keep putting words on the page and don't worry if they make sense.

Then I found out about The Family History Blog-to-Book, and the writing got easier.  Just write a short story, I'd tell myself.  Just one story.

And here I am at the next challenge, almost not believing I've come this far.

I have two more books on the shelf ready to dive into when this one is published, bound, and sitting on the "Finished Shelf."    Life is good.  Today it is.

Pinterest Genealogy

Just found out Geneabloggers is on Pinterest.  Must have been snoozing, or had my head buried too deep in my Family History Book!  Sure glad I found it though.  It's beyond expectations.

I had to pry myself away there's so much interesting, but before I unstuck myself I had to check out the  Geneabloggers Social Media board.  One of the pages here has some good info about Facebook, whether you do genealogy or not.  Always finding things we didn't know...