My Grandfather was a Captain in the Civil War in the Northern Army from Kansas. After the war, he started a Drug store at first supplied by native Americans on a nearby Indian Reservation. They collected medicinal herbs that he sold. He started this drug store I believe in the early 1870s and ran it until he sold it around 1925. And then he lived until he was 105 years old. I figure in order to be 20 years old by about 1860 he had to have been born in 1840 or thereabouts which would mean he lived until around 1945 before he passed away. My Grandfather was born on his farm in Kansas and his baseball name was Pinky and he was a baseball pitcher (at that time with red hair). But, by the time I remember him he was completely grey in hair by the early 1950s (I was 2 in 1950 in Seattle) and I lived on my grandfather's 2 1/2 acres there with my mother and father, my aunt and Uncle and their two kids a boy and a girl, my grandmother and grandfather, and my mother's mother lived with us. I am the last one alive of any of them now.
My Grandma and Grandpa had their own house and we lived in one of the duplexes built next to and down the hill from the garage on the 2 1/2 acres in Lake Forest Park. It rained and snowed a lot I remember and it was cold a lot too. There was no TV then just a radio and a record player for entertainment but I loved walking out past the washing machine and dryer to eat raspberries and boysenberries and black berries growing outside there from ages 2 to 4 years old. Next to me then were many Black cherry trees and apple trees. Sometimes my mother made Cherry pie or Apple pie or a combination or would make Boysenberry or Raspberry compotes for desserts.
At 4 years of age in 1952 my father drove his 1941 Buick that his brother had bought before he disappeared in World War II flying a plane. So, he drove this by himself to San Diego and my mother and I and her mother got on the train and rode it to San Diego from Seattle. We never moved back. So, I missed my Dad's Mom and Dad a lot and my aunt and uncle and my two older cousins. But, some summers they would come and swim with us at Zuma beach when I was 8 and we almost all drowned together when we were all (all the cousins and my California cousin too) were all swept out to sea in a rip tide and 5 lifeguards had to save us. I really thought I was going to die because I couldn't swim yet, especially when they took away my life raft and made me just grab the orange float they carried. Then the waves beat me down into the surf because they were 5 to 7 feet high where we had to come in so I was bouncing off the bottom in the sand there and it kept knocking the wind out of me. My Uncle was asleep on the beach and missed all the excitement. So, that was interesting. I was 6 years old before my father bought us a TV because I spent so much time next door at a friends house watching theirs. This was 1954. It was a 17 inch black and white portable TV. I watched Disneyland, and Superman and Maverick and Leave it to Beaver then. And later I like Bewitched. I also liked the Rifleman and Davey Crocket and Daniel Boone on Disneyland.
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