We were poor but so was everyone else. My parents worked very hard like everyone else. As children we were not as affected by the difficult circumstance as our parents were but even we knew times were not good. We had just the bare necessities in terms of furniture but we had an upright piano. Still there were people worse off than we were. As I told you, my mother always had someone to help her with the house and our clothes. The black women who did that work also had families and kids to care for and their own housework to do. 31ST AND CUMBERLAND Just about the time I reached adolescence we moved to 31st and Cumberland. I was in Fitz- simon’s Junior High School before we moved. Later, when we moved again, I went to Simon Gratz High School. Our new address was 3512 N. 31st Street. The house was nice; it had a straw-weave rug on the living room floor. We lived there for two or three years. Pearl and I wanted to surprise our parents so we went to our uncles’ Max and Char- ley’s store to buy things for the house such as a lamp and a picture for the wall, for example. Later I would see the same ugly picture hanging on a wall at my boyfriend, Marvin’s parents’ house.
NOT SO SWEET CHARITY The first charity camp I attended when I was about ten years old was awful; the food they served to us kids you wouldn’t feed to pigs. I remember looking at my plate and seeing these balls of fat that were to be my dinner. I thought I was so clever when I discovered I could drop them, one by one, onto the floor. But someone squealed on me. They gave me a tablespoon of castor oil as a punishment. After dinner they passed out lolli- pops and when my sister tried to give me a lick they stopped her. I am sure someone was making money selling that slop, but doing that to chil- dren still makes me angry. They should have been arrested. As a child you can’t protect yourself in these situations; as an adult I sure would have something to say. THE BOTTOM RUNGS OF THE LADDER We lived at 30th and Dauphin streets until I was fourteen years old. And so most of my child- hood was spent growing up in two very similar neighborhoods under similar conditions. I had two close girlfriends when we lived at 30th and Dauphin. One was Molly Freed, the other was Miriam Silverman. It would be so nice if we could see each other again after all the years that have gone by.
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30th and Dauphin (2013)
31st and Cumberland (2013)
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