Living with My Aunt & Cousin

Living with my Aunt and Cousin during WWII

Shortly after we originally moved to the fire station, my dad had to leave for the Navy. Mom and I were left alone in the apartment and I guess that she and my aunt Imajean, her sister decided that it would be beneficial for all to live together in my aunt and Uncle’s stucco house on 4th Avenue East. My Uncle Swede, as I called him was also in the Armed Service, the US Coast Guard.
My cousin was 2 years younger than me but we were like brothers. We shared the same bedroom and combined our toys and had a great time playing together. He had bunk beds and I’m not sure, but they may have been purchase when I moved in.

I am not exactly sure of the time when we lived together, but I know I was about five and he was three. We had wonderful times together playing our imaginary games on his bunk beds. We both had a lot of toy trucks building block, Lincoln logs and books. Every night Aunt Imagine and Mom would take turns reading to us.

Mom had a part time job working at the “Red Circle”, a very small grocery store located on about West 5th Street not too far from the Lincoln school. The owners were very good a friend of mom and dad and hired mom to help out for some extra money while dad was in the Navy. Art and Blanch Woolsteincroft were their names. They had no children but were very active in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Art and Blanch were to play a very important roll in my life later in my story.

Art & Blanch Woolsteincroft and Me

Art and Blanch had no children, but they did have dogs. (Two real purebred bulldogs, Pudge and Shorty). Pudge was the mother of Shorty. They took very good care of the dogs and treated them just like children. I can recall going over to their house and playing with the dogs. I also remember going to their small grocery store and watching Art cut meat for the small meat case that was there in the store.

Other things I remember about living with Aunt Imagine and Webb where the fun times Webb and I had playing in the sandbox and in the garden. In the fall after the produce was pretty well harvested from the garden, Webb and I would glean the green bean stocks and place the dried-up leftover beans and place them in containers. We did this hour after hour.

Webb and I in the sandbox

Webb and I in the garden

One particularly bad experience in the garden was when we discovered the rotting leftover tomatoes. We decided it would be fun to through them at the stucco house. Well you can about imagine what the reaction to this fun time event was to Mom and Aunt Imagine. The scolded us, I remember there were no spankings, but were given a pail of water and a rag and instructed to clean off the tomatoes from the stucco walls and deposit the remains of the tomatoes
In the garbage cans in the ally behind the house. Needless to say I have never thrown a tomato at anything since then