The Very First Thing I Remember

By Larry Carbone

The author is a lifelong resident of Connecticut. The Very First Thing I Remember is a story about a boy growing up in one of the largest cities in the statean old mill town that had seen better years. The story is told through the eyes of a five-year-old child growing into adolescence.

The voyage that the main character takes in this story is not that special or even particularly interesting in the eyes of the author. This book is simply him telling a little story about his own personal journey into learning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546235804

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© 2018 Larry Carbone. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/26/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-3581-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-3580-4 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1   The Very First Thing I Remember…

Chapter 2   Long Hot Summers

Chapter 3   The Family

Chapter 4   The Newcomer

Chapter 5   Places

Chapter 6   My Father

Chapter 7   The Others

Chapter 8   The Journey Into Learning

The Places Lived In Connecticut Thru Grade 12

The Schools Attended

CHAPTER ONE

The Very First Thing I Remember…

The very first thing I remember is Teddy. Teddy, the brother of Nettie, Marsha, Butchie, and Guy.

I was born in a place called Yellow Mill Village and later lived in what was called a triple-decker apartment house in Bridgeport, Connecticut on a busy street called Barnum Avenue.

The apartment’s address was 1061 Barnum Avenue, Bridgeport, Connecticut. I always practiced saying this just in case I got lost. I always made sure I knew my phone number, too.

The apartment house we lived in, like so many others in the neighborhood, was made of wood and was three stories high with two apartments on each floor.

In this case, though, the first floor had two small businesses in it instead of apartments.

One was a Chinese laundry, and the other is gone from my memory now, but it was another privately operated business of some sort.

Like a clock, my mother paid rent to Mrs. Magilnick, the owner, always on time.

Every month I would marvel at this person that my mother would let in the door, sit down, and have coffee with. I remember this very large purse she carried, God, who is this person?, I would ask myself, How could anyone have so much money going into a purse?

Mrs. Magilnick always said my mother kept the apartment very clean and that made me feel good.

My mother was on state aid and city aid. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were poor, plain and simple, poor.

Me, my sister Joanne, and my mother all lived in a four room apartment that was heated by the kitchen stove. If you had a real chill, you stood there by the stove and tried to get warm. This apartment was what was called, a cold water flat.

There was this little thing you could do though. Some kind of tool could be used to remove one of the burner covers from the kitchen stove and boy, was it warm then!

We lived in railroad rooms. They were okay because you could see everything. The kitchen was on one end and the living room was on the other end.

So, to get from the kitchen to the living room the trip took you through the two bedrooms.

One bedroom was for me and my older sister where we slept in twin beds. Our room was right after the kitchen and the next room was my mother’s room.

The end room was the living room and it faced Barnum Avenue.

There was one more very little room too, off the living room. We called it the toy room.

Our apartment was on the second floor of this apartment house. Each apartment had a hallway running alongside the rooms.

At one end of this hallway was our bathroom. At the other end was our front door that led down a flight of stairs to the street.

There were two of these triple-decker houses, side by side and the first level of each had little businesses in them. Mrs. Magilnick owned both. She owned everything.

Right outside my bedroom window was this Chinese laundry place. Once in a while, I would jump down from my bedroom window and onto the roof of that laundry and fool around there.

Everyone always said that the Chinese people would eat cats, which I thought was disgusting, so I always looked around for cat bones. I never found any. If I ever did though, I would have reported them to the police.

I didn’t really like cats very much, but I didn’t like the idea of people eating them either.

Even though we slept in the same bedroom, my sister Joanne and I would go to bed at different times. This was because she was four years older than me.

I would usually stay awake when I went to bed though so that I could bother her when she got to bed later. I didn’t think it was fair that she could stay up later than me.

I remember one night when we got into an argument about this doll she had. Somehow, I had one end of the doll, she had the other end, and we were both pulling it like in a tug-a-war.

Well, the doll ripped in half. I had the head and top end in my hands and Joanne had the legs in her hands. Joanne started crying and my mother came running in to see what the commotion was all about.

After she saw what had happened, she looked around for me, but I was already hiding under the covers of my bed. My mother calmed Joanne down after a few minutes and promised to buy her a new doll.

Then she reached over for me, pulled back the bed covers, and gave me a few smacks…. hard ones, and told me to keep my hands off of Joanne’s dolls.

Before Barnum Avenue we lived in a different place, but I don’t have much memory of it. I was born there though.

That was a place called Yellow Mill Village. Later, this place was called Father Panic Village, and later still, became a parking lot.

This village was a very large area with many, many brick apartment houses in it with hundreds of people living there.

I think we moved to Barnum Avenue when I was still a baby.

The toy room:

One day, when I was about four years old, some very large men came to our apartment on Barnum Avenue and went into this little toy room we had.

I couldn’t figure out how it could be that these guys were interested in my toys.

As it turned out, it wasn’t my toys they were interested in, but instead, it was my father.

It seems that he had stolen money from the local Savings and Loan association and hid the money in the toy room.

Anyways, I didn’t really have any idea what this was all about at the time. I only knew that the toy room had been entered by these big strangers. My sister Joanne didn’t seem to care though.

It was many years before I saw my father again. Many, many years. Life on Barnum Avenue, Bridgeport was pretty good.

Every single day I had the same routine. I would either be in school or not, but it did not matter. I had a routine and it meant that me, and my friend Teddy had to get together, period.

Teddy was one of the many people that lived in an apartment upstairs from me, one of very many people.

Teddy’s family lived one flight up and one flight over from me. He lived in a four- room apartment like I did. In his case though, there were many, many people living in that apartment. I don’t think he even had a Toy Room.

There was Teddy, my friend. There was Nettie, his sister, my friend too. There was the little baby boy named Guy, kind of my friend. There was Butchie. He was big. There was Marsha, she was big too. There was Leona, the mother, she was old, and there was someone else, the father, also old. Every grown-up seemed old to me.

I didn’t really know the father, but one day he just died. My mother told me that he died in bed because they could not afford for him to go to a hospital.

I don’t know for sure what he died from, but somehow I think it was TB, whatever that was.

Teddy was the best friend I ever had. We did everything together. We walked around garbage can rims. We threw rocks. We roller-skated together. We played ball together. We ate crackers together, and we even gave crackers away, together.

We would play