We lived in a house on Vine Street until I was five. It was a two bedroom wooden house my dad and my uncle Sam had built. It was on a plot of land adjacent to my maternal grandparents house that they had given my folks as a wedding present. It was a small house set toward the front of a long narrow property with a small front yard and an open field in the back. It was located on a quiet street with ditches rather than sidewalks toward the eastern edge of town.

What few memories I have are somewhat random. I remember my dad’s old wooden fishing boat rotting in the tall grass behind the house. I remember we had a dog, a collie who’s name escapes me, who one day disappeared. We were told at the time that he had gone to live on a farm. I only learned later that his removal was caused by him trying to eat my then infant brother Michael. And there was no farm. I remember watching the French explode an atom bomb in the South Pacific on a grainy black and white television in the living room and even at my young age I sensed that this wasn’t a good thing. I remember twice having my stomach pumped after trying to expand my culinary palate…once with a bottle of aspirin and once with a pack of Lucky Strikes, thankfully unfiltered. I remember that one time my mom sent me to the corner store to buy some “snails”. I didn’t know that she meant the spiral shaped pastry and I was pretty sure the didn’t sell molluscs at the corner store so I came home with a can of beans.

I never knew my maternal grandfather, Frank Brown, who died a few months before I was born. What I know of him comes from stories my mother told me. He had been born in Kansas and had come out to California as a young man. He settled in Los Angeles where he married and had three daughters. But when the marriage didn’t work out he headed north and took a job as field supervisor for Holly Sugar, working the sugar beet fields in the delta. Soon he met my grandmother and they settled in the obscure hamlet of Clyde, just north of Concord in the East Bay, where he sired two more daughters before moving to Stockton. He was a kind man, by all accounts, with an intellectual frame of mind. He was an avid reader who liked his drink and could often be found in one of the Skid Row bars until late in the evening. One Sunday in the spring of 1953 he lay down for a nap that is still on going.

As for my grandmother, who we called “Nanna”, my memories are few. We saw little of her after we moved from Vine Street until she passed when I was eleven after a lengthy stay in a nursing home following a massive stroke. She was the daughter of an English doctor who had emigrated to California when she was ten to work for the railroad. The family had come from British aristocracy and were used to servants and the finer things. My memories of Vine Street were that her brother Charley lived with her, doing chores around the place. Charley was the only grownup I knew who rode a bicycle. I remember that she kept chickens. Mean, vicious chickens. My later memories were of visiting her in the nursing home, with it’s pale green walls, and of her open casket funeral which made quite an impression on me being my first encounter with a dead person. By all accounts she was a formidable woman who loved a good argument…or a bad argument or any excuse for an argument…and would take on all comers. My mom often said that Nanna went through life looking for a worthy opponent.

Shortly after my brother Michael was born my mom, who had contracted rheumatic fever as a child, suffered a bout of chronic heart failure and went into the hospital for an extended stay. Our family had outgrown our small two bedroom house…Michael was sleeping in a crib in the living room which he would soon outgrow…the decision was made to sell the house and move. So with my dad needing help raising four kids while working a full time job we moved in with his parents across town on Rose Street while the house was readied for sale.