Years on the 7s #2: 1947

What about the other years ending in 7? Let's go deep, back to 1947.

This is the year I go from being a little 4-year-old kid at home to being a little 5-year-old kid in school, starting kindergarten at Sheridan No. 8, the two-room school at the end of our grape vineyard.

I jump straight from kindergarten to second grade in 1948, precocious little brat that I am. I demonstrate my brilliance by studying the calendar and telling people what day of the week a particular date is later in the year.

I have one brother, Tom, two years younger, who's my playmate, and mom is expecting. My father's widowed mother, Albertina, born in 1877 and who talks to my dad in her native Swedish, lives with us and babysits.

We're out in the country in a big brick 19th century Italianate house on a busy corner. Three miles down U.S. Route 20 to Fredonia. Three miles down State Route 39 to Dunkirk and the Alco plant where my father works as a welder. 

We have cats. We have chickens in our chicken coop. We have a Farmall Cub tractor in the barn. We grow strawberries, raspberries, cherries, peaches, corn, string beans and grapes, lots of grapes. Three acres of them. 

We have radio, with soap operas and comedy shows and hit novelty songs like "Open the Door, Richard," "Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette" and "Peg of My Heart" in harmonica and accordion versions.

        We have a party-line telephone, a Fredonia number, shared among eight households. 

        We have a 1939 Chevy business coupe, the one with no back seat, just a rubber mat. Tom and I sit back there on little wooden stools for those trips to visit mom's parents in Sheffield, Pa., in the spring and at Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Tucked among hills, Sheffield is a tiny town, so small that there's only one insurance agent, Grandpa John Keller. He drives a pre-war Packard. Mom's mother had a stroke a couple years earlier. Her name was Mable, and we called her the Grandma Who Walks With a Cane. She died in 1946. My grandfather would remarry and outlive his second wife too, who we always call by her name, Dora.