The Move to Philadelphia

I was 8 years old and partway through the third grade when we moved to Philadelphia:

In early December of 1961 my dad's mentor passed away in my dad's car as they were returning from lunch. My father's career had been advancing rapidly and there was apparently a lot of resentment among the staff in the St. Louis office. Within a week he was offered a sales manager position on the east coast. We were originally supposed to move to Boston but that changed to Philadelphia a week later. My mom was absolutely convinced the change had something to do with an old girlfriend dad had in Philadelphia. Dad claimed he had no idea what my mom was talking about. Regardless, everything happened within a few weeks.

BTW - As soon as our house went up for sale we got a visit from some of our neighbors to make sure we weren't going to sell the house to the 'wrong' kind of people (yes, they used the n-word). My parents were unsettled by the visit - they were recent immigrants so the whole racial bigotry thing was kind of new to them... That was one of the problems with growing up during the baby boom - it was the best of times if you were a white male - not so good for everyone else...

On December 29th, 1961 we all hopped in the Chevy (including Bozo the retriever) and headed east. It was an uneventful trip except for Bozo going nuts in the tunnels (I mentioned that in an earlier post). We arrived at the George Washington Motor Lodge in Valley Forge right around 11PM on New Year's Eve. We turned the TV and the first thing we saw was a "Chock Full o'Nuts Coffee" commercial - we all had a good laugh over that :-) And the next day we dropped Bozo off at a kennel in Norristown and moved into the Marriott that used to be on City Avenue just off the Schuylkill Expressway.

It took a while to find a new house. Dad had to fly back to St. Louis to finalize the sale on the Lakeshire place and retrieve my mom's new 62 Valiant (aptly named Val). So we ended up staying at the Marriott for about a month. That was fun :-) By the time we moved into the new house I was attending Waldron Academy and my sister was at Overbrook (private Catholic girls school on Haverford Rd.- also not there anymore). Both schools were in the northwest suburbs across the Schuylkill (pronounced 'SKOOcull') River from Philadelphia so we were apparently focused on that part of town - I have no idea why...

We ended up buying an old house on Bewley Rd. in Havertown. The prior owners were moving because they had 14 children and were expecting twins... The house may have been cramped for a family of 18, but was plenty big for a family of 4 (three stories plus a finished basement on a 20,000 sq ft lot). The kitchen was huge. It had a counter down the center long enough for 16 people to eat at. It was a really cool house. Bozo loved it - he liked to run up and down stairs and that house had a lot of stairs.

Sidebar: Bozo had this bizarre quirk. If you were standing with your feet apart he would try and run between your legs. And if you met him on the stairs he'd go between you and the closest wall - if there wasn't enough room he'd knock your legs out from under you. Standing in the middle didn't help either - he'd wait until you moved to one side or the other and then run through the narrower gap. So if you were on the stairs and heard him coming it was advisable to move a little bit to one side, stop and grab the railing. But I digress...

It's going to be tough to tell the story of the Philadelphia years. That's when everything fell apart... My dad was out of work about a fourth of the time we lived there. Yet we continued to maintain a very affluent lifestyle... I became an obnoxious, arrogant little ass (it came quite naturally to me)... My sister spent her days reading True Romance magazines and eating everything in sight... My parents screamed at each other constantly. My father spent more time at the Cynwyd Club than at home... My mother was having both physical and mental health issues...
It seemed like we were living separate lives under the same roof. And worst of all - there wasn't much of anything amusing about it :-) But amusing or not there were some interesting bits and that's what I'm going to focus on...