When I was thinking of a clever name for this blog I thought back to my distant past to the neighborhood in Buffalo where I lived for my first five years, and often visited afterwards to my Grandparent’s house. Summer vacations days were spent there during my early elementary school years as both my parents worked. My brother and I were commuter kids, dropped off by Mom in the morning and retrieved in the evening to return to the suburbs. Kaisertown was, and still is, a working class neighborhood on Buffalo’s East side populated predominantly by people of the Polish persuasion. That “Polishness”, rooted in staunch Catholicism and a love for Polka music, was the early foundation of my persona.
I was pretty much a free-range child, given to long
wanderings to places I probably shouldn’t have gone. I learned to love all the things an
industrial neighborhood has to offer.
Kelburn Street, the home to the Arendts and Daruszkas who begat my parents,
dead ended into the massive Worthington Pump Works. I would walk to the top of the Bailey Avenue
Bridge to watch the trains ply the rails that fed the city’s industries and carried
its products to places I could never imagine.
This would feed a life-long fascination with all things railroad.
My parents were typical of their generation. We lived with my Mom’s parents long enough
for them to save enough to buy a house in the burbs. My Dad was a World War II vet who never much talked
about his experiences. He wasn’t one of
those go to the VFW Hall kind of guys who reminisced about the war over drinks. My Mom was a sharp cookie. She went to secretarial school and worked her
whole life. I always wondered about
friends’ mothers who stayed at home. My
brother and I were latchkey kids during the school year, with defined duties
that were essential to the smooth functioning of the household. Chores first, play later. My friends who weren’t burdened with these responsibilities
would be out having a grand time long before I could join them. I learned discipline and how to cook, things
I would later find invaluable in adult life.
We were treated fairly and never wanted for much. All in all it was a pretty idyllic childhood.
While my folks were pretty much straight arrows the same
could not be said for my Grandfathers, who were strange in their own ways. Both were reformed alcoholics and both put
their respective families through endless hell until they sobered up for
good. Grandpa Daruszka was remote and
sometimes scary. Going to his house
often felt like punishment. Grandpa
Arendt on the other hand was a fun guy capable of doing crazy stuff for the
express entertainment of his grandsons.
Spending time at his house was something to always look forward to. One lived at 89 Kelburn, the other at
98. I rarely wanted to cross the street
from heaven to hell. Grandma Daruszka
was my Father’s stepmother, his mother having died when he was 17. Grandma Arendt was the chief cook and bottle
washer at 89. There was always something
to eat on the table or in the fridge.
She always wanted people to eat, and eat we did. I became a chubby little kid, something that
would factor into my later role as target for the bully brigades.
I entered the world on November 1, 1950 at Millard Filmore
Hospital. And so, the story begins.
