Part I Childhood
Of the eight sections under this heading, seven are devoted mainly to the years up through 1925. The divisions are topical and the arrangement concentric. We move outward from the "nuclear family" (311 Lyon Street) to life with Grandpa and Grandma Shafer (The Farm on Laraway Road), camping experiences (Herring Lake and Tours through Michigan); on to family social life (The Powers' and Other) and Visits to Father's relatives (Canadian and Other Cousins); and on to early education (Fountain Street School) to piano lessons and the Episcopal Boys' choir and camp (Music and Church). The last section, or epilogue, looks out to adolescence and beyond (From 1925 on).
The sections overlap not only in time but also in theme. A theme developed in one section is sometimes introduced in earlier or repeated in later ones. Even the slow dissolve that we begins in the fall of 1925, the theme of the last section, is stated in the others.
* * *
I have climbed out of the crib, which stands against the south wall of the first floor bedroom, and walked to the back of the house and down the hill toward the garden. Someone intercepts me. It is my earliest memory, I am pretty sure, though I can't date it. I was late to walk, over a year, prompting Grandma Shafer to remark, when someone contrasted that with another child, "Calves walk when they're dropped." Yet this memory may date from the summer of 1915, when I was a year and a half. In the summer of 1916, Art would have had the crib, in the room long occupied by Mother and Father.
I can date approximately the memory of looking out the windows at 311 Lyon Street. It is the fall of 1918, and I have the mumps. Art has been sent to his grandparents to keep from catching them. At my request a small bed has been put downstairs by the more easterly of the two front windows so that I can look out, in particular so that I can wave to my kindergarten teacher, Miss Goodrich.
[Everything remained the same then until 1921 or 1922. In the summer of 1921, Art and I were old enough to allow Mother and Dad again to take vacation in northern Michigan. Not the camping trips of 1904-13, but a settled vacation at Little Herring Lake, between Frankfurt and Alberta. That summer we went by train, were picked up with our baggage by J. H. Howard in a wagon, taken by the cooperative where his apples were sold, and on out to his shack by thge Lake. The next summer …][1]
[Everything remained the same, in my memory, until 1922, when we acquired a Ford…]
The years of our childhood were very good ones for our parents. They had waited a long time for children and family life was everything. Rarely, if ever, during the week did they go out, and callers were infrequent. On weekends we went to the farm. At first, we went occasionally by streetcar to the end of the line, on Kalamazoo Avenue (at Burton?) and Grandpa came in a buggy to get us. In 1922 we acquired a Ford, and began going every weekend.
[Things changed in February (?) 1926, when Grandma died. Mother then went every night to the country to look after Grandpa, and FAther looked after us. Later, in 1928, when he became weaker, we all went to the country every night. After his death, in 1929, Mother and Father wisely considered that Art and I needed more time with our friends, and beginning (I believe) in the fall of 1929, we two stayed in town nights.]
Those earliest years were orderly and complete. In the morning before it was light, men walked to their jobs across on the West side, speaking a foreign language (Dutch?). The first streetcar labored up Lyon Street hill. The milkman's horse clopped by, rubbershod, stopping and starting. Then in the winter, came the distant warning signal, Father's shaking the ashes in the furnace.
The house at 311 Lyon, brick and stucco, was built for Mother and Father, next to the older frame house where Mother had lived as a girl. Together they occupied a large lot, the better part of an acre. 311 Lyon was compact, with comfortable sized bedrooms on the second floor, but rather smallish rooms on the first. There was a small vestibule, having, on the left, a storage bench with a lid that raised, on the right a coat rack and a strip around the wall with hooks. Since the front door was covered with a tightly ruffled curtain, it was always dark in there. The front door was solid, well hung, and it squng tight; I still remember how the sound of it made being closed.
To the left of the vestibule, a by no means large living room, with two single-width front windows and half windows on the side. A piano stood against the front wall this side of the windows. At the far end, next to the passage into the dining room, stood Father's chair, where he read the Grand Rapids Press before dinner. The carpet had a narrow border of a half dozen or so narrow rows, into which Art and I used to roll marbles.