Fall 1963My First Move
Author: Ken Homer Issue: 2024-06-19
Fall 1963–My First Move
by Ken Homer
- We were supposed to move from Ridgewood NJ to Madison Wisconsin. I remember talking to my dad on the telephone. (It’s long distance – it’s costing us a fortune – talk fast!)
He told me about the winters about how much snow I would have to play in. What I didn’t know at the time was why we were going to move. My dad’s alcohol problem had cost him another job. And that loss had cost us our house.
Instead, we ended up in a town called Irondequoit. A suburb of Rochester NY. My guess is that his drinking had also cost him the job in Madison, but no one ever told me that. It’s just something I’ve been able to surmise over the years.
- It was the biggest truck I’d ever seen. Right there outside our door! Deep orange with Allied Van Lines painted in giant letters. I helped to pack, proud that I could now spell “FRAGILE” which I scrawled in big red letters on the boxes.
My first plane ride ever was from Newark, NJ to Rochester, NY. I was six. We wore our Sunday best. The props, yep, props were still common back then, made a noise that reverberated and rumbled through my whole torso. I stared out the window the whole way, except during lunch. Lunch, I was delighted to see, included a five pack of cigarettes. These my mom promptly confiscated. I was terribly disappointed.
We spent the first few nights at a Howard-Johnsons. The orange-tiled roof with the pointy turquoise cupola was a familiar place to me seeing how it was roadside fixture. We ate at dozens of them when I was a kid. I’d tried all of their 28 ice cream flavors. My favorite was peppermint stick. (My, how tastes change, and thank goodness they do!)
I wanted to swim but the pool was closed. Plus, I had no suit. For dinner I had the Ipswich clams––my favorite. There was a color TV in our room! My mom and sisters slept in the bed. I was on a roll-in cot near the window.
- My mom sobbed for days when she discovered that her grandmother’s beautiful ornate silver service––the one we used at Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and which was probably the only really valuable thing we owned––didn’t arrive with our other possessions.
I suspect it was all too much for her. Her husband losing her house. Being forced to move away from friends and family. Then, the theft of her inheritance. It all just broke her heart. I think it broke her spirit too. A weariness settled over her and she was never the same again.
Three years later, she would depart from this world, careworn and seemingly far older than her chronological age of 48.
Ken Homer • Jan 2024
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