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46 HOME, FAMILY AND FRIENDS ----- At the beginning of 1941, Bab was twelve and Rog eight. We lived in what we considered a very nice Baldwin house at 515 Kahkwa Blvd. The house was rough red brick with metal casement windows and were its first occupants, having moved in 1939. It had four bedrooms and two baths, a 2-car garage, sat on a fair-sized lot and was in an upper middle-class neighborhood. The homes of the rich weren't far away. We were quite proud of the place and worked hard to improve it, particularly the yard, which Willie did a great deal to enhance with flowers. We even planted some small trees and I remember well going down to Frontier Park by the creek and cutting some willow switches, which we planted and they grow like mad, almost alarmingly fast, threatening first to take over the yard and not long after that, the sewer pipes. Of course, we were only renters but we got a lot of satisfaction out of this place for several years. It had another advantage in that the fourth bedroom was downstairs in a small wing at the read and had its own bath. Baldwin had improved it for us while building the house, the purpose being to provide a place for Mother and Willie's father when they visited us. Our nextdoor neighbors to the north were the Glasses, who lived in the house later to be occupied by the Brightmans. Jim worked for some concern in Erie which paid him well enough that they could soon buy a fine new home in Frontier Place and I devoted some bitter thoughts to the fact that I, who worked for the great General Electric Company and had a pretty good job by this time, was so strapped that we couldn't even think of buying a home. As I look back on that now, I'm inclined to think that I was just too conservative, carrying a relatively large amount of life insurance, salting money away in savings like Investor's Syndicate, and being appalled at taking on a large mortgage. There was a short period between the end of the Depression and the start of the war, when we could have swung a house and probably should have; in fact, we would have made considerable by the inflation that followed the war. But we didn't and I accept the blame. We were friendly with the Glasses and across the street was a family named McAuliffe whom we got well acquainted with but neither of these connections was to last. Little did we realize what a connection was in the offing for late 1946, when the Brightmanns moved in next door. Our neighbor on the other side was an aging widow named Hanauer with whom we had little in common. It was an attractive little gray-shingled house which had been built by Dr. Delaney originally and they'd lived there until moving on to greater things in the country. However, Mrs. Hanauer had a sheepdog who nearly drove Dusky, our black cocker, completely out of his mind. Dusky hated this dog with a deep and abiding animosity and the dog could probably have eaten him alive if it had come to a fight.
