Chapter 15

MY FOURTH TIME AT EAST MAIN STREET

 

So many things happened and so many decisions were made in late 1940 that I am now not sure of the sequence of events. I know that Jay became ill with polio while papa and I were laying the joists for the house we sold to Blumenshine. In fact, I think the agreement was reached within days or weeks of Jay's illness. As soon as the sale was assured, Papa and Mamma began making plans to go to Florida for the winter. They were both in their sixtieth year and needed a vacation.

 

Either before or after that period, Ada and I had sold our bungalow on Bethany Road to Mr. and Mrs. George Gamber. We were to give possession in November of 1940.

 

When we had an agreement with Gamber, we decided, in October, to buy another lot just north of the Blumenshine house and build a home for ourselves. Since we could not build before we had to empty the bungalow, it was decided that when Papa and Mamma had gone to Florida we would again move into their house, but into other rooms than before.

 

So we continued to work on the Blumenshine house and had it nearly finished when they left for Florida. Also, in the meantime, Papa built, in his lawn, a house trailer, eight by fourteen feet in size. The interior of it was nicely fitted with full equipment. He had bought a 1937 Plymouth coupe from Mabel that she no longer needed because she had gone into city mission work in Philadelphia. They towed the trailer to Florida and back with that Plymouth.

 

While they were leaving, we moved from the bungalow back to East Main Street. I finished the Blumenshine house and arranged the transfer of title. At the same time I started our house at 110 North Eleventh Street. It was the first property all our own.

 

At some point after Papa had built the big brick house on East Main Street he made, for Mamma, a sun parlor at the rear of the house. This winter of '40-'41 we had that sun parlor for a kitchen. (Papa had earlier, in making apartments, changed it to a kitchen). We also had the living room with the semi-open staircase, the front parlor with the main front door and two bedrooms upstairs.

At first, that winter, we tried to heat our rooms with the oil space heater and the coal range in the kitchen, but by the end of December that big pile of bricks had lost so much heat that we couldn't keep warm, so I bought a few tons of coal and made fire in the furnace. The furnace was a "pipeless" and the floor register was in our middle room. Then we were warm. It was fortunate that we had heated the house then, because at New Year Mabel came back to Ephrata to attend the six-week Bible School being held in the old Ephrata Church building. She used Papa and Mamma's rooms.

It was that winter that Jay was fitted with his first leg brace. As soon as he could walk alone, we took him to Ephrata and bought him his first long-pants suit.