BORROWED FROM JULIE's BLOG

She wrote that she stole it from someone else…

Childhood memories…

What music takes you back to childhood? My Dad singing Old Italian Songs playing the guitar…

What were favorite games? When I was real young we didn’t have TV yet in Montreal…so we were happy playing hockey in the streets or on frozen ponds in neighbors’ back yards…during summers I played cards with neighbor kids…canasta, rummy, hearts…I don’t recall if board games had been invented then but no one had any…

Favorite bedtime stories? My Dad telling me stories about ‘The Mafia being a fictitious organization perpetrated by the government to discriminate against Italians'…

Favorite TV shows? Didn’t have a TV until I was around 10 or 11…when TV arrived we watched whatever was on…maybe only a few hours a day and almost all shows came from the U.S…

Was I popular? Maybe, but not because I was a nice kid…my Dad always bought me the latest and greatest toys, guns and rifles, hockey sticks, gloves, pads, toboggans…all cool stuff…bringing home comic books almost every day was a treat for me and friends…I remember a Schwinn bike with balloon tires, fringe at end of handle bars, a light and a bell…probably cost a fortune in those days…

Did I go to Camp? No, but we traveled a lot, drove and flew to New York City many times, Florida, Atlantic City and places in Quebec and Ontario…I joined Cub Scouts once, went to one meeting and found it kind of dorky…I wore my Cub Scout clothes under my hockey shirt…

Most magical part of childhood? None totally magical …but I had great times going to pro hockey games to watch the Montreal Canadiens and semi pro baseball games…the Montreal Royals were a farm team of the Brooklyn Dodgers and we saw the best players who went on to play for the Dodgers…I have to confess I had some semi-magical days tho…my Dad bought me Lionel Trains with steam locomotives (dropping a pill in the smoke stack produced smoke), I had all sorts of railroad cars and cabooses…Dad had someone build a lighted village with train tracks all around the table…with my huge engineer’s cap on I got pretty high playing with my choo-choos.(and I wasn’t sniffing the smoke)…spending hours away from my parents and sister in our basement was the best…

What mementos do I have from childhood? ONE…My parents were different than my friends’ parents…let’s leave it at different…My Dad was a travelling salesman and always hated driving during the winter…I remember shoveling snow off our one car driveway almost every morning…Without telling us of his prior intentions one day he came home from work with visas and passports for all of us and a month later we were on our way to California…our parents had never said a thing to us about moving before that day.. All the house furniture and stuff was either sold or given away…my Lionel trains went to a cousin…(Today some of those engines go for $15,000 to $20,000 each), my Comic book collection disappeared… I lost my Roy Rogers six guns, holsters and Cowboy hats that my daughters never got to play with! I don’t know why I let all my good stuff disappear; I was probably thinking how happy I’d be not shoveling snow in California…

We drove to California in a brand new Buick Roadmaster with a car carrier thing on top…nothing else made it to California…

 We had a dog named Prince, a long haired mutt that we loved…I wanted to name him King but my Dad told me to stop whining or he’d put a hit on me…the dog made it to Calif. but I never knew or asked how he got there…

One of the best things my Dad ever bought for me was one of the first Kodak 35 mm cameras…I still have it…I have thousands of slides of our family, vacations and relatives but only a few of myself, and that is cool...

What were my favorite books? I spent hours a day reading and still do to this day…favorites back then where The Count of Monte Cristo, Moby Dick, The Man in the Iron Mask and Robinson Crusoe…ironically all but one of these were condemned by the Church because the plots were about revenge...kind of like Godfather movies today...now that I think about it Moby Dick was a revenge novel but I guess hunting whales was OK with the Church..

What were my favorite foods? Three guesses and the first two don’t count…Italian food! Pasta almost every supper either with meat balls, chicken and occasionally pig tails… (I learned to like them but I wouldn’t touch them these days); On Fridays my mother made meatless meals like salmon casseroles, fish, lotsa fish…Was a mortal sin to eat meat on Fridays in those days...today it isn't a sin, but I often think of the Catholics who did and died...did they go to hell or were they redeemed when the rules were changed?

Happiest days of my life? Wedding day and when each daughter was born…