My Siblings

Who were your siblings?

I have one younger brother and one younger sister. My brother Patrick was born in August 1951 when I was a little more than 1 1/2 years old. We had just moved into our new house that was being built by my father when Pat was born. He never smiled in pictures that were taken of him as a child. I don't know why, but he always had a scowl on his face. He looked completely different from me, with his blonde hair and blue eyes, while I had very dark hair and dark brown eyes.

My sister Joanne was born about 10 months after Pat, when I was about 2 1/2 years old. She looked different from both Pat and me. Her hair was red and she had light brown eyes. The three of us could not have looked more different from one another. My mother had light brown hair and light brown eyes; my father had reddish hair and light brown eyes. I looked more like my Uncle Donald with my dark coloring. My Grandmother Rose had red hair and blue eyes. When my mother was young she had blonde hair. As we were exposed to the sun, we all had freckles, Joanne having the most.

What did you play with as children?

Pat and Joanne were close to one another growing up. They played together more than I played with them. I was very content to draw or to read books or walk about the property by myself. My brother loved to play construction worker with his little plastic men and trucks. Joanne was constantly climbing up on something. She climbed trees and jumped on furniture. My father eventually built us a jungle gym that she could climb on. We also had a swing set and a large slide my father had made.

When Joanne was older, we would play with our doll house and little dolls, moving the furniture around until we had a disagreement and then got into a fight. We also played with our larger dolls, baby dolls that had a pram and a bed. All of us enjoyed playing with blocks that my father had made out of scrap wood for us and my mother had painted. We also had tinkertoys to built things with.

My father also built us a play fort out of wood which we enjoyed playing in the woods. Cowboys and Indians were popular in those days so the fort was a perfect place for us to act out our play. When we a little older. my father built us a play house. It was green with a porch, three windows and a door. As we got older, the spare key to the house was located above the door to the little house. We got many hours of pleasure from playing in that little house.

As we grew older, we played board games together, which usually ended in some sort of squabble. We played Monopoly, Parchese, checkers, chess, and Chinese checkers. Monopoly games could go on for hours. My brother often played Battleship or War with his friend Bruce who lived nearby, and they also played baseball as they listened to the Yankee games on their transistor radios. My sister often played with Bruce's sister Allison who was a year younger than Joanne. I was left on my own to imagine, draw, paint, and read. But I didn't mind. I enjoyed being on my own since I most often ended up in a fight with my sister who was extremely stubborn and willful. I was calmer and would give in more readily.

We also enjoyed skating and sledding in the winter. My father built us a skating rink in the back yard one year, but mostly we went back in the woods and shoveled the snow off a pond and skated in the woods. We also had our bikes we could ride around the long circular driveway. Only my brother was allowed to ride his bike on the main road as he got older. Joanne and I were confined to riding our bikes in the driveway.