My Home for a Few Months in 1946-47

When I was about one year old, my parents decided to move to Lake Worth, Florida. It was more of its own city then: Now it’s more like a suburb of West Palm Beach. I don’t know why they decided to do this, and I was never curious enough to ask. I have no memories of the place before a 1950 visit with my mother when I was five years old. And my only memories of that visit was discovering a weed with a nettle at one end and straight enough to use as an arrow with my toy bow, and also of the train ride there.

The only proof I have of my residence in Lake Worth is a picture of me at the age of one wearing no clothes and peeing into a bucket. I would insert that here except that I once got into trouble by doing just that. Oh well, I suppose there are a lot of sickies who would get off on that, so WordPress would be in their rights.

Our stay in Florida came to an end because of my father’s easily upset digestion. When your job is disposing of the rotted bodies of dead alligators, it’s difficult to keep one’s lunch down. So it was back to Cleveland we went where Dad, who was a master machinist, could get a job that was more in his line.

When he retired, he and my Mom bought a condominium in Hollywood, Florida, in the same complex where my Uncle Emil and Aunt Annabelle lived. It was more to his liking to live in Florida as a retiree than as a young man with a foreign accent trying to get a job anywhere in the South.

Although I visited Florida a number of times, I never liked the heat and humidity. There’s something about always being sweaty that didn’t appeal to me. Even after buying the condo, my folks preferred to spend their summers in Cleveland, which I thought was only marginally better.