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Lake Worth

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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.

Flying to Florida 1959

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My first flight was in the summer of 1959—to Florida of all places. Way back around 1946-47, we had all lived in Lake Worth, now a suburb of West Palm Beach. My Dad had the worst job in the world for someone with a delicate stomach: disposing of the bodies of dead alligators. My Mom worked as a checker in a supermarket. So when Mom wanted to hook up with her Florida friends a dozen or so years later, my Dad wanted no part of it.

Wait a minute! Florida in the summer? Were we out of our minds? Apparently. It was either June or July, and Mom had made a reservation at an apartment on Federal Highway in Lake Worth. So Mom, my brother (then seven years old), and me (aged fourteen) were off to Cleveland Hopkins Airport, where we boarded a prop plane similar to the one shown above and flew to Jacksonville, where we landed to embark and disembark passengers, and continued on to West Palm Beach.

That second leg of the flight was a real doozy. We were flying at low altitude through a violent thunderstorm. I saw a stewardess lose her footing and dump a tray of beverages into the laps of a row of passengers.

Then, when we finally landed in West Palm Beach and stepped out of the plane, it was as if we were hit in the face with a hot, wet towel. Cleveland in the summer was humid, but nowhere near so bad as Florida. We sort of got used to it. We even got used to seeing dead palmetto bugs as big as mice piled up along the curbs.

Bookworm that I was, even at that early age, I remember vividly that I was reading Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur, which I completed there and started reading MorrisWest’s The Shoes of the Fisherman. Good reading for a devout Catholic schoolboy, though I couldn’t stomach it today.

One interesting memory of that trip: My Mom had worked for a rich widow in Palm Beach named Mrs. Gregory. One day, we went to visit her. Mom always thought that some rich person would out of the goodness of her heart shower us with money and gifts. It never happened. Instead, we went for a ride in her chauffeured Cadillac with no air conditioning and the windows resolutely closed on a sweltering day. Afterwards, she generously offered us a glass of ice water.

My Early Career

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Yes, That’s Me at the Age of 18 Months

Now that you’ve seen me without a stitch of clothing on, and facing you with the situation, I thought I’d bring you up to date about the second home of my young life. When I was only a little over a year old, my Mom, Dad, and I moved to Lake Worth, Florida. As I was much too young at the time, I have no memory of my first trip to the Land of Sunshine. My Dad worked for the city, which is a southern suburb of West Palm Beach, and my Mom had her hands full with the above illustrated hedonist.

Unfortunately, my father did not have the best of times in Florida. His job was to remove the bodies of dead and rotting alligators. Now Dad had a tricksy stomach, so instead of job satisfaction, he was mostly involved in projectile vomiting at the time. The move to Florida was declared a failure, so Dad insisted that the family relocate to the Hungarian neighborhood of Cleveland, on the East Side’s Buckeye Road. Which is what we did.

My third home was the second floor of a duplex at 2814 East 120th Street. I was able to put down some roots there, as we were to remain there until 1951, after my brother Dan was born. Since I didn’t know a word of English, Mom and Dad figured we should relocate to the suburbs, a few miles east of Buckeye Road. It was time for me to learn English and become a red-blooded American. Which I proceeded to do, with such dispatch that after three more years, I was no longer regarded as a problematical retard with a funny accent.

BTW: My Mom adored the above picture. She showed it to all my girlfriends….