One thing about the families in that 6 family house is that we were all very clean. The parents were from Italy. So we, the children, were first generation Americans. Every week the hallways were swept and mopped and the steps scrubbed. The families on each side of the floor would rotate the cleaning each week. Even the sidewalks were swept. Later in life I met people who thought Italians were dirty and threw their garbage out their windows. I could not believe this. Where did they ever get such an idea? I can attest to the fact that my mother kept a clean house. My sister and I washed walls, floors, even the furniture. Everything in the house was washed. For some reason we moved often. Every time we moved we left a spotlessly clean house. As I remember, we would always move somewhere where the ones who moved out were not are considerate, and we would have to clean everything again.

This being the depression I remember standing in line for a bushel of cabbage. For the next several days we had cabbage for breakfast, cabbage for lunch, and cabbage for dinner. It was all the food we had in the house.

One time the electricity was turned off. We lived by candlelight. The candle on the window sill caught fire and burned the shade and curtain. We also had one stove for cooking and heating the apartment. The end rooms were always cold. My uncle Frank (aunt Josie's husband on my father's side) worked for the city's garbage department. When the garbage pickups went from horses to trucks, he gave us an old horse blanket. Four of us slept in one bed with the old horse blanket as a cover. I can still feel the scratches on my chin that it gave me. Funny, as I am writing this I realize how poor we were, never knew it and had a happy childhood in spite of it all.