One of the things I remember about Inverness was the times we spent on vacation there. Mom and Dad would farm out the five kids to various relatives so that we wouldn’t be such a burden to one family. John would stay with uncle Danny, Art would stay with uncle Roddie, Dave would stay with someone else(?) and Anne Marie would stay with aunt Billie. I spilt my time between aunt Billie’s with mom or with dad at Grandma and Grandpa’s.

As a young child, I was fascinated with the idea that the hot water heater was connected with the stove. Aunt Sadie would be up early to fire up the stove for breakfast. After breakfast, there would be enough hot water to do the dishes, do the laundry and begin to prepare for supper. She would roll out the wringer washer and do the laundry in the kitchen. She would utilize her time during loads to bake the world’s greatest sugar cookies! The laundry would then be hung out on the line. (It was summertime and it wouldn’t take long to dry. During the winter it would be hung in the attic.)

After supper, which would include vegetables, gravy, meat, rolls, and etc., the entire kitchen would be cleaned up and everything put away. Then the hot water would be turned off. Dinner would consist of biscuits, cookies, fruit, cheese and whatever happened to left over.

As a kid, not having to take a bath at the end of a long summer day was something I was not used to.

• Mom and Dad: Hughie Ferguson and Greet Macdonald
• John, Art, Dave, Anne Marie: Hughie and Greet’s kids
• Aunt Billie: Greet’s sister
• Aunt Sadie: Hughie’s sister
  
• Uncle Danny: Hughie’s brother
• Uncle Roddy: Hughie’s brother
• Grandma and Grandpa: Hughie’s parents, Mattie Ferguson and Sadie MacDougall

I think it was the summer of 1966. I was sixteen, and as usual I was visiting Inverness with my family.

“With my family” isn’t exactly right. Once we grew out of toddlerhood, when we went down home my parents would farm us out to different relatives. My brother John usually stayed with Danny and Olive. My brother Art usually stayed with Billie. I spent a lot of time at Roddie and Pat’s.

I’m sure we must have seen my parents from time to time — we always managed to be in the car on the way back to Detroit — but I don’t remember much of that.

What I do remember, along with other things from this visit, was being at Billie’s house on MacIsaac Street one day. I noticed an old man at the place next door. As I remember it, he was doing something on the roof of the porch, like repairing shingles.

It wasn’t a very steep roof, but he wasn’t particularly young, either. In my mind’s eye, he looks like he’s in good shape for age 70 or so.

I said something to BillIe about the old guy up on the porch next door. She laughed and told me that was Dan Kennedy.

It seems this was the house he’d grown up in. As the Kennedy children got older, they moved away, started families of their own, and I suppose their parents stayed in the house on MacIsaac Street.

Eventually Dan’s own family grew up, and I guess his wife died. However it happened, he ended up moving back into his childhood home, the place where I saw him repairing the porch roof.

Billie told me that the same thing had happened to a couple of Dan’s brothers and sisters, and that a few of them were now in the house together, just as they had when they were children. I think she called the place “the pensionage.”

And I was right, she told me. Dan Kennedy was in good shape for his age. I was just wrong about the age.

Dan had been born in 1864. The man fixing the porch was 102 years old–or, to put it another way, he was three years older than Canada.

David is the son of Greet Macdonald and Hughie Ferguson.
Billie: Billie Macdonald, Greet’s sister
Danny and Olive: Danny Ferguson (Hughie’s brother) and his wife, Olive Duffitt
Roddie and Pat: Roddie Ferguson (Hughie’s brother) and his wife, Patricia Dunn

When Dad left [Inverness], it was February of ’52. and he stayed for our anniversary, but I don’t know when after that he left, shortly after. We had a bad winter. We were snowed in; they had to shovel us out one time.

I was there two or three months, and I used to worry about the stove, because we had a big stove in the living room. It was called a Warm Morning; that’s what it was called. And Freddie used to say, now, bank it at night so it won’t go out. And every day I used to call him. “How do I bank it?” And you would put coal in, but then you put ashes in on top of the coal, from below the stove.

I was always so worried about that. I was so afraid. I would lie in bed at night and think, if there’s going to be a fire, now I could put the kids out on the — there was a porch in front, you know, from your bedroom, I could put the kids on top of the porch. This is what I used to plan at night.

Anyway, the time came, Freddie had no housekeeper for the three kids. And I had to sell that house anyway, before I’d leave. So he talked me into selling the house and moving over there [with him]. And I did that. Sold the house for eighteen hundred dollars. That’s what we paid for it, can you believe it?

And we moved over there, stored some of my furniture at Pa’s and took a little bit with me. I suppose I took the bed, I don’t know.

But anyway, we moved in. We had six kids. I don’t think Frankie was seven yet. Three in diapers — you, and Jackie, and Art. But the kids got along great.

If you remember, Freddie’s street was the next street to the main street. This was Campbell Street. And the back yard of Freddie’s was at the back yard of this restaurant, the Greek’s restaurant. Harry the Greek’s.

And you would go down there — you were kind of a loner. You would go down there and go in. You made great friends with the truckers; they’d be in there. You must have been — I think you were two and a half, maybe, but you could talk like a lawyer.

And these truckers would give you money. And you would buy candy, and you never waited for change. You’d take the bag of candy and you’d come home and you’d treat all our little kids — you were generous, you’d treat them all with the candy. And you did that over and over and over again.

And sometimes you’d go down and there wouldn’t be truckers there, you know. But the girl in the restaurant had a glass, and she would put your change in the glass when you didn’t wait for it. So you could go in and order candy, and she’d take the money out of the glass pay for it.

And you’d bring it — oh, you did that so many times, and you’d bring it home and treat the kids.

Just wander down there by your self. But you know, at that time in Inverness, you didn’t worry. You couldn’t get lost. Everybody knew everybody’s kids.

One day you didn’t come home, and I got worried. And we started looking, and we couldn’t find you. We looked, oh god, we even looked down by the mine. Going crazy. And coming back, I walked up the side of — I don’t know if it was Harry the Greek’s place or the next building — and there you were, asleep on the grass.

You got tired and you laid down.

Dad: Hughie Ferguson, Greet’s husband
Freddie: Freddie Macdonald, Greet’s brother; a widower with three children
Pa: Jack D Macdonald, father of Greet and Freddie

When my family first moved to Detroit in 1952, we lived in the lower half of a brick duplex at 13101 Cherrylawn, in northwest Detroit.

Some time around fifth grade, I was learning the “proper format” for writing letters. My teacher insisted that we include “street” or “road” or “avenue” after the street name. I remember wondering with a little annoyance how anyone knew it was Cherrylawn Street rather than Cherrylawn Road, though I didn’t argue. The street signs around us only showed the names: Cherrylawn, Northlawn, Buena Vista, Fullerton.

When the Jeffries Freeway was built, and my former street was one of the few to cross over the freeway, I learned that I had lived on Cherrylawn Avenue.

Just across the street from our house was Littlefield, a city playground that took up most of an entire block. Walking from our house, you’d first pass some tennis course, then a large expanse of concrete with a thin metal pole, and finally come to the playground itself.

My brothers John, Art, and I had it pretty good, living across the street from a playground.

The playground had lots of room. There were areas with monkey bars, with swings (for little kids and older ones), a telephone pole on its side with a steel rail (as in railroad) attached to it (for balancing), another pile of telephone poles, stacked on their side in a pyramid. Sandboxes for little kids, fields for baseball and kickball, and open areas for simply running around.

One block over was the land belonging to the public elementary school. Since the playground was named Littlefield, we always called the school lot “Bigfield.”

In the center of the Littlefield playground was a building used as an office by the city Parks and Recreation staff who ran programs. I learned to make kites there, and big masks out of papier-mâche.

The expanse of concrete I mentioned earlier, with the metal pole, was known as “the showers.” In the summer, kids would arrive in swimsuits, and at scheduled times one of the parks people would turn a hidden valve, and water would gush out from the big shower head at the top of the pole.

So, yes, it was like a giant, outdoor shower, and we’d run around on the concrete, having a great time. It didn’t strike me as strange at the time, though later I realized I’d never seen another place like it.

Years later, after I’d married and moved to Virginia, I happened to meet a woman at a party. She’d grown up two or three blocks away from my house on Cherrylawn, and remembered the showers distinctly. Because she was a few years older than I am, she even knew how there came to be showers.

According to her, there had originally been a swimming pool at Littlefield. But in the late 1940s or early 1950s, because of the fear of spreading polio, the pool was filled in. Eventually, probably after polio vaccine had been developed, the parks department decided it would be too expensive to tear up the concrete, and instead came up with the idea of the giant shower head.

Polio was no idle fear. My brother John walked with a brace on his leg because of polio he’d contracted back in Nova Scotia. And every family in St. Brigid’s parish, where we lived in Detroit, knew about Patricia O’Brien, whose family lived a block from the church. She was twelve years old when she contracted polio. It left her paralyzed from the neck down for decades.

Pat was a vivacious, dynamic person. Despite behing unable to walk or even turn the pages of a book on her own, she joined discussion groups at church, and although she needed a portable respirator and a reclining wheelchair, loved going to events with friends.

I wonder whether her particular situation had anything to do with the filled-in pool that (after an effective polio vaccine) became the playground showers?

[I talked to my mother tonight and told her about Rose getting her own room when she was a baby. Mom pointed out that I did once have a room of my own. -- Dave]

[It was] at Bertie’s house [on MacIsaac Street in Inverness], the one we bought, up the street from Grandpa [Jack D Macdonald]. We moved in there before Art was born….

Yeah, we lived in there. And John had one room, and you had the other room, and we had the third room with Artie’s crib in it.

And you would get up in the morning — and you had a lot of animals in your crib at night. And you’d come and you’d say, “Here comes Davy with all his damn trash.” You’d come over after Hughie went, you’d come over to my room and come in bed with me.

Dave: Rose remembers hearing that story, and the line was “here comes David and all his G. D. trash.”

You could get out of the crib no matter what. So I finally decided I might as well leave the sides down, you’re going to break your neck some day. So I left the side down and you’d come every morning with an armful of animals of some kind. With all your G. D. trash, that’s exactly what it was.

…There was another thing that I remember. Hughie used to come home from work and he would get Grandpa [Ferguson]‘s panel truck and take John out for a drive because John wasn’t allowed to walk.

He did that every day after work. And one day — the windows in that house were really low, you know. You were standing in the front room window, looking out, and you said to me, “John is so lucky. He gets to get a drive in the car.”

And I thought, oh, my god.

So when Hughie came back, I said, you know, you’ll have to take Dave with you because he was looking and thinking how lucky John was.”

…Art was maybe about six months old, so you were about two.

(My brother John, who would have been about three and a half, was not allowed to walk because of his polio.)

When my grandfather, “Jack D”, was visiting our home in Detroit, Michigan one particular time, he was sitting in a chair reading the newspaper. He wore a hearing aid, which in those days entailed a little box that men put in their shirt pockets.

This particular day, my brothers David and Art and I were playing on the floor in front of him. We ranged in age, at that time, from about 7-2 year. I guess we were making a lot of noise. Not changing his expression at all, my grandfather peered around the paper, looked at us, reached in his pocket, shut off the unit and continued reading.

Never said a word or gave us a disdainful look. Just went on with his reading.