When we got to Toledo, we had no place to sleep so Dad made an
arrangement for my brother David and I to sleep in the City Hall. The
City Hall in Toledo was a very unique place. City Hall contained the
City Council Chambers upstairs, the Fire Department, and Police Department, The
Fire Dept. Firefighters were all Volunteers, at that time and had to
live close enough to hear the siren, at the City Hall building. In one
of the back rooms, at City Hall, there was a bedroom with a double bed,
and my brother David and I slept in that bed for the first two nights
after we arrived to Toledo. Dad Called Mayflower Moving and Storage and
had our furniture delivered to our house in Toledo.
Dad got a good deal on a huge hpuse that was very close to Downtown
Toledo. The house was about two and one half blocks East from Main St.,
on East Graham Street, on the south side of the street. It was medium
gray in color and was a craftsman in style.
It was three stories, including the basement. There were two large
bedrooms upstairs and the Master bedroom was on the first floor, just
off of the livingroom. The living room was huge and it had a fireplace.
The kitchen and dining room were large also. There was a large grate in
the living room floor for the oil Heater which was located in the
basement. All in all, it was a great deal for the monthly rent. {
I flew over recently, on Google Earth, and went into street view to take
a look at our old house. It has been modernized, re-modeled, and has a
different look on the front view of the house. The Craftsman front porch
is gone and the Craftsman style, of the front of the house, is pretty
much gone. I took a few pictures while I was there. } The
moving company delivered the furniture and spread it out into the
approximate locations that it was going. Mom and Dad set the house up
and after a couple of days it was looking like a real home. My brother
and I each had a large bedroom on the second floor. It didn't take long
before we started noticing that was something very different about this
house. No matter which room you went into, you had the feeling that you
weren't alone. Dad worked the graveyard shift and Mom was sleeping alone
in the Master bedroom on the first floor. She began to hear the
furniture moving around in the livingroom. When she got up in the
morning and passed through the living, going to the kitchen, the
furniture had been moved from its original position. Upstairs was no
different. The atmosphere was very eerie. The light, in each bedroom,
was an uncovered lightbulb, hanging from the ceiling, in the middle of
the room. There was a length of string hanging down that you had to pull
to turn the light on. You had to walk about ten feet into the room to
reach for the string. As you walked into the room, the hair on the back
of your neck would stand up. It was frightening to walk into the
bedrooms. Dad had to fix the light fixture at an angle, solidly, and run
a string from the light fixture over to the door. He fixed the string so
you could pull the string, turning the light on, before you entered the
room. After a couple of weeks like this, Mom had my brother and I come
down and sleep with her in the master bedroom downstairs.
My brother and I were enrolled in
Grade School, me in the first grade
and my brother in the the 3rd grade.
We went on like this for a
couple of months before Dad applied for a position with the Newport
Police Department about seven miles West of Toledo. Dad was accepted and
we were on our way to live in Newport. We left at end of the
school year and my brother was enrolled in the 4th grade and I was
enrolled in the 2nd grade at the beginning of the next school year in Newport.
