Life on the Riviera!

I'm guessing that after you read the title of this post you think that I am going to talk about living in some exotic foreign land with all the beautiful people on the famous beach. Sorry Charlie.....that isn't going to be the case. Nope, this is going to be about the house that our family moved into in June 1956 when I was approaching my 8th birthday. The name of the street we moving onto was Riviera. I was to spend the next 16 years there except for a couple little side trips. Once was about 10 weeks in Silverwood, MI working on my uncle's dairy farm (that is worth several posts all by itself) during the summer of 1965 and the 19 months in the Army using up most of 1968 & 1969. Riviera was a great place to grow up. I suppose that most people think that where they grew up is the best place. I feel so sorry for all of them because Riviera WAS the best place to grow up. I had some of the greatest friends while growing up. Unfortunately I no longer am in contact with most of them. Of my closest friends during those years I am only in contact with one. I am keeping in touch with many other friends that were within 2 or 3 blocks of where I lived. There were lots and lots of kids that lived in that neighborhood. Just on my block of Riviera there were 7 boys and 6 girls who were near my age. There was ALWAYS someone to play with. What about things to do. Holy Activity Batman!! First of all there was the street itself. There was traffic but not a lot so there was little problem running to and fro across the street. All the houses had good back yards and most didn't have fences...all that just made the yards bigger. There were sidewalks that we could break all kinds of land speed records riding our bikes. My bike when I first moved there was a little bike. I have no idea what the brand was. I had had that bike since I was about 4 or 5. I did the "training wheel" riding on it and learned the art of two wheeling with that bike. Later I got a Western Flyer from Western Auto. Bicycle riding was a big part of our lives as it was with the lives of most kids our age. We had an elementary school only 4 blocks away that had a great playground and ball fields. In the other direction there was a little corner store that was the favorite spot for turning in pop bottle for the refunds, buying candy, buying baseball cards, and sodas. That was two blocks away. One block farther on the next corner was another corner store. It is amazing that these two stores very similar in nature both seem to thrive. Then one more block was the drug store. Each of those stores had its own appealing feature so depending on what we after we would decide which store to go to....sometimes all three. Also four blocks away was what we called "The Sand Pit". It was a huge area of nothing but dug out land. It had cliffs (cliffs might be a strong word but when you are 8, 9, 10, or 11 they were cliffs) and dunes and more nothing. So much time playing Army or cowboys or just hanging and talking was spent at the Sand Pits. All of the above would already make Riviera one of the greatest places ever to grow up BUT the biggest attraction was THE BEACH. The neighborhood which was about 5 blocks wide and maybe 6 or 7 blocks deep had a beach. It was in my opinion the nicest beach in that whole area and Waterford, MI had a lot of beaches. From my house The Beach was .8 of a mile. From Memorial Day until Labor Day the beach was open every single day. There was a club house, a little (very little) store, swings, a merry-go-round, teeter totters, monkey bars, a shallow dock, a deep dock, a slide on land, a slide in the water, lots and lots of sand, a life guard (usually one of the better swimmers of the older teens of the neighborhood), picnic areas, boating docks, and more. It was a massive delight. It opened at 9:00 AM so at about 8:55 we were mounting our bikes for that .8 of a mile ride. The fun never stopped. If you weren't having fun growing up there it was your own fault. I learned to have fun and enjoy life on Riviera and the experiences taught me to have fun and enjoy life ever since.

About My Friend Growing Up

In my last post I mentioned my next door neighbor. I learned a long time ago that using names in some kind of internet post is not always the wisest thing. I'm not sure what I have done in past posts but for the most part in the future I will use few, if any, names. That being the case I will not use his name although if he reads this he will certainly know who he is. Also anyone who knew me in my younger years will also more than likely be able to guess his Identity. In June of 1956 my family which consisted of my paternal grandmother, my dad, mom, two older sisters, myself, and my younger sister who was not to be born for another 4 weeks or so.....but she made Mom big enough that I feel it only right to count her into our numbers. I had seen the house once or twice before but being not quite 8 years old I really wasn't all that impressed. What did impress me was that we lived close to a lake and that lake had a beach and we were allowed to go to that beach...woohoo. Moving day came although I'm sure that it was far more than a day but my mind has it all rolled into one experience. My parents along with the help of another couple that were friends of my parents used a rental truck and moved us lock, stock, and barrel all by themselves. I did my part to help by not helping at all. For the first part of the move the three of us kids were at the "old" house playing and not paying much attention to the work that the four adults were putting into the move. Finally enough had been moved that Mom and the other wife were to leave the "old" where they were helping to stage the move and go to the "new" where they would start to distribute our belongings into their new home. It is at this time that my two older sisters and I were transported across town to our new home. The place we would call home for many years and the place that we would all consider as the place where we grew up (that is assuming that any of us actually "grew up"). Of course having new neighbors moving in was exciting for all the kids on the street and I will say that our street had a lot of kids. This included my new next door neighbor. He had just turned 7 and was right over in our front yard as soon as he saw that there was another boy about his age that was going to be living there. As with most kids that age we were instantly friends and that is what we have stayed. As of this writing it has been nearly 60 years and I still consider him one of my very best friends....if nothing else he has an awful lot of seniority over all my other very best friends. Oh sure we had our spats here and there but I cannot remember us being mad at each other for very long....usually only minutes and if it was really something serious a few hours. Instead we raked in so many memories of things we did with each other that it would take 10,000 blog posts to relate them all. Some I have he probably totally has no recollection of and I'm sure that it is the same with some of the things that he remembers. I am also sure that telling the same story his would be different than mine. Neither of us would be lying or even wrong but it would be just how we saw things. As this blog continues I know that he will come up many, many times in more specific stories but I wanted to say that we didn't "meet" but we just melted together one afternoon in mid 1956 and in many ways have been one ever sense. That's it for today....more tomorrow!

Another "new" house

We now move into 1956. Even though we were firmly in the north and in theory an integrated world the separation of races was very real. In the neighborhood that we lived in behind St. Joseph Mercy Hospital was 100% white when we moved there but when a new section was built it was sold to black home buyers. Thus started the "white flight" to the suburbs of Pontiac. Our family was part of that movement. Frankly I didn't care one way or the other. I was still only 7 years old and I had, as far as I can remember, no racial issues. On the other hand one house with a friend was already torn down for the hospital expansion and two other of our neighbors had already moved so I didn't mind moving to a new area.



I can remember going with Dad and Mom to a couple of places to look at. I was never around any of their conversations or if I was I was too young to be paying any attention so I really didn't have any clue what they were or were not going to do. All of a sudden......we were moving. Mom took us kids over to the house one day and we walked through it. I remember us going but I really don't remember much about it.



I do remember that they said that there was a lake and beach that we were able to go to because we were buying the house. I remember going to that beach one day early in the summer of 1956 but before we actually moved. I remember it being pretty cool to a 7 year old.



So moving day came. I don't remember being any help at all. What I do remember is that the Kay family came over. The mother, Marie Kay, was also a nurse and knew Mom. They also had rented space on Putnam by where we lived. They had quite the family with several kids.....who were by anyone's standards a bit on the wild side and of course we were wild whenever they were around. The father, John Kay, and Marie were a lot of help.



Dad had rented a truck that had one of those lift gates on the back. I do remember as they were backing the truck up to the garage they had the gate down and they ran it right into the porch pole of the Dellwood house and broke it right in half. They pounded it back into place and finished the day. I don't know if they told anyone or not. If I was a betting guy I would put my money on them having NOT telling anyone and probably never talking about it again.



So there we were in our "new" house. It wasn't, of course, new but it was new to us and it wasn't a terribly old house probably only 6 or 7 years old. There it was....80 Riviera Terr. in Waterford Township. Now back then we used the Pontiac Post Office so the address was Pontiac, Michigan. I am writing this in 2010 and Waterford has had its own Post Office for quite some time and that area's address is Waterford, Michigan.



One of the benefits of the new house was the neighborhood that it was in was associated with a beach called Elizabeth Lake Estates Improvement Association or E.L.E.I.A. It had arguably the nicest beach in Waterford Twp. That is saying something considering that Waterford Twp. had a whole lot of lakes and beaches. Only residents of the E.L.E.I.A. could use the beach along with their guests and they were limited to the number of guests that they could bring. I had some really great fun at that beach over the next 25 years.



That first summer that we lived at 80 Riviera Terr. I turned 8 years old. My parents, I think mostly my mom, decided that it would be great if I had a birthday party. I don't remember my exact feelings but I can assure you that I would have been just as happy to not have a party. I remember friends coming over including the Kay kids and Danny Bushey from the old neighborhood (they had also moved by this time to another house within Pontiac) and of course all of the kids that lived on our block at the new house. Naturally I got all the normal presents....you know, that cheap stuff that as parents we grumble that we have to buy it for some other kid......but I really don't remember what any of them were. The only present I remember actually came from Dad and Mom and it was a baseball mitt. I have to admit that it was NOT one of the nicer mitts in the world but it was my first mitt and I used it for years and years. I didn't replace it until the mid '60's.

I lived at the 80 Riviera Terr. house for a long time. I did leave there in April 1968 when I was drafted but returned in November 1969. I left again in September 1972 when I married. Dad and Mom finally sold the house and moved to Florida in June 1986.