1. Being a Child in the 1950's

The nineteen fifties brought about many visions of my grandparents life as they grew up. My grandmother, Yvonne Knittle (at the time) had vivid memories of what great times she would spend on 187 Farmington Road, Rochester New York. With an older sister named Malou and a younger brother named Renee they spent much of their time running around the neighborhood and playing ball in the streets. Since the backyards were filled with large victory gardens, ball in the street was a common activity for Rochester kids. During one of their games my grandma remembers one of her good friends on the street hitting the baseball straight through her neighbor’s window. These incidences many times resulted in a week off of the streets and the kids were forced to find something else, such as, playing on clotheslines in backyards. As kids they used to clothesline as jungle gyms and would hang upside down off of them. My grandpa, Jimmy Eggleston had some similar memories to the time period. AS a young boy living on Lexington Ave. each neighborhood had a large playground. Each of these playgrounds had a softball field and a team. After meeting early in the morning at their shed, that was located next to the field, they would walk or ride bikes to other playgrounds and challenge these teams to a game. With about eight playgrounds in the area they seemed to get a good number of games in each week. After spending hours at playgrounds and on the streets my grandparents would return to their homes with groups of friends and hang out on the large porches on the front of their homes. Since both of my grandparents were the first on their streets to purchase televisions around 1951 many neighbors seemed to congregate towards their houses. At the time televisions were in black and white so both my grandma and grandpa remember covering their televisions with a multi colored see through piece of plastic. Since each section of the colored board was different each part of the person’s body on the television was different. Looking back and talking about this, made my grandparents begin to realize how much the times have changed.