Lyndhurst

I can't tell you much more about the first 20 years Mom & Dad were married.  Maybe my brothers and sister will chime in and give me some stories about living in Pennsylvania and Newark.  I am the youngest child, by 10 years.  A few years before I was born, Clay & Daisy bought a house in Lyndhurst.  It was an old house and from what I heard, it didn't even have a real bathroom.  The toilet was installed in the basement.  The house was built as a 2 family home, with a 1 bedroom apartment on the 2nd floor.  Clay basically rebuilt the inside of the house, with his sons help.  The first floor became a kitchen, living room, bathroom and pantry.  The 2nd floor became 3 bedrooms and a small half bath off the master bedroom.  There was no hall, so when you walked upstairs you walked directly into one bedroom, with the other 2 rooms having doors off of it.  When I was very small I shared the back bedroom with my sister and the boys had the center room.  Before long, the boys got a bedroom set up in the basement, which Clay finished, and I got moved to the center bedroom.  By the time I was 9 my sister got married and I got her room, but by that time the boys were also gone and their bedroom became my playroom.   Daisy always wanted a dining room, so in 1964 they had another room added in the back of the house, off the kitchen.  It made room for wonderful family dinners on holidays when my older siblings and their families, as well as 2 of my aunts, came for dinner.  The photos below are from the first Thanksgiving dinner in the new dining room.