But then I knew that Mr. Walt Disney hadn’t read the true story carefully enough because he got it all mixed up with “Sleeping Beauty” and had the Prince kiss Snow White, and she woke up. In the true story the Prince carries the coffin to his palace, and on the way the piece of poisoned apple falls out of Snow White’s mouth and she wakes up. But this time I didn’t yell at the movie screen, in case the lady behind me got mad at me again.
But when “The End” appeared on the screen, boy, was I mad! I couldn’t help it. I stood up and hollered, “The story’s not over yet. Where’s the wedding? Where’re the red-hot iron shoes that they put on the Evil Queen so she dances herself to death?”
That was the true end of the true story. Just then my mom came running in, grabbed me, and dragged me out.
“Mr. Walt Disney didn’t read the story right,” I yelled again.
I never did understand it, and when I went to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs again, with Carol Crane, I warned Carol that Mr. Walt Disney hadn’t read the true story. I didn’t yell at the movie screen. But I still wished I could have seen the Evil Queen dancing to death in those red-hot iron shoes!
Chapter Four
Right after the Christmas of 1938, my dad had a big fight with the man he had hired to build the house. My mom and dad wanted the house to be built a certain way, but the builder didn’t listen to them. “I’m paying for it,” Dad said. And they fired the builder.
So 26 Fairmount Avenue just sat there all winter without any work being done. My dad and mom would put Buddy and me in the car and drive by to look at the sad, unfinished house. Maybe we would have to live in apartments forever.
Easter came. Easter was always fun because every year the Easter Bunny brought Buddy and me Easter baskets. I always got a stuffed animal, too. My favorite was a duck.
We got new “outfits” to wear to church on Easter Sunday. My mom must have loved to dress up Buddy and me, because there are pictures and home movies of us, Buddy in long pants, a jacket, and necktie; me in shorts, a striped shirt, and a beret. We certainly were what grown-ups call “fashion plates.”
“Guess what?” my dad said one day in the spring. “Johnny Papallo, Tony Nesci, and a few of my other friends are going to help us finish the house.”
Hurray! I might get to live in our house at 26 Fairmount Avenue after all.
But before my dad’s friends could start work, the City decided that Fairmount Avenue would be a real street with telephone poles and streetlights.
Machines came and scraped away lots of dirt, which made the street lower. Suddenly our house, which had been on a small hill, was way up in the air. My mom cried. My dad said some bad words.
Now a wall would have to be built to keep the front yard from falling into the street. Stairs would have to be made so we could get to the front door. And, last but not least, they would have to put in a steep driveway so we could get to the garage. Until all this was done, no one could work on the house because no one could get up to it.
And the new street was still just dirt. Every time it rained, the street turned to mud.
Well, my father’s friends were really smart men. They just got boards and loads of wooden planks and made a long walkway up to the house. Mr. Johnny Papallo, Mr. Tony Nesci, and all the others started to work.
Soon the roof was on the house and the inside walls were up. They were made of plasterboard, which was like heavy cardboard. Later, men called “plasterers” would come and smear wet plaster over the plasterboard, and it would dry into smooth, white walls.
But before the plasterers came, Mr. Johnny Papallo gave me a piece of bright blue chalk from his toolbox. He knew I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. I looked at those blank walls and knew what I wanted to do.
I asked my mom if I could make drawings of the family on the walls. She and my dad talked about it, and finally my dad said, “Okay, Tomie. Mom and I decided that you can make pictures on the plasterboard. But as soon as the plasterers come, no more drawing on the walls. Okay?”
Sure, it was okay. But maybe if they saw how great my pictures were, they’d keep them. I decided I would give each person in the family a special corner in what was going to be our living room.
I put Mom and Dad in a corner by the fireplace. I put my grandfather, Tom, in the other corner. (I put me there, too.) I put Buddy and Nana Downstairs and Nana Fall River by the kitchen. That way they wouldn’t have far to go. (I didn’t draw Nana Upstairs because she had died and gone to heaven a few months before.) The corner by the front door was for Uncle Charles and his girlfriend, Viva. Along the wall I drew some cousins, looking out the two windows.
We didn’t have real stairs to the second floor yet, so I couldn’t go up to the bedrooms. Mom had already told me that the biggest one was for her and Dad, and the smallest one was the just-in-case nursery. (Later we needed it for my sisters, Maureen and Judie.)
If I could have gotten up there I would have gone into the room Buddy and I were going to share and marked which side was mine. But that would have to wait.
The plasterers finally came and covered over all my beautiful drawings. I was mad about that, but my grandfather, Tom, told me that was perfect because they’d always be there under the plaster and wallpaper. That made me feel better. Tom always made me feel better.
With everything moving along smoothly, my dad started talking about the “backyard project.” The backyard was filled with weeds and tall grass and stuff. It would be plowed and smoothed so grass could be planted.
“I’m going to wait for fall to get here for the backyard project,” Dad said. “Maybe we can start on the front wall and the steps up to the walkway to the front door.”
But before they did, guess what? The City came back and scraped more and more dirt away from the street. Our house was even higher up in the air than before, and we needed the wall more than ever.
My mom kept crying. My dad kept using more and more bad words.
Chapter Five
In the fall of 1939, almost one year after the Hurricane of 1938, I started school. I was hoping that I could say my address was 26 Fairmount Avenue, but not yet.
I was excited about going to school because I knew that in school you learned to read. I really wanted to learn so that I wouldn’t always have to wait for my mom to read stories to me.
The first day of school came. I was going to be in the afternoon kindergarten class. My mom and I walked to King Street. At the corner, I said, “I know the way,” (it was just down the street). “I want to go alone.” My mom said I could. She watched me walk down the street. She waved when I reached the school.
I walked up the long front stairs where the boy with the umbrella had floated down during the hurricane. I didn’t know that students weren’t supposed to use those stairs. They were reserved for the president or the king of England and especially for the superintendent of schools.
I pulled open the heavy front door and went in. A lady was standing there. “Who are you, little boy?” she asked.
“I’m Tomie dePaola,” I answered. “Who are you?”
“I’m Miss Burke, the principal.” (I got to know her really well over the next seven years.)
Miss Burke told me not to use the front door again, and she showed me where the kindergarten room was.
The room was filled with kids crying and hanging onto their mothers. Boy, I thought, what babies. I didn’t realize that I would be in school with those kids for years and years.
I went up to a lady who looked like she might be the teacher. She was.
“And who are we?” she asked. (She always used “we.” “We must take our naps now,” or “We must bring our chairs into a circle”—stuff like that.)
“I’m Tomie dePaola,” I said.
“Oh, aren’t we lucky,” she said. “I had your big brother, Joseph, in kindergarten, too,” (she was talking about Buddy). Well, I figured it wouldn’t take too long for her to realize that my brother and I were very different.
But that could wait.
“When do we learn how to read?” I asked.
“Oh, we don’t learn how to read in kindergarten. We learn to read next year, in first grade.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll be back next year.” And I walked right out of the school and all the way home.
No one was there. My dad was working at the barbershop, and my mom was off shopping all by herself for the first time in a long while.
The school called my dad at the barbershop. He found my mom, and they came roaring home to Columbus Avenue.
There I was, holding one of my mom’s big books, staring at it, hoping that I could learn to read by myself.
When I told Mom and Dad what had happened, my dad said, “You handle this one, Floss.” And he went back to work.
My mom sat down next to me. “You know,” she said, “if you don’t go to kindergarten, you won’t pass. And if you don’t pass, you’ll never get into first grade, and you’ll never learn to read.”
So I went back to school, but I never really liked kindergarten.
Chapter Six
Now it was time to start “the backyard project.” The first thing we had to do was to burn off all the stuff that was growing there. It was a Saturday, so Buddy and I weren’t at school, and our friends and neighbors came to help. Carol Crane came, too.
It was a sunny day, with no wind blowing. “That’s very important,” my dad told us.
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, if it’s windy, the fire could spread and the house might burn down.” I sure didn’t want that to happen.
“Okay,” my dad said. “Let’s begin!”
“All right kids,” my mom said. “Stand back out of the way.”
My dad, Mr. Tony Nesci, Mr. Johnny Papallo, Mr. Crane, and a bunch of other people stood around all three sides of the field with old brooms, buckets of water, and wet burlap bags. My mom stood holding a hose attached to the one water faucet that worked. Everyone was ready.
They lit the fire at the edges, and it blazed right up. They wet their brooms and put out the flames around the outside of the circle. They did such a good job keeping the flames low that the whole fire went out.
“Try again, Joe!” someone called to my dad. This time he lit the fire in the middle, and it caught and burned bright and strong. Everyone shouted, “Hurray!”
But then the smoke started to get in people’s eyes. They ran from the edges. Suddenly the fire was really big. Everyone was shouting and banging the flames with wet brooms and burlap bags.
Brooms caught fire. Burlap bags caught fire. The smoke got thicker.
“Quick, Floss,” my dad shouted. “The hose, the hose!”
“Buddy! Turn on the faucet!” Mom shouted. Water streamed out of the hose.
“Wet down the house,” Uncle Charles yelled. My mom did.
“Put out the flames!” Mrs. Florence Nesci shouted. My mom aimed the hose at the fire. She kept squirting water all over the place until the fire was out. What a mess!
The weeds and grasses were black and smoking. So were the people. Everyone had black, sooty faces and smoky clothes. And everyone except my mom was soaking wet.
“Look what you’ve done to us,” Mr. Tony Nesci said.
“Well, I saved the house, didn’t I?” Mom said, laughing.
She sure did, and I was glad. Can you imagine having to start all over again? No, thank you.
With the backyard all burned down, my dad hired an old Italian man who had a horse and a plow. It took a few days for the man to plow the backyard. It was fun to watch. Rocks kept popping up, and my dad saved them so he could use them later to build the wall in front of the house.
After the yard was plowed, the old man attached a contraption made out of chains to the horse where the plow had been. He and the horse pulled the contraption along the ground to make it smooth and flat. Back and forth they went, back and forth. It looked pretty good, until the next day.
Chapter Seven
That night it began to rain—no, not rain, pour. And it was still pouring the next morning. The radio said, “It is a nor‘easter,” and the streets were full of water.
That morning my mom drove my dad to work and then came home to drive Buddy, Carol Crane, and some of the other neighborhood kids to school. I went with her.
I didn’t go to school until the afternoon, so after we dropped everyone off, Mom and I drove up to Fairmount Avenue. The street looked like a huge river. Muddy water was rushing down it.
Mom stopped the car at the corner. She didn’t dare drive up that sea of mud. “We’ll get stuck for sure,” she said.
We looked up toward 26 Fairmount Avenue. What used to be the newly plowed backyard was roaring down in two muddy streams on either side of the house into the street.
“I hope the inside of the house is all right,” Mom said.
“We could take our shoes off and go see,” I suggested.
“I don’t think so,” Mom answered. “Your father will just have to check it when he gets home from work.”
I was disappointed. I thought it would be fun to squish through all the muddy water.
That night when my dad got home, he told us that everything was fine.
“A little bit of muddy water went into the cellar, but it’ll be easy to clean up,” Dad said. “But the backyard, well, that’s a different story. And the street! The City is going to have to redo the whole street. It’s a mess!”
“Oh, no,” Mom said. I thought she might start to cry again. But she just said, “I guess that will mean waiting even longer to move into the house.”
I sure hoped not. I had just found out about guardian angels from Aunt Nell, my grandfather Tom’s sister. Aunt Nell told me that if you wanted something really important, you could ask your guardian angel, and as long as it wasn’t a bad thing, you’d probably get it. I figured now was the perfect time to talk to my guardian angel.
And guess what! My guardian angel did come to the rescue. The rain stopped. The weather turned cold. Within a week, all that mud on Fairmount Avenue had frozen in place. Cars could go up the street again, and everyone went back to work on the house.
Finally, the inside stairs were built. I could go upstairs and look at the bedrooms. I could go up to the attic. I could go down to the basement to look at the furnace and see where Mom’s laundry room would be. Everything was happening quickly now.
“Looks good,” my dad told Buddy and me. “Next time you come here it will be to move in—right after New Year’s Eve.”
Chapter Eight
Right after New Year’s Eve—but first we would have our last Christmas on Columbus Avenue. Dad put up the Santa Claus fireplace for the last time. It was made of cardboard. 26 Fairmount Avenue had a real fireplace. Mom put the cotton snow on top of the Santa Claus fireplace and set up the Christmas village.
We had a manger scene, too.
“Next year,” Mom said, “we’ll get a brand-new manger scene with all new figures for our brand-new house.”
On Christmas Eve, the neighbors came by for a party. Mrs. Crane was crying a little. “I’ll miss you all next Christmas Eve here on Columbus Avenue.” She sniffed. My dad gave her a hug. Carol Crane said she’d miss me, too. Mom said, “Well, you can just all come up the hill to 26 Fairmount Avenue.”
It was a great Christmas. Santa brought me an Uncle Wiggly game to go with my Uncle Wiggly books. I got a harmonica and a Jeep doll. The Jeep was an animal from the “Popeye” comics. Buddy got a catcher’s mitt and a softball. We got lots of other things, too. Carol Crane got an authentic Shirley Temple doll. It was so big and looked so real, I expected it to sing and dance.
On Christmas Day, after church we went to Tom and Nana’s house for Christmas dinner. Uncle Charles was there, too, as well as his best friend, Mickey Lynch (we didn’t call him Mr.). We had turkey and dressing and gravy.
“Well, Timothy, me bucko (that’s what Tom always called me), it won’t be long before you’re in that nice n
ew house. I’ll bet you’re excited,” Tom said.
Excited? Tom was right.
On New Year’s Eve, my mom and dad got all dressed up like movie stars. Mom had on a long black evening gown,with long gloves and silver shoes. Dad wore a tuxedo with a bow tie. They were going to the Wallingford Elks Club New Year’s Eve Dance with Uncle Charles and his girlfriend, Viva. Mr. and Mrs. Crane were going to go, too. Carol was going to stay with Buddy and me.
Althea Morin came down from upstairs to take care of us. We were going to have our own New Year’s Eve party.
Mom left us brownies and Cokes in the icebox. Mr. and Mrs. Crane gave us party hats and noisemakers to use at midnight.
“Gee,” Buddy said, “midnight sure takes a long time coming. I’m going to take a nap-after I drink a Coke and eat some brownies.”
Carol, Althea, and I played my new Uncle Wiggly game. We listened to the radio. The doorbell rang, and it was Mr. and Mrs. Morin, Althea’s parents, from upstairs. They had a bowl of hot popcorn and some ice cream. “To help celebrate,” Mrs. Morin said. Mr. Morin tuned the radio to a program from a fancy nightclub in New York City. “And now,” the radio announcer said, “for our entertainment, singing his latest hit, the lilting voice of everyone’s favorite Irish tenor, Morton Downey.”
Morton Downey was my mom’s first cousin. I woke Buddy up.
“Cousin Morton is singing on the radio,” I said.
“So what,” Buddy said. “Let me sleep.”
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