He was everything a good leader should be. I can still see him in the overalls that hung loosely on his stringy body, his blond hair sticking out in irritated tufts, his face dwarfed by the huge bandage covering a nose broken by the bat that sailed loose during a sandlot baseball game. For 11 kids who roamed freely - it was almost impossible to get into trouble, it seemed - we were rich in all the ways that mattered.Īlvin was the self-proclaimed leader of the seven younger kids. But, 11 kids? And two single women? Yes, we were poor. Aunt Dolores drew a pension from the railroad where her husband had worked, and she took in washing and ironing. My mother worked as a waitress and cook at the Le Mar restaurant next to the Strand Theatre on 10th Street. Looking back now, I realize we were very poor, dirt poor. She just did it and then went back to what she was doing without so much as a backward glance. I am sure she never thought she had done anything that deserved gratitude. Something in her was compassionate in the most offhand, natural way. I never heard her criticize these men, living off the charity of others little better off than they were. Aunt Dolores would open a can of Campbell’s soup for each of them. I remember transients coming to the back door and asking for a handout. I was 3 years old, and I was at home there.Įven without material possessions of any significant nature, my Aunt Dolores was loving and kind and generous to a fault. The house was, in many ways, like my Aunt Dolores - old before its time and hard-used, but honest, open and welcoming. The yard was hard-packed dirt with an occasional scraggly weed too stubborn to die. A few scabs of paint still clung in haphazard fashion to otherwise bare boards, screens were missing or torn, and where windows were broken, cardboard filled bare frames. The house on F Street was an old derelict. My mother was raising my two brothers and me as a single parent. My Aunt Dolores was a widow with eight children. We lived in a big old ramshackle two-story house on F Street, near the train yard in Modesto. 05, 1981, decades after Bunny Steven’s mother worked at the restaurant next door. The Strand Theater on 10th Street in downtown Modesto is pictured Oct.
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