Ruth Pruiett - Memories
Part 6
Life was exciting for a few weeks with a new baby whose bed was in the front hallway of a big old house at 4531 Smith Road in Norwood, where Mom and Pop Pruiett lived on the first floor and Thelma and Wes Iredale lived on the second floor with their three children. Ralph and I slept on a couch in the living room until our Buddy was about three months old. Then we moved the baby bed to the third floor and we had a bed up there. Ralph was pretty tired of having to tow the line in the Service and refused to think about getting a job until about four months after getting out of the service. He then got a job at Standard Oil working in a service station. I used to walk Buddy, in the baby buggy, up there to see him almost every day at the corner of Madison and Edwards Roads.
Meanwhile, I was becoming more and more depressed about not being able to move into a home of our own. So finally, when Buddy was seven months old, I managed to talk my Dad and Louise into taking care of Buddy so that I could go back to work to earn some money so that we could rent an apartment or, as it turned out, buy a house. John Graham, the father of my cousin Fritz's wife, Chris, was a dabbler in real estate and he found a house on Manss Avenue in Price Hill at a price that we could afford.
We had picked out the house and made arrangements to sign the papers in October 1946, when my stepmother wrote to tell me that I had to come to pick up Buddy and bring him home because she was pregnant again and just couldn't handle him. He was a big boy, even then. We asked Muriel and Bob Rakel to drive us down to pick him up and on arriving back in the City, we went to the Savings and Loan Office and signed the papers to buy our house at 1310 Manss Avenue. My brother Barney was born in March of 1947.
Unfortunately, the OPA, at that time, required that we give our tenants three months notice to vacate the apartment that we chose to live in. So we still had about three and a half months to spend in Norwood with Ralph's parents before we could move into our new house. Fortunately, we had saved enough money to pay the closing costs and to buy a few pieces of furniture that we needed to start living on our own. As a matter of fact, we had chosen to live on the second floor and the people on the first floor moved out before the second floor was available and my brother Warren and his wife and baby moved into the first floor before we moved in. We moved in about February 1, 1947. Shortly after we moved in, our tenant on the third floor moved out and Ralph's brother Bob and his wife Carlas moved into the third floor, so that we had a real family situation of our own. During that first summer, I paid Carlas to take care of Buddy, and since Thelma was pregnant with Larry, she also took care of Wayne, most of that time.
Sometime after that summer, Bob and Carlas separated and moved out of the third floor. Bob needed some money, so we paid him for their furniture and, thereafter, we rented the third floor furnished. Sometime late in 1948, we made some changes in the third floor and took it over ourselves, thereby having our living room, dining room and kitchen on the second floor and three bedrooms on the third floor. Our son Bill was born in April of 1949 while we were living thus. My little sister, Clautee, or Toddy as we called her, came to live with us in 1948. She made it possible for me to continue working most of the time. She loved my children and they also loved her. She was a big part of our lives until she got married in 1955. Even after she was married, we still were very close and visited often and talked to each other quite a lot. She had four children, Steven, Mark, Barbara and David. Unfortunately, she had some problems, which I was unable to help her with and she died in 1974. We have had very little contact with her children since her death.
In August of 1948, Kathleen and Warren's baby girl, Barbara, was born. When Barbara was six weeks old, Kathleen went to visit her mother in Kentucky and, while there, was stricken with Polio. Warren brought her back to Cincinnati by ambulance and she was treated here. Kathleen was in a wheelchair for some time after this and her Mother took care of Barbara. Sometime after this, Warren and Kathleen moved back to Kentucky and stayed there until 1958, I believe, during which time Gerry and Marilyn were born. When they moved back to Cincinnati, Barbara stayed in Kentucky with her Grandparents. Therefore, Warren had a similar situation with her as my Dad had with Charles.
After Warren moved out of our house in Price Hill, we moved into the first and second floors and, again, rented out the third floor furnished. During this time, we had two different tenants. The first couple was a policeman, Donald Hahn and his wife, Ruth. They stayed until they had enough money to buy a house of their own. After this, Mr. and Mrs. Bernie Eisele moved in. They had a new baby and, while we were in Tennessee on vacation, in the summer of 1950, their apartment became infested with pigeon mites. They moved out until we had the place treated, but they were never comfortable living there so they moved on. From this point on, we took over the whole house until we moved out in November 1952.