home to my Mother. He always liked Mom and he really made her feel welcome. She lived with us for ten years in Toledo. When we lived on Grantwood and Sid was six months old, Mom had a stroke. She revived and was good as new and when we moved to Castlewood Drive she had a nice room and bath upstairs. She loved all her grandchildren and was a good Mother and Grandmother.I remember one time she was watching my boys when they were small and she had to answer the phone in my bedroom. While she was in there the boys locked her in and she could hear them in the hall medicine cabinet. It scared her so bad she took the screen out of the window and dropped to the driveway pavement. It was a pretty long drop. It didn’t hurt her but I was always so sorry about that because it could have been really bad. She was probably seventy-five years old at that time anyway. I can’t remember how we punished the boys but they deserved a good spanking. Mom had four stokes. One before she came to us, two while with us, and the last one at my sister Marie’s. Mary Lou, Lois and I went down to Marie’s in answer to a call from Marie that Mom wasn’t doing too well. Marie was real concerned so I kept the girls out of school and took them with me. I remember on the way down praying that if this was the time for my Mother to leave us, please let her die in my arms. When we got there she was all smiles, she was so happy to see us but she couldn’t talk. She hadn’t been able to talk for quite a while. I was going to leave to go back to Toledo, but then decided to wait until the morning. About dawn, Marie and I took Mom to the bathroom. Marie was on her left and when we got to the bathroom door,Marie told me to change places with her so I would be on Moms’ left. Then when we got into the bathroom Mom lunged back and she and I both slid to the floor. She died in my arms very quietly and peacefully. She was so precious and loved her family dearly. She was always a loving and quiet Mother. She had a gift that she could imitate people to perfection, even the sound of her voice would change. She didn’t do it to hurt anyone, only in fun. She had a very sweet personality and could really take a joke. I remember Mary Gerber, Sally’s Mother, would tease Mom about Jeff Gerber. Mom always had an answer for jokesters. Her answer to Mary was, “Now that’s just the one I would want if I wanted one.” When she would be disgusted with me she never said a word but she often slammed the door which hurt me worse than anything did. I gave her cause many times. When I was sixteen years old, Mom was fifty-eight. She was forty-two when I was born. I was a “change of life” baby. My Mother was patient, kind, understanding Mother. She had a good sense of humor. One time when I ask her about Dad and how he treated her when he was drunk, she would say that drink would make people do crazy things. Someone offered Mom some beer once and she said, “No, thank you. I don’t want to be dizzy.” I remember after Dad’s second marriage, I still kept in touch with him. He had married his first cousins’ widow. She worked in a saloon in Vera Cruz. After she died, he would ask me questions about Mother, like, if she had as many gray hairs as he had. I ask Mom if she wasn’t afraid that he might try to harm her, but she had no fear of him. They are both buried side by side in the new Apostolic Christian Church cemetery. One day when I had just left the kitchen to go to the basement, Sidney was playing in the kitchen. I was brewing a pot of coffee. He pulled a chair to the stove and climbed up and took a hold of the boiling hot coffeepot. It poured all over his arm, but never left a scar. The blisters were an inch high. He was always a curious boy. I told him never to put anything into the light socket, so when he found a hairpin he stuck it in and the power threw him backward several feet. He hasn’t been the same since, but we’ve learned to live with it. When he was in school, he was a good student and always got good grades. When he became a scout, he went on to become an Eagle. He always did his best at whatever he did. I was in my ninth month expecting another baby. We had invited the Frautschi sisters, Homer & Jo Reineck, Carl & Ann Frautschi, George & Francis, Lois & Warren Newman, and Lydia & Ben Schlatter to come over for an evening to watch home movies. Everything was going fine. They were all enjoying the food and the home movies. About eleven thirty, I told Harold it was time for me to go to the hospital. I had my bad packed, so he said okay, he was ready to go. The room was dark because of showing the movies. So we told our guests they were welcome to stay as long as they liked, but it was time to go to the hospital to get another baby. Our second son was born at two PM Tuesday, Mary the eighteenth in nineteen forty-three. He weighed nine pounds and he was a sweet black haired boy we named Charles Eddie Klopfenstein. He has been a blessing to everyone that has ever known him. He does unto others, as we want others to do unto us. When we moved to Castlewood Drive we had a big back yard where the neighborhood children liked to play. One year in the winter, Chuck and Sid flooded our back yard and made a big skating rink. The neighborhood kids and even parents came to skate. In summertime we had a big tent in the yard. One summer we took a camping trip clear to Cape Cod and the historical battlefields. We didn’t miss much. Good memories. One time we had a surprise birthday party for Chuck. He and Sid had been taking swimming lessons at the Toledo Catholic Club, so I made arrangements to have a surprise swim party there. Chuck knew nothing of it, so all of his friends were there when he and Sid walked in. He was so surprised and happy he didn’t know who he was or what was going on all evening. Chuck was always a good student and got good grades. He and Sid were boy scouts and went to the Boy Scout camp outside of Toledo. When we took our trip to Oregon to see the Klopfenstein relatives, they wore their scout suits a lot. He and Sid have been good friends and enjoy being together. I’m thankful for that. Not all brothers can say that. Every Easter I would get them live baby chickens and this one year I got them each a duck. I never dreamed we would be able to keep them until they were grown. Well, they grew and they waddled around our backyard. One day a raccoon caught one of them and tried to run off with it but Chuck grabbed a croquet mallet and threw it at the raccoon. The raccoon was a long ways off on the fence, but it was a great shot and the mallet hit the raccoon on the head and he dropped the duck and ran up a big tree. Everyone was dumbfounded that such a little kid was quick enough and brave enough to do that. Chuck was a hero and the duck was okay except for where it had been bitten. Chuck put Mercurochrome on the wound. That duck ran around with a red streak on him from the medicine that looked like blood until we gave them all to one of Harold’s drivers. Good riddance. I think we were sort of an attraction in our neighborhood. At least we always had a lot of kids in our back yard. There was a big Catholic Church at the end of the street and also a Catholic school. We had a lot of unruly Catholic kids that passed, when we would say we would have to call their priest, they would straighten up. After we moved to 2278 Castlewood Drive, we had a big four-bedroom home and a big front porch that Harold screened in so that it was real nice. The children could play outdoors even on rainy days. It was an ideal place to raise a family. I found the house