I am the first of four children in my family. It was towards the end of the month of May of 1975 when I was born. The twenty eight day had come and it was very early in the morning. My mother had checked into a hospital at Towson, Maryland in the United States of America. There were some unusual circumstances about my birth that almost caused me to die. The umbilical cord had wrapped itself around my neck causing me to choke while my heart began to race very fast.
My mothers name is Barbara Ellen (Royston) Moten. The names of her parents are unknown other then Grandma and Grandpa. I remember a little about Grandpa before he died. The clearest images that I can picture is Grandpa setting on the end of the sofa next to a lamp reading the news paper. He may have had glasses, but I can not be too sure. Grandpa was always wearing a gray jumpsuit of some kind with his name sown onto them. Grandma always liked to travel with Aunt Mabel. She would sometimes bring myself and my brother along or my two sisters. We would always go to places just to camp in our motor-homes with a lot of other people.
Mom had one sister, Aunt Winnie who is now married with a daughter named Julie. Aunt Winnie always seemed quiet. She was very thin and tall with long strait black hair. I remember that Aunt Winnie’s husband had a really cool train set in his basement. We didn’t get to travel over there much. Grandma wasn’t on good grounds with Aunt Winnie. It seems she just took off one day and did not tell grandma and did not want her to know where she was living.
Grandma had curly dark hair that she would constantly die. She is kind of short, but not by much. There was always this lotion she would use on her hands and feed that were colored in strange ways with purple spots.Her persistent ways about complaining about petty things has had its toll on her. My immediate family no longer speaks with her.
Mom says that most of her relatives live in the state of Texas. We would attend family reunions at the same place every summer. There were always a lot of people that I did not know.
My mother grew up in Towson, Maryland. The home was built by her father. There are actually two houses there but the first has since been turned into a sort of storage garage. They lived in the first home, (the storage garage,) until the real house was finished. I remember strange smells in both homes that were different. They were not nasty smells. One of them smelled like a sort of old perfume. The other was stale and humid, but with flavor. I used to like visiting the old storage house because there were still parts unexplored. There were also some old toys and games that I never saw before.
Mom worked as a dish washer for K-Mart. Most of my life, she has worked as a postal employee. She would deliver mail, sort mail, and also be the clerk at the counter. My mom is a fighter, meaning that she has a lot of determination and self motivation to continue until her goals are achieved. The biggest opponent in our lives was the school system and she fought for us every step of the way.
My fathers name is Lewis Edward Moten Jr., named after his father. I was also named after him so I am the Third (III). His mother is Regina M. McAteer, who had remarried after grandpa had died. Grandpa had died when my father was very young.
Dad’s family is where all the warmth came from. Grandma would always say that I was her favorite grandson.
Dad had a brother and two sisters, (just like me) – but not exactly. He had a step brother and a step sister (or they may have been half-brother and half-sister). Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Kathy belonged to the other grandpa. Aunt Dian was dads full sister.
Dad’s step-father was thin and old and smelly. Grandma has red curly hair and is always alert. She could make her voice sound like a parrot. In fact, she had a green parrot at her house that could talk until Aunt Kathy moved out. Aunt Kathy also had red hair where Aunt Dians hair was blonde. They all wore glasses. Uncle Jimmy had dark curly hair and had a very short beard growing. They were always quiet.
During the holidays, everyone would come to grandmas house and talk about things going on in the world. They were always happy to see me. Grandma would always say that I was her favorite grandson.
Dad grew up in a neighborhood filled with children and a lot of crazy stories over in Bradshaw Maryland. His house was rite next to the train tracks and his parents actually owned a small abandoned coal yard that was overgrown with weeds.
Dad worked for a factory called Crown Cork and Seal. He had injured his leg once while on the job by falling into some scrap metal. After a while, he was also laid off. He had another factory job at a company with three C’s (CCC) making plastic bottles. A couple of times he would go back and try to get his old job back. Later, after mom had gotten a job at the post office, Dad also applied. After a couple of times, He got in doing maintenance. He was flown out to Norman, Oklahoma a lot of times for training. Today, he is still holding his present job doing maintenance for the post office.
My parents married in October.
My parents first lived in a very small apartment at first and then moved to apartment to live in a two story home. Dad was hit by a drunk driver and was seriously injured. He had been flown by a helicopter to the hospital, but he does not remember it. After getting money from the accident, he had enough money to make a considerable down payment on a much larger and nicer house. This house is in White Marsh, Maryland – where I spent a lot of my child hood growing up.
I grew up in what was considered a large family in my childhood. The average family was said to have 2.5 children. I have three siblings injured consists of one brother and two sisters. Our family had some unique little twists. One was how our names were chosen. All the males initials are, L.E.M. and the females are B.E.M. with an exception to Becky’s, whose real name is Rebecca.
My brother, who is just a little over a year younger then I was called Lucas. We would switch between calling him Luke and Lucas. He wasn’t breathing when he was born and I heard that he actually turned blue. Luke had seemed to have preternatural abilities when it came to understanding things. He was usually the one who would program the VCR, or take a look at something that wasn’t working as expected.
I had lacked the social skills that he posessed and was jealeous of him. He had usually associated himself with others rather quickly and went off to visit friends for the night and was active in a few school activities. One such activity was where he had played an orange munchkin on roller skates. He had worn a tall pointy orange hat made out of card board paper and a shiny orange shirt and pants.
The third child to come into our family was named Bonnie. Complications occurred during her birth as well. Doctors had tugged on her arm and to this day she can not lift it above her head. I believe that a nickname that she once had was bellow breadth because she was always shouting about something.
Becky came last into the family through a C-Section. The girls always seemed to hang out together a lot. Bonnie would often boss Becky around.
My errant memories of early child hood are very hard to recall. The first thing that I can remember is probably kindergarten. It was snowing and we were growing a seed in a cup that was upside down. It was all interesting to me and seemed to be a lot of fun. There was also a kid there named Charlie or Charles. Charlie Brown cartoons were my favorite and that’s what he reminded me of. I even had an old red Charlie Brown lunch box with Snoopy on the lid in elementary school.
I had a lot of toys while growing up. I had Legos, Construx, Tinker Toys, Etch-a-Sketch to name a few. The first Lego set I can remember is a truck with a crane on top. There was a red toy that we had that was in the shape of a circle. We would set on it and in the center a pole came up and had a smaller circle on the top the size of a Frisbee. I would turn it and in doing so, I pushed my body in circles around it. We also had a battery powered train that we could set in that ran on a set of train tracks that could come apart. My favorite toys were usually things that came apart and could build other things.
My grand mother Royston had many old toys from when my mother was a little girl. There were large canisters of lincoln logs that we would usually play with. Back in her guest room, a large chest was filled with toys. One of the toys was a plastic rifle that contained many pieces so that it could compact into a smaller unit to carry around. I was not permitted to play with it because my parents did not want us children to associate with weapons. It had always intrigued me though, because each time I would go play with the toys, I would have to pick it up and set it aside to get the other toys out.
There were more toys in a building in back of her house from when Mom was a child. The toys had an oder that smelled like the building. I couldn’t determine if it was dry or wet in the air or a combination of the two.
Mom and Dad did not read bet time stories to us often. My favorite bed time stories would be from a book called “My Book of Bible Stories”. It was a yellow book with lots of pictures from the biblical time period. My dad would play a cassette tape that we could look at the words and pictures as the story progressed through the pages.
My playmates were Jennifer, Tanya, and Jason Wadarzick. The Wadarzicks were friends of the family that didn’t live too far away. We would usually play at each others houses. They had a lot of buildings full of junk and cars all over the place. There were lots of trees on the side of there property and they had a lot of geese. Amtrak Trains and Freight trains would run past the house at the end of the property. We would sometimes watch as it would take forever for the trains to start or stop.
My favorite foods were strawberries, pizza, lasagna, and stuffed shells. My father had a garden out in the back of the house and he would spend quite some time there. He grew a lot of his food and most of it was good to eat. I disliked artichokes and asperiguess. The artichokes looked like small potatoes with bumps all over them. They were not as soft as normal potatoes and had an odd smell. They grew along the roots of a plant that rose as high as a sun flower. The asparaguss was very hard to chew and did not taste all to well. I would prefer the tips of the asparaguss over the stems, but I was not allowed to leave the table until I finnished them.
My mother would can a lot of different kinds of foot into glass jars. It would take a long time to prepare everything and she had a process that she would go through. It would be very hot in the house and smelly. She also liked to make pies. We had a green apple tree and a cherry tree. The rubarb that my dad grew would be used to make one of her prized pies. When I was young, I HATED Rubarb Pies. Now, I love the things and can not find them in a store.
I first started doing chores around the home when I was very young. Washing dishes, doing laundry, taking out the trash, cleaning up the rooms in the house and feeding the dog were the basic chores that would be assigned to us children. The chores would alternate between us so that we couldn’t complain about one sibling not having to deal with as much work as the other.
I remember that the dish water was always scalding hot and would turn my hand red rite away. I would dart my hand in and out of the water until I got used to the heat. Mom would state that the heat allowed the dishes to dry faster after they came out of the water. She had been a dish washer for a deparment store called K-Mart.
The first holiday that I can remember is Christmas at Grandmas. Being Jehovah’s Witnesses, we were not allowed to celebrate holidays. We would sometimes have to wait for Christmas to pass before we could get our presents. After one Christmas, I received a domino set from one of my great aunts. They were yellow cream color made of porcelin and a box with a sliding top came with the set. I treasured this game more then most of my other toys due to the quality it seemed to posess.
The only holiday that my family observed was Passover. At one time, my father tried to invent a holiday called happy day. His theory was that Christmas comes only once a year, but happy day could fall on any day. It was kind of like Christmas and a birthday combined. There was a cake and everyone got presents. It was pretty rare when Happy Day came. To this day, he still believes in Happy Day. I think it reminds him of the TV show, “Happy Days”, with “The Fonz”.
The house that I lived in was large. It was more of a fixer-upper in that every now and then something needed repairs or something was broken by us kids. The floors were green and had sort of a textured pattern. They were not exactly shag, but was on its way. When we moved in, I remember two old people in the kitchen with some kind of object on the dark yellow carpeted floor. I think it may have been a white crucifix or something.
The attic had a back room with a lot of cool stuff that my brother and I would look at. There were items such as cowboy cards from an old TV western show. It was always really hot up there and I would break into a sweat just as I would walk in. I liked setting up in the attic looking out of the windows down at the ground. It had given me a dizzy feeling but I got used to it. You feel as if you could almost fall out.
The house was located near a lot of businesses. There was an old couple that lived next to us on one side and a fire department next to them, then a bank, a hardware store, and a deli. On the other side of us was also an old man and an old woman. There was a boy, who I think was called Robby – but he was much too old to play with us. Later, the Hopes would move in with two daughters. One was about two years older then me and the other was my youngest sisters age. Across from our house was a car dealer, and then a post office next to them. We lived at that location for about 14 years.
How to Write Your Autobiography
by Patricia Ann Case
Preserving Your Family Heritage
This book has made it very easy for me to remember a lot of my past experiences. It is really easy to follow along. The first couple of chapters explain why and how to write an autobiography. It is really cheap if you buy it from AltaVista – and I will also get a cut of the profits if a lot of people buy them through the link on this page!
(Purchased December 28, 1999)