While living there, Margeet had her church letter transferred to the Presbyterian Church in Monongahela and started attending there. That year we had Dave baptized at the church.
In early 1956, I was transferred to a project at the Cleveland Works of Jones & Lauglin Steel Corporation. We found a second floor apartment on Snow Road in Parma, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. We made trips back to Monongahela to work on the house on weekends. The Cleveland Zoo was only 15 minutes away and we visited there quite often with Dave and his neighborhood friend, Bobby.
We were surprised when my folks called to tell us that they were taking a bus out to visit us. As far as I could remember, they had never taken a bus trip before. After three sons and two grandsons, she wanted to make sure she really had a granddaughter! Later, Betty Stevenson and Kathryn (Stevenson) Shoemaker also visited for a few days.
After a year in Parma, we moved to a small, two story house in Garfield Heights in Cleveland on E. 97th St., located near the high school. Here, and in later moves, we usually had a gas stove when the new house kitchen was set up for an electric one, or vice versa. We settled on an electric stove, and had to pay to have an electric outlet installed. At one time, we thought if we were to keep moving around, perhaps it would make sense to own both an electric and gas stove!
Living on the ground floor made it much easier to take the kids out for walks and to play than it was in Parma. The job was winding down in Cleveland, and we continued to make some weekend trips to Monongahela to try to get the house ready for our move back there.
Shortly after New Year in 1957, I found out I would be going to a large job at the U.S. Steel Works at Duquesne, Pa. I had to be there for several weeks before we could make the moving arrangements and stayed with my folks. Our new house was finished except for one bathroom sink.
In early 1955, Marguerite and I decided to build a new house on Hill Street in Monongahela. We moved from Charleroi to a block house at the lower end of my folks’ property. We didn’t have as much room, but it was handy to our planned new house, and cut about a half hour off my daily commute to my job in Vandergrift.
We had plans for a two-story brick house with a full basement, a dormer on the upstairs, and a garage under a concrete patio off the kitchen. There were two bedrooms upstairs, a large walk-in closet and a bathroom. Downstairs was a living room with a fireplace, a kitchen and dining room with a pass-through cupboard which opened from either side, and a back bedroom and a “den” with a wall closet opening from either side. When we lived there, the kids thought this was pretty neat.
Lou, who had built a house next door two years before, and I did most of the work ourselves, working in the evenings and on weekends. After the basement was excavated, we poured the basement slab and laid the block walls. My Dad helped us with the wood framing and walls. By the end of fall, we had it under roof and could start some of the inside work. We had contractors do the electrical work and the plumbing.
Margeet was pregnant with Karen at this time. Margeet’s Mom was home from Iran on leave and came out to take care of Dave while Margeet was in the hospital. Karen was born on November 7, 1956 at Deaconess Hospital in the suburb of Cleveland called Brooklyn. I remember that it was a presidential election year when Dwight Eisenhower was elected to his second term by defeating Adlai Stevenson. I was watching the election results on TV in the waiting room when the doctor came into tell me that we had a baby girl.