Neal and Fumiko’s stay in the Zellers household was not a happy one, at least not to hear Kathy tell it.

Reed, the youngest son, was the problem.

I don’t know exactly what went on, but I know that in my dealings with Reed, who was my uncle, three years older than I was, he was often like the big brother that I never had and very protective of me around older kids, but he was also very bossy and he always got his way. Always.

So I don’t know exactly how he behaved around a girl, but it probably wasn’t any better.

According to Kathy, Reed used to chase her around the house, and when she eventually complained about it, instead of taking her side, Mom and Pop Zellers asked Neal and his family to move out.

Well, maybe. But perhaps the recollections of a six or seven year old child are not entirely reliable. I know from experience that I used to blame my childish self for arguments that developed among my adult relatives, only to learn years later that, no, it had nothing to do with me. It’s quite common for children to blame themselves when adults behave in ways that they don’t understand.

So what might have prompted the move?

The Zellers house was much too small for seven people to live comfortably and it didn’t have a real bathroom. What it had amounted to an outhouse. 

We lived on a farm and although there were outhouses on the property, even we had a proper bathroom with indoor plumbing, a toilet, and a bathtub.

What my grandparents had in the borough of Richland in the middle of the twentieth century was a little room that was attached to the back of the house. When you entered that room through a door there was a wooden bench with a hole in it. That’s where you did your business. Yes, the little room smelled like an outhouse.

No bathtub. To wash up, they had a basin that you filled with water and washed yourself from that.

That house didn’t get a proper bathroom with a toilet and bathtub until a few years later.

Remember that Neal and Fumiko were still newly married. The upstairs had three small bedrooms for seven people. I don’t know what the sleeping arrangements were, but there cannot have been very much privacy. For anyone.

In any case Neal got a job in Middletown, and in September of 1954 he moved his family to Hummelstown, PA. I don’t know any details, but my understanding is that it was difficult for this young family to make ends meet.

I remember that we went to visit them there, because I recall seeing a giant lollipop on a candy factory near where they lived.

They didn’t remain there too long. They moved back to Richland and found a second floor apartment on North Race Street so Kathy could continue attending class at the Richland elementary school, where she had formed what would be a long-lasting friendship with Ellen Weiant.

Ellen Weiant’s mother JoAnn was a longtime friend of my mother, and when we moved back to Richland a few years later in 1957, we lived directly across the street from the Weiants. Moreover, Ellen’s great uncle Leo Blecker was married to my great aunt Marie, the sister of my grandmother Tillie. Do you need a scorecard to keep this all straight? I’ll be making some available for a modest fee.

But I digress.

What I neglected to mention is that when Neal and Fumiko and Kathy came to the States, they were not exactly welcomed with open arms by the rest of the family.

I was much too young to be aware of any of this at the time and only found out about it many years later, so I don’t know any details, but what I do know is that initially the only people who made Fumiko and Kathy feel welcome were my aunt and uncle Joan and Mark.

Yes, that means that even my parents were not welcoming. 

In one way it’s rather surprising that Mark would be part of the welcoming pair, as he was always the real hothead among the Zellers clan, but perhaps Joan, whom everybody loved, had a calming influence on him. Or perhaps it was his stint in the military where he got to see other parts of the world and developed a broader outlook on people. One of his longtime friends from his time in the Army had married a woman from Italy.

Again I’m going to season this recollection of Kathy’s with a little bit of skepticism. I’m perfectly willing to believe that the Zellers clan might have been a bit hostile and even betrayed some racism, as I know them well, even including my parents. But Kathy never described any overt displays of hostility or racism to my sister or me, so I’m wondering if what she experienced was more along the lines of that well known Zellers (and Troutman) reserve. Our family was never known for its overt displays of affection. Couple that with Fumiko and Kathy coming from a completely different culture and trying to acclimate themselves, perhaps our family was not quite as unwelcoming as Kathy remembers. Add in the warm affection that she surely received from Joan (everybody loved Joan; she was something of an anomaly in our extended family) and the rest of the family would have seemed chilly by comparison.

Then again rest of the populace of Richland was definitely not as friendly to people who looked different as it might have been.

After Neal and his family moved back to Richland to take up residence in the apartment on North Race Street, in the first floor of the building lived Marcella McGee and her brother Billy, and they tormented Kathy mercilessly.

That’s when she would get on her bicycle and ride to the other side of town to where Joan and Mark lived, simply to get some relief.