Grandpa Ralph had a big red circle on his forehead

When I was a little girl and still ate in a highchair, I had a toy that stuck to the tray on the high chair with a suction cup. You pressed down on the suction cup, the air would be pressed out, and it would stick to the tray.

Grandpa decided that he wanted to try attaching it to my forehead, and Grandma said, "Why don't you try it on yourself, first?" So Grandpa did, and the toy stuck to his forehead. In order to get it off, he had to pull very hard, because it stuck on very well, and when he finally got the toy off his forehead, it left behind a big red circle where it had apparently broken some blood vessels during the removal. For the next week or so, Grandpa had to wear makeup on his forehead to cover the red circle when he went to work, so that he wouldn't look so strange!

My first pet

I went to the Roosevelt School, a public school in Englewood, NJ, for first and second grade. My first grade teacher, Miss Sekol, had a lot of cats. She had been struck by lightning when she was a teenager, and had taken a vow (promise) that if she recovered, she would never marry and would devote her life to teaching schoolchildren. I loved her very much.

During the year that I was in her class, one of her cats gave birth to kittens, and I begged my mother, Grandma Anita, to let me have one. Grandma finally relented (agreed) and I had my first pet, Frisky. Frisky was a ginger colored cat.

Frisky had a few litters of kittens. One time, the day before Pesach, Grandma went into the garage to go into her car to shop for food. She found Frisky in the front seat of the car with her newborn kittens. Grandma did not like animals very much, and didn't want to touch the cat and kittens, but she needed to use the car. So her father, Grandpa Max, was given the job of taking the mother and babies out of the car and putting them in a box.