It was authentically Fire Engine Red!
It was the sole Christmas gift for the both of us to share (obviously my share was the very back of the rig). At that time, Wayne was ~5 1/2 years old and I was ~3 1/2. The youngest offspring at that time (Jeff) was ~15 months old and not in this photo. Mom was pregnant with child #4 (Gordon) at the time of this photo and he was born in August just after we had moved to a suburban town far north of Chicago. Child #5 (Raymond) was born 2 years after that.
Anyhoo, a single moment after Mom had shot the photo she said that we couldn't play with the firetruck in the apartment. She said it was for us to play with once we moved to our new house "in the country" where we could play with it on the sidewalks. Subsequently, she managed to hide it where we couldn't get near it until after we moved to the 'burbs. A scant few days after we arrived at our new home that beautiful toy was parked in a niche in the garage where it languished for many years thereafter. Ya see, our sidewalks around the Eisenhower era ranch house proved to be too short and narrow for us to ride the engine on and the gravel driveway and our neighborhood roads weren't yet paved. Further, Dad fretted about what the firetruck's wheels would do to his lawn. Sooooo Pops went and bought Wayne and I bicycles (mine had training wheels) for our upcoming birthdays and we learned to ride on the gravel roads. I tell ya, Mom and Dad both wanted their children to have the gifts that they never had during their austere childhoods.
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Anyhoo, the aforementioned photo holds a great deal of memories for me. The TV and antenna were purchased secondhand by my maternal grandfather so he could gift it to Mom, Dad, and us kids. That makeshift sofa-bed pictured behind me also was secondhand. Older bro and I would watch Superman on that TV then we would tie bath-towels around our necks as capes and take turns running and "flying like superman" onto that old sofa. Well, during one such playtime episode I managed to bounce off the sofa and smashed the back of my thick little skull on the radiator. BLOOD WAS EVERYWHERE (scalpwounds tend to be very leaky) and I was scream-crying like a wounded animal! Mom ran into the room and she screamed "SOMEBODY CALL AN AMBULANCE!" The landlady ran upstairs and she screamed to my Mom, "GO DOWNSTAIRS AND CALL FOR AN AMBULANCE!" Mom ran downstairs and the landlady proceeded to TIE A TOWEL AROUND MY NECK AS A TOURNIQUET AND THEN BEGAN SCRUBBING MY HEADWOUND WITH ANOTHER TOWEL. Mom then returned from downstairs proclaiming she could not call an ambulance because she had no change for the payphone just as she noticed my face had turned blue from the landlady's first-aid efforts.
MOM: "WHAT IN HEAVEN'S NAME ARE YOU DOIN?!"
LANDLADY: "I'VE STOPPED THE BLEEDING! I'VE STOPPED THE BLEEDING!"
Mom forced the landlady to release me. I caught my breath and ran like hell to get away from the lunacy of those two women. While they argued I took shelter in one of my secret hiding places and decided it would be best for me to just suffer in total silence. After they were done shouting at each other, they noticed that I had VANISHED! They ran downstairs and then back upstairs, then back downstairs and up again. Fortunately for me, Uncle Thomas (only about 6 or 7 years older than I was EDIT: he was only 4-years older than I was and he was just as home on the streets of Chicago as he was in the wooded hills of Tennessee) came by for a visit. He figured out what all the screaming and confusion was all about and quietly suggested "Just follow the blood trail." He then traced it to my hiding place, smiled at me and said something akin to "You can come out now." Mom and the landlady again put me into panic mode with their diatribes of getting a doctor to sew the scalp-wound closed. Well, for the sake of brevity, I'll just end this story by saying that, somehow or another, after the bleeding had stopped, everyone finally calmed down enough to decide just to let my scalp wound heal naturally. Yes, it did leave a lifelong scar on the back of my noggin but nobody notices it unless my hair is cut "crewcut" short.
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😎
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/Z@X
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