Street Toddler

On Facebook lately there have been some really  great  pictures  of old Marietta.    Just yesterday, my 3rd grade teacher, Jesse Lee McCollum and her family were displayed in two pictures.

I have put some  pictures of Old Marietta too, off and on.

Which is what the above is.  These two picture of me were taken in the Clay Homes about 70 years ago.   The lady standing beside me in one of the pictures  is Ruby Steele.  Her husband Pete owned Steele's Store, just across the street from our apartment. 

Look at me.  I look like a little homeless orphan street kid.  At about the same time period this picture was taken little kids like me were all over the bombed out areas of Europe picking the pockets of dead bodies lying on the ground defenseless.   If you put this picture of me and put me on a pile of bricks and rubble with a shell of a building as a backdrop you would say that poor kid, having to scrounge  for a living, tch tch.

I about that age, I and, sometimes my friend Carol Joe Clayton*, often went to the center of Marietta only 2 or 3 blocks away and played on the park's playground by myself.   The pigeons and I were always  picking up things people would throw down.  They were picking up crumbs and I was picking up cigarette butts.

*Carol Joe was born on Halloween Eve in 1942 and was killed on Valentines night, in 1963.  He collided with a truck on Soaks Creek Bridge, which used to be one of Cobb County's two covered bridges.