Remembering Geoff as a Toddler and Child...

My earliest memories of Geoff go back to when our family was living on Broadway Avenue in Somerville, Massachusetts, in a first floor flat of a large Victorian house. Mom and Dad brought Geoff home as a newborn infant. I was four and fascinated by my new younger brother. Pam, my sister who came along a year after me, and Susan, who came along a year and a half later, were all born at Everett, Massachusett's Whidden Memorial Hospital. Everett, Somerville, and Medford, were all small cities founded in the 1600's and early 1700's that became part of the Greater Metropolitan Boston area. Mom had us all outfitted in red pajama suits with little feet made into the legs. I remember at Christmas one year, when Geoff was a year old, and he received a doll and his favorite stuffed animal, Doggie Rex, named by him later for Grandfather Mader's real childhood Doggie Rex.

Following Christmas, a strange man came to our house and Mom told us we were moving to a white house in a small town in far away Ohio. Pam and I thought she said Lighthouse so imagine our disappointment when the strange man, a friend of our father, who had gone a year earlier to Ohio to start his new job with GE Aircraft, drove us straight to our new house, a story and a half frame, white house. The next morning, Pam and I looked around the house and saw no ocean, no Lake Erie, and no lighthouse.

Months after coming to Ohio, I remember driving with a friend of dad's to a house in Hyde Park, Cincinnati where he looked at a 1949 Mercury "woodie" station wagon, with a Ford flathead V-8 engine and a standard 3 speed transmission. He bought it, and months later, when he and mom were shopping at the A & P grocery in Roselawn, we kids were bored sitting in the car. Pam asked me to push the little starter button on the dashboard. Since we didn't have the key, Dad left the car in first gear, so when I would press the starter, the car would lurch forward and hit the guard rail like an amusement ride. I kept doing it, and Pam got Geoff to bite his teething biscuit into a point, and poke holes in the cars headliner. We had lots of fun, until some older people reported us, and Dad came out in a BAD mood. Geoff got off due to his age, but I got pulled out of the car for a good belting! Of course we did it again next time we went shopping!

When we came to Ohio Geoff made immediate friends with neighbor, Doug Weisman, and during the summers we had Robin Hood Adventures where I would make us special sandwiches and we would find old hats and parts of clothes, that with a little imagination, could be construed as attire from Robin Hood's time. Geoff liked being Friar Tuck, a happy and hearty soul who had many friends in the Merry Band of Outlaws! As we grew older and went to St. Susanna Grade School, Geoff won a large metal Army Truck with a trailer with a searchlight that worked. from Yost Drug Store. a couple of years later, he won a P-40 gas powered Army Air Force Flying Tiger. We used to play in our tree shaded yard on Church Street with Geoff's army men, the truck and the airplane, and make twig houses out of branches that fell from the mature maples and oaks in our yard.

In the winter we used to ride our Flexible Flyer sleds down the small hillock behind our house, or go to the Rose Hill Cemetary where we could ride the large hills that might let your sled go all the way out onto a pedestrian bridge across a creek. Sometimes we would ride down hills on old television corrogated cardboard boxes!

Geoff made friends easily, and sometimes brought a new neighbor, Bobby Schneider, and old friend, Doug Weisman, with him on some of these adventures.

Later, when we had bicycles, we would ride to Mason Meadows, where many of our friends from school lived, and play softball with them, or ride bikes! Those were the unending days of childhood summer!

I remember Geoff's smiling tanned face on our rides home, after adventuring all day, to look forward to one of Mom's home cooked dinners held with the entire family, in our kitchen!