Clattering Sparrows by Marilyn Land Read Free Book Online

during the war.
    Although Billy McAvoy’s father had been killed in the hard-fought Battle of the Bulge, his mother, who had gone to work for the Navy Department during the War, decided to remain in their house in northeast DC. Her job was secure, and she felt it was important for Billy to continue in a stable environment with the friends and school he was happy with. Her nearest relatives lived in Pennsylvania and she didn’t consider moving there an option. Grateful for the support she had received from her neighbors in her husband’s absence, she measured them more like family than her own.
    The Russo family also contemplated moving and returning to New York when their eldest son Vinny was killed, but personal circumstances required them to remain in Washington as well. It was rumored that Joe Russo had ties to the New York Russo crime family and handled the family’s “business” in Washington. Unable to abandon his job at the time, and reluctant to let his family move back to New York without him, they too remained. The Russo’s eldest child, Tony’s sister, was married and lived on Long Island in New York.
    For the time being, our row of five houses on Oates remained in tact.
     

4
    JUNE 1948 MARKED THE end of elementary school for us. It was hard to believe seven years had passed since we moved into our houses on Oates. Our friendship grew stronger as we often confided the trials and tribulations of our pre-teen years in one another, and on our last day at Wheatley, Judy, Billy, Jenny, Tony, and I dubbed ourselves The Fabulous Five . We were all excited about attending Eliot Junior High in the fall, but first more immediate on our minds were our summer plans with our families and each other.
    My father surprised us and bought our first television set, a Philco 1000. It was a large cumbersome piece of furniture with an antenna on top, and it was almost comical to see all of us sitting around watching the small ten inch screen. It wasn’t long before everyone was talking about “rabbit ears” and “snowy reception” and “TV test patterns” in everyday conversations.
    There were a host of new shows that debuted that year and the Texaco Star Theater , a comedy/variety show on NBC, proved to be one of the first hugely successful examples of American television. Remembered best as the show that made Milton Berle a household name and earned him the title of “Mister Television,” it kept audiences glued to their sets for an hour each Tuesday night for eight seasons. When Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town debuted two short weeks later on CBS, guests Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis wowed millions of viewers and earned the show a strong following who continued to watch each and every Sunday night for years.
    Because of the Polio epidemic, the public pools were closed and the many beaches on Chesapeake Bay were off limits. We managed to keep busy. We read books (the Nancy Drew mysteries were my favorite), went to movies, rode the Wilson Line to Marshall Hall, took the streetcar to the Washington Monument to see the 4 th of July fireworks display, and in August our family went on vacation to the Catskill Mountains in New York. All too soon the summer was over.
    The next three years transformed us into young adults. Our steps toward independence had advanced to a trot. We entered Eliot as children and left as teenagers, thinking more about the future and what we wanted to do with our lives. And thanks to the Friday night dances in the gym, we discovered “boys!” Whereas in elementary school we were limited to friends in our immediate area, junior high school offered the chance to meet friends living miles away who had attended other elementary schools. This opened a whole new world for us.
    Unlike Wheatley where we had one teacher and remained in one classroom for the entire day except for assemblies and field trips, at Eliot we had a homeroom where we started each day, and went to a different class with a