By TomL
I have been walking down the memory trail which is sometimes fun to share, but once started it was not.
My younger brother is living in south Florida and my older sister living in Inverness Florida. Both recently passed away within 60 days of each other. I am the last of that generation. My Niece brought me some old photos that really brought back memories. There was a picture of my Grandmother and Grandfather Loury probably from the nineteen twenty’s, on my father’s side. They lived in Ohio, Alliance I think. One night John Loury walked up the mountain to have a drink at the tavern. On his way home an intoxicated doctor driving down the mountain hit him with the car and killed him. Sally Loury (Grandma), in her retirement years, would come to Florida to take care of my brother, sister and I, while Mom and Dad worked away from home at the Boca Raton Hotel. They lived and worked at the hotel. They would come home once or twice each week for a few hours. After a few years they would buy concessions at the hotel: the card room concession and the women locker room concession. They each made a lot of money in five years, then they sold the concessions and came home after a total of seven years and paid the house off and started life in the small town.
Mom and Dad more or less had to come home because of the dangers that lurked around us. It was a rough neighborhood. We had many criminals living on both sides of us and across the street. We could not afford to move yet. My brother was hurt in a knife throwing accident. A neighborhood boy threw a knife at a tree and the knife glanced off and stuck in my brother’s eye. My sister was molested at a young age. I did not know about that until recently. I was playing with a neighborhood boy near the railroad tracks which was about two blocks away. I jumped off a hill and landed on a broken beer bottle. It severed my tendon almost all the way through in the ankle area. It was a touch and go surgery for a couple of hours. They fixed it. All these accidents clearly showed Grandma, who was aging, could not keep up with us.
Now at home, Dad went to Real Estate school and became a realtor and then a Real Estate teacher. He also became the Zoning chairman for the town of Dania. One Sunday morning, we were all sitting at the breakfast table and the phone rang. It was a man that was passing through town and saw the For Sale sign on a hotel that my Dad had listed. I heard him say “It’s Sunday morning!” He hung the phone up and said he had to go show a property. He met the husband and wife at the hotel, got them keys to a few empty rooms and said I’ll be in the kitchen having coffee. About twenty minutes later the couple returned and said “we’ll take it!”
Dad’s commission added a room to our house and sent him to Insurance school. He built a fairly large insurance business, which in his retiring age sold along with the Real Estate business.
Later we made a deal with the bank on a house that the builder was in over his head on the house and needed to get it off his books at the bank. It was a spec house split level, hard wood floors upstairs, three/two never lived in and was on the east side of town which got us out of the high crime area. The people from the old neighborhood never walked down the street in front of our new house and I really don’t know why, but did not mind. In the new neighborhood as kids we went to school and worked every day. We walked to work and sometimes we walked home at nine or ten at night. We felt safe…
