Ortiz Cellar House
We were here a very short time. It was never winter here.
This was an emergency only house. We could not have
stayed here but it was for rent and for rent cheap and we needed a place in a
hurry. It was only a cellar but it had rooms that were sectioned off and covered
by sheet rock on one side only. I think there was water in the kitchen and I
know there was electric but it had a chemical toilet. There was a hole with a
grate over it in the floor of the toilet. This was supposed to be the shower
drain but I don't recall a shower being there at the time.
We moved in but none of us ever really felt comfortable
there. It was like living in a hole in the ground.
Mom took ugly photos of us here. I couldn't get her to pose us with a different back ground. The pile of old furniture and trash was there when we moved in and there still when we moved out. Mom refused to clean up his trash.
I don't know what we paid for living there but it definitely was not worth it.
Ortiz was an obnoxious black man from Saratoga. I don't know if he was a negro or a Haitian. He couldn't speak good English. He had a strange accent. He swore he was American Indian but there was no way that he was. He would say words funny like instead of thirty three and a third he would say "turdy tree and a turd". Us girls were banished to the back rooms whenever he came. Mom was instructed by Dad to never let him in if Dad wasn't there.
He always yelled and he yelled a lot and that scared us
all. Mom would send us all outdoors whenever he came. She was that afraid that
he would hit us.
In the back rooms we snickered when he talked. He was a loud and mean sounding man.
The cellar was only a cellar with a tar paper roof. Dad said it was only till he could find a better place.
There was a kitchen. I think it had running water.
The bedrooms were little more than squared off with the studs and one side covered with sheetrock. The floors and walls were bare cement. There was electric. We had lights. I don't remember having a TV here. The bathroom was a disaster. There was a rectangular room set off as the bathroom. It had sheetrock walls so no one could see you. Inside was a chemical toilet. He had not finished the plumbing. There was a space that was supposed to be for a shower with a drain in the floor that we were told not to use because the plumbing wasn't finished.
Outside there was a small field that we could play in and a swampy area between our place and the house up on the hill. In the swamp were frogs and probably snakes but I never saw one. There were little black things that looked like crayfish.
The swamp wasn't very deep. It might have been a foot deep in some places. It was lush and green and we all loved to poke around in it. Mom taught us how to catch frogs with a bent safety pin and a tiny bit of red flannel for bait. She skinned them and fried the legs for us to eat.
In the house up on the hill lived a family of husband, wife and two boys and one girl. I don't remember the parents well but I have some memories of the kids. They were nice and played with us. I think we went to Fort Edward School here. I have memories I think of us waiting for the bus there and the nearest school would have been Fort Edward.
One time on a hot day we were playing by the swamp. Mom had taught us how to catch frogs with a bent safety pin, a string and a bit of red cloth. She told us that she knew that French people ate them. She said her Uncle Thorne taught her how. We caught a few of them and she cleaned them and fried the legs in butter in a small metal frying pan. I don't remember if I tasted them. I was a kid so I may have.
The man she called Uncle was not a blood relative. Uncle
Thorne and another very old man Uncle Bill were two aged men that Grandma
Russell took care of because they had been friends most of their lives. Uncle
Thorne was a black man who had worked on the trains with Grandpa Russell. Uncle
Bill was Grandma Russell's brother. Sometimes when we went to visit her and
Grandpa Arthur they would be there. They lived in a little shack way out back in
the field behind her house where the garden was.
We were all playing in the grass with glasses of Kool-Aid with ice cubes in them. Yes, there was a fridge and it had those awful metal trays that were a chore to get the cubes out of.
The oldest boy was a heckler. So was Millie. He had one of those black wiggly things in his hand and he showed it to Anna. She got a bit upset and told him to get away from her. He did and that was when Millie dropped an ice cube down the back of Anna's dress. She screamed bloody murder and there was big upset even after she found out it was just an ice cube.
I don't remember much about the little girl but the boys were nice but I wasn't interested in boys or maybe just not in them. Their mom had told our mom that they sometimes looked off into space and didn't know what was going on around them. She said they had been in a train accident and had got seizures from it. We never knew if that was true or not and I never personally saw one do anything strange like that. Later in life I would see my now ex husband in a real seizure and I know I never saw them do that.
We had a black and white dog here. I think that's what color he was. He got in the swamp chasing something and he got his head stuck in white ceramic thing that looked like part of a large pipe. I don't know what it was but I remember Mom and Dad having a bad time getting his head out of it. He was scared and we were too.
I got sick here once. I had something that turned me off from food completely. I had a fever and I just lay there. I don't know what I had. Finally, Mom asked me what I wanted to eat. She said I had to eat something. I thought about it all day and told her the only thing I thought I could eat was mashed potatoes. Even then I didn't want to but I ate some. They stayed down and she made me eat them till I could stomach other foods.
Us younger girls had a big room in the back of the cellar. Mom and Dad had one on the side and Anna and Millie had the one on the other side. Anna and Millie took pages out of "movie" magazines and hung them with tape on the walls. Millie of course had Elvis up. One of them put up Ricky Nelson's full page photo. I snuck in there once and pretend kissed Ricky. I was a dumb kid, yep but I was normal. I never told any one that till a few days ago. I may have forgotten it with all the things that happened to me since.
I still didn’t get it but I felt stupid for trying it.
I walked around for days ashamed of myself for falling for such a dumb trick.
A bad thing happened here. There was a storm with a lot of rain and the swamp water backed up into the house in the night through that drain hole in the toilet.
We woke up in the night or early morning with Mom saying "Stay in bed and don't touch anything!" until Dad got the power off. Some of us were in beds with metal frames and head boards so it was scary. Dad said that was it and he found us another place to live quickly.
This is the younger boy and his little sister.
It's Nancy, of course. That little girl in the back ground lived in the house up the hill from us.
Nancy near the wood scraps. She's holding a tiny purse Mom gave her.
Millie with the two youngest kids from the top of the hill.