The Cutest Baby Face…Maybe

“You’ve got the cutest little baby face…”, music created by Harry Akst and lyrics by Benny Davis in the mid 1920’s, may not have described me but I hoped it had. Ethel, my babysitter, told me that it was my late father’s favorite song.

The tin pan piano scratchy sounds played through an old floor mounted wooden Victrola that I had seen only at her house. We had an ancient pump organ at our house, a nonworking floor model radio stored away in a closet, and a new transistor radio but nothing on which to hear music from a vinyl disk. This was the 1960’s. People watched television but we didn’t have one nor a record player. I’d never even seen a record player before she showed me how this one worked.

When my mother returned to work following my father’s death, Ethel, a neighbor and friend of my mother’s, cared for me on summer days. As my mother drove five miles to catch the bus to her city job, I turned the opposite way, walking down the Southern Ohio gravel road and over the hill to Ethel’s house.

I thought I was pretty grown up, walking the half mile alone, sometimes stopping to visit with my former third grade teacher as she worked in her large vegetable garden. Usually I carried a book with me, sitting in the parlor as Ethel called it, reading most of the day. Occasionally I walked across the road, threw stones in the creek or simply listened to the gurgling water.

Ethel and her brother shared an old, unpainted, grayish two-story wooden house. Next door to Ethel and her brother lived…