Dad was the middle son of an assistant steel plant superintendent and had earned a forestry degree from Penn State. His family lived in a bark-brown frame house with a wide front porch in well-off south Lorain. My mom, on the other hand, was raised in a duplex that was sandwiched between two cinderblock bars in Central Lorain, which wasn’t the best neighborhood.

Her parents emigrated from Czechoslovakia after World War I, struggled to feed and raise their seven children and never learned English. Mom regularly reminded us how much better we had it than she did. Too poor to buy sanitary napkins, the Jakmas girls stuffed rags in their underwear and washed them for next month’s cycle. At Easter, her mom boiled onionskins to dye eggs red. Her father cut the heads off chickens they’d raised for dinner, and the chickens ran around the basement in circles until they fell dead. When I heard her talk about this, I just thought of all the blood.

I hardly ever left Lorain, except for our annual expedition to Florida shortly after the first snowfall. Because landscaping was seasonal, Dad had the luxury of taking off during the winter when almost everyone else’s dad worked long hours down at the mill, as the steel factory, the National Tube, was called, or at the Ford Assembly Plant. But come December, Dad brought his powder-blue house trailer out of storage. He cleaned and polished it, and we’d head for highway A1A that we’d follow all the way to south Florida to spend part of the winter.

But too soon, it was time to load up and return to cold, snowy Ohio. It seemed as if everyone worked hard in Lorain, and that was expected. I saw my parents working hard, too, and yet they protected me from work. They surely never dreamed I’d work down at the mill or the Ford plant, and I never did.

I had no desire to be a laborer. The hard work seemed like hell and looked like it as well whenever we drove over the High Level Bridge at night, and molten slag, a steel by-product, would flow with the fluidity of lava out of huge cauldrons, lighting the night sky like an inferno.

Our life in Lorain, as in Florida, had a predictable and comforting routine, with only minor interruptions and inconveniences, much the same as those in the arche-typical 1950s sitcom families.

At five o’clock in the afternoon Mom rang the dinner bell—a two-hundred pound railroad bell in our backyard that could be heard for more than a mile away. She ladled shredded chicken soaked in cream of chicken soup over rice and set it before us. We gobbled it up—and retreated to the family room to watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom before going to bed. While Dale and I watched TV, Mom cleaned the dishes and the kitchen, and Dad read the evening newspaper while smoking his unfiltered Pall Malls. In the morning, we’d get ready for school.

Every Friday evening when non-members were permitted, Dad piled us into the Cadillac, the kind with big fins in the back, and drove to the Lorain Yacht Club for a fish-fry dinner, or to the Ponderosa Steakhouse when he yearned for a big, juicy steak. Sometimes Mom let us stay up late to watch Ghoulardi, a Cleveland late night horror show. Dale and I would scare ourselves silly while eating Jiffy Pop.