Sounds like good stuff, Ebbie:

Lying in bed this afternoon, I was reading some of the stuff I've written as an introduction to songs I've composed. Some of these things I wrote in the 60's and 70's and the paper is yellowed like old parchment. I'm so glad that I kept them because even though my Mother still has an amazing memory, I doubt that she would remember the level of details she gave me at the time I was writing these things.

Here are the first couple of paragraphs as background to a song I wrote, Tommy.

"In may of 1929 just before the depression, my parents bought our hose on Caroline Street for $4,000. The house is small, but when the depression came they were forced to rent out half the house in order to keep it. A monthly rental of $8 made the difference between losing the house or keeping it. Three children later, things were pretty cramped, but we managed to get by. Even though we switched back and forth, renting out the front of the house for awhile and then the back with the next tenants, I remember living in the front half most clearly. We had a living room, my parent's bedroom with an ice box and a gas stove in one corner, and a summer-only bedroom on our front porch. We shared our tiny bathroom with the tenants. We lived that way from the time that my parents bought the house until I was about six years old., when we were finally able to take out two large sliding doors that separated the front of the house from the back. My Mother says that when we took out the doors, I kept running around the house excited at how large it was with the dining room kitchen and a small back bedroom up on stilts completing the space. Mom could use the stairway to go downstairs again, rather than climb up and down a ladder through a trap-door in our one closet; something she had done for a dozen years or so while raising three small children."

It is amazing to me the sacrifices that my parents made for us, and how little we noticed it, let alone expressed our appreciation to them.

Jerry