After our return from Minneapolis, Lisa and I immediately began getting set for our big move. We were very excited to get out of the Woodman Park Apartments and get into the brand spanking new and luxurious Peppertree Apartments. As nice as these apartments were, amazingly they were part of the Low Income Housing project, so you had to make under a certain amount to get into them. This was accomplished by creating a lowball estimate of how much we were forecasted to make the following year. Since Lisa and I were both hourly employees of Kroger, we could project our income working a minimum amount of hours.
The apartments themselves were very nice, even by today’s standards. It was an ideal community within walking distance of Wright State University and a Meijer store. There was a little playground that was ideal for Ashleigh and Briana, a clubhouse that I thought would be great for Laurel and Hardy tent meetings, and a swimming pool. Lisa and I were well on our way in our schooling, careers, and life together.
I thought the clubhouse would provide a great place to host tent meetings, especially considering they actually had Laurel and Hardy standees there (their opening tag was “Live Like a Star”). Turns out I only had one meeting here.
The mailbox gazebo. I had to walk or drive here everyday to get our mail.
The little playground area
I was also getting a jumpstart on technology when Dad gave me his old HP computer in early March. He was already ready for a new one at this point and I was ecstatic to have one of my own. I’ll never forget my first night on the internet in my own apartment (still at Woodman Park), climbing into a chatroom and conversing with strangers, and actually finding my name on a website about the Little Rascals. A whole new world was opened to me. I also purchased an Epsom inkjet printer which was running about $400 at that time. I was eternally frustrated with the print quality of that thing and spent the better part of the month trying to get it fixed. It never did work right.
I continued to record videos from shows on AMC and rented Laserdiscs from the Mayteg store in Kettering. Why they rented Laserdiscs while selling washer and dryer equipment was beyond me – but while there Lisa and I decided that we should get our own washer and dryer before moving into our apartment since Peppertree had the hookups available - so we began arranging that as well. As of this writing, I still have them. The dryer had to be gas-powered because that was the only hookup that was available at our future apartment.
It was an interesting existence at this time – babysitting Ashleigh and Briana frequently for Christi, watching movies and wrestling, hanging out with friends (we went to the Boston Pub with twins Brigid and Rebecca Bard on 3/9), attending school, working at Kroger Beavercreek, working on Dante’s Info, eating out, collecting autographs through Bob Satterfield and Steve Cox, and playing Scrabble, all while getting ready for our next step in life – the big move.
Ashleigh turned six on March 21 and Briana turned three the next day. We had a party for them on Sunday the 24th at Christi’s parents’ house where they were all living and then took them over to my Mom’s that evening. On Saturday the 23rd, we had attended a 50′s dance with Mom and Dad’s Gem City Classics car club. It was a very downtrodden affair for us though, as my Grandma Murphy had just had open heart surgery on the 20th and wasn’t doing very well.
School ended at Wright State for the quarter during the third week of March just before the girls’ birthdays. It resumed on Tuesday, March 26 for me as I continued my business management classes. My next courses would be Leadership Studies (3 credit hours; I got a B) and Public Policies in the Business Environment (3 credit hours; I got an A). Not bad grades for classes of which I have no recollection.
I capped off the month with a Laurel and Hardy tent meeting at Dad’s on Sunday, March 31. We showed all short subjects highlighted by the premier of Now I’ll Tell One as I had described in Dante’s Info #15. As you can see, Lisa and I were leading relatively busy lives.
Once April hit, there was more of a push to get ourselves prepared for moving. Naturally, there was the packing and cleaning of the old apartment, having our address changed with the post office, getting the new utilities cancelled and hooked up at the new place (our new number was 427-9541), and the moving itself. There was also the task of having Stymie neutered before he went over to Mom’s house to live. Since Peppertree didn’t allow pets, we were forced to have him temporarily live at Mom’s house for a few years until Lisa and I had our own house. Of course, plans would eventually change in the cat department and to this day, Stymie lives with Denise.
We still tried to make time for some social gatherings – namely on Easter which fell on April 7. Dad hosted a gathering with his new girlfriend Becky and her sons. There Denise and I had the treat of meeting Toby, the loudest guy this side of the Mississippi – and the other side too. He was rather inebriated upon our arrival and was in the midst of a fight with his pregnant girlfriend (wife?) Selma. Becky’s other two sons were there as well and somehow…and this is when it gets really weird…they ended up performing a makeshift concert in the basement, complete with guitar, keyboard, and a microphone. To this day, that whole event seems like some surreal dream of strangeness. And it got even stranger when Selma then thought that Toby was hitting on Denise. I wonder what prison he is in these days.
Although I had numerous friends at this time, I really had no best friends other than my family. Lisa and I would often hang out with Denise and her boyfriend Chris. I even joined the family softball team around this time and we began our very first practices (just throwing the ball around during the spring). My old high school friends Jeff and Eric Flinn came over to visit me on April 8. Lisa found a new friend in her nursing classes named Susan Tafini and we would sometimes hang out with her and her boyfriend Mike Ferrin. Lisa also had her friends Nicole and Brandy, but we wouldn’t see much of them anymore after our move. Brandy Elsasser actually helped us move some stuff and I gave her my old desk. They both vanished into obscurity.
Finally the day came to actually make the transfer. We signed our new lease on April 22 and began moving on Wednesday, April 24. I skipped school that whole week and took that Friday and Saturday off. Mom, Dad, Chris, and Denise helped us move on Friday. On Saturday, we went up to Sidney to get a new couch from Lisa’s parents and they came down afterward to see our new digs. By the end of the month, it was official – Woodman Park was no longer our home. We now lived in the Peppertree Villas.
Top floor on the right: home sweet home
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