The 3 Gibson Brothers

It was a mistake to put the 3 of us boys in one room together. But what could my parents do with 3 boys and 2 girls in a 3-bedroom apartment ? It was a cold water flat, ( no hot water ) and the only source of heat in our home was our kitchen stove, which had a gas side heater to warm the entire apartment. Mom and Dad had the front bedroom off the living room, Laurie and Marianne were off the kitchen (near the stove), and Gary, Tom, and Scott were in the back bedroom (farthest from the stove). Many a cold night the 3 of us boys would crawl out from our frigid room with our blankets to sleep on the warm linoleum near the stove. One winter Dad decided to conserve the heat by shutting off our room completely and we slept on a pull out sofa in the living room. The problem was if one of us wet the bed, we were all wet!

Sometimes Dad would come home drunk at night and fall asleep in the bathroom. What does a boy do when he has a full bladder in the middle of the night? We were lucky - we had 2 windows in our room, so that solved our problem. Mrs. Lane (who lived below us on the first floor) had some flowerbeds that got extra watering now and then. Pretty soon, we did not need the excuse of Dad sleeping on the toilet; it was easier to just open the window in any case! Three boys close in age can get into a lot of mischief, if left unattended, as was often the case. We were awake early one summer morning and the sun was already up. So we tossed our mattresses out the window to make a landing pad and rehearsed how we would escape a fire - by jumping from the second floor window on to the mattresses. It was so much fun, we did this often, but had to hide our activities due to some internal sense that our parents would not like that. Mr Lane squealed on us. It did not go so well for us when they found out.

All 10 families in our tenement block lived just like we did and there were hundreds of apartment buildings all around us. This mini ghetto was called "The Flats" because all the cheap housing was built to house the factory workers and their families. We were poor back then but did not know it. We 3 boys were always fighting, mostly in fun, like 3 puppies in the same litter. These are some of the happy memories of my childhood.

Gary