| My sister Jean and her childhood friend, Elizabeth Zapp, recall a summer vacation as teenagers with our grandmother and grandfather Peter (Pieter) VanderPutten in Carmel. | |||
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| During the summer of 1961, my brother John and I along with our
cousin Gary and my childhood friend Liz Zapp spent a few days at our grandparent's
vacation home in Carmel, NY. There were two houses on the property. The
larger house, on the corner of Salem & Lockwood, was originally owned
by grandma and grandpa and the smaller home, to the left, was inherited
or bought from great-aunt Mary, grandma's sister.
During our stay, we teenagers (15 and 16 years old at the time) occupied the larger house. We spent sunny days at the lake and rainy days and evenings playing "Michigan" Rummy and surreptitiously smoking (tobacco) cigarettes on the screened-in porch. Apparently, our smoking did not go unnoticed. Periodically, grandma would dispatch grandpa to our "pleasure den" to make sure that we weren't burning the place down or just to tell us to stop smoking. Not wanting to spoil our fun (he must have remembered similar times in his youth), grandpa would always alert us to his arrival by coughing or slamming the screen door or sometimes just yelling to us to see if we were on the porch. These diversionary tactics always allowed us adequate time to douse our cigarettes, clear the air of as much smoke as possible and toss our butts and ashes under the raised porch. He could then report back to grandma, with all honesty, that he did not see the kids smoking. This was a pretty cool thing for a grandpa to do and I'll always love him for it. |
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