I was visiting with some family members last week, and we started talking about the house and neighborhood that I grew up in. There are so many wonderful memories, some of which I have shared in this column. Here are several more.

My dad purchased a country milk route shortly after we moved to 4813 Madison Ave. That old Dodge milk truck was our only means of transportation, but I thought it was cool to ride around in that truck.

Our house had three bedrooms, but we used only two of them. I remember my folks renting out the extra one to Charlie Cleveland for several years. He occasionally dined with us. About the time that my sister was ready to have her own bedroom, Charlie got married and moved to the Eastside.

About that time my paternal grandmother needed a place to live, so a small house was built on the back of our property for her. My mom’s father built the house. I really enjoyed that because we had more visits from Dad’s side of the family.

A couple of years after our family’s rolling fleet grew to include a car, my mom decided to learn to drive. I wasn’t allowed to ride along when Dad gave her lessons, but I have great memories of her driving up and down the driveway. A few years after she got her license I was walking home from school along Madison when I noticed her driving toward me. I waved, but she was so intently looking at the road she didn’t notice me.

There was another building on our property, and over the years it served as many things: a chicken house, a goat house, a playhouse for my sister and a clubhouse for me and my buddies.

I can remember baby chickens huddled together in a large cardboard box in our basement for several days before moving them to the chicken house. Later we had a goat and her two babies that lived in the house. I remember Grandpa Jones (Mom’s father) remodeling the goat house into a playhouse with a picture window and pictures on the walls.

When my sister, Kathy, started playing music, taking dance lessons and doing all the other stuff that kept her busy, I changed the playhouse into a guys clubhouse, which had a crows nest on the roof. 

Grandpa Jones and my dad hung a basketball backboard and goal on the front of our garage. We had a small baseball field on Morgan Drive for a few years before some houses were built.

Several of us had paper routes, and we rode our bicycles everywhere. I am still friends with several of my childhood buddies. 

My old house is the Longacre Bar & Grill, but my old clubhouse with the crows nest is long gone.

I enjoy holidays because families get together while sharing wonderful meals and sometimes exchanging gifts. Holidays occasionally make for longer weekends. In other words, there is nothing better.

We celebrated one of my favorite days of the year – April Fools Day – on Friday.

Sometimes I start thinking about April 1 in January or February. It’s harder to pull a good prank when your family and friends know how much you enjoy the day.

When I was a bus driver a few years ago for South Grove Intermediate School, Principal Tonya Reid helped me to fool a busload of students into thinking that there was not going to be school as we arrived at the building. They thought I was going to return them home or to the middle school to eat pizza and watch movies. April fools!

This year an idea came to me as I was watching all the crazy stuff on television pertaining to the primary elections. I thought about it for several days and did some research on the Internet. I was ready fairly quickly.
On Friday around 8 a.m. I posted the picture below and caption on my Facebook page:

“I have accepted a part-time position. For the next few weeks I am going to drive Donald Trump’s campaign bus. I guess he is going to make stops in Indiana before the May primary. I will meet his airplane and transport the entire staff to these engagements. I was told that Stuart, my therapy dog, can ride along on certain events. This should be a lot of fun.”

By afternoon I had received several telephone calls and lots of comments on Facebook. If the comments suggested anything about an April fools prank, I quickly deleted them. Then I made a quick call to those people and explained that their comments could spoil my fun with friends who might see my post later in the day. Everyone agreed that it was a great plan. 

I continued checking the comments, and my wife, Lyn, and I got a big kick out of them.

Around 7 p.m. I posted the same picture again with April fools as a headline. The message read: “I’m sorry. This was too good to pass up. I had to delete about 25 comments from the original posting from friends who figured it out that it was my April fools offering. If they called me on it, I deleted it. I then sent them a short note to explain why they were deleted. 

“Happy April Fools’ Day.”

This set off another round of comments. Some people said I had them totally confused. A few said they thought it might be a prank but chose to remain quiet. And of course, there were those who said, “I knew it.”

I’m sure that I set a personal record for the number of times I checked my Facebook page in a two-day period.
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As soon as the 100th running of the Indy 500 is over, I will start planning my prank for next year.