Memories, scattered:

• The apartments had black (or very dark) linoleum tile floors.   They were large tiles (I'd guess 4 to 6 inches on a side) and created a very hard, slick floor.  It was fun to slide on these in socks.  My mother used to wear high heels; I gather the noise of high heels on those floors made lots of noise for the neighbors below.  This apartment was the only one I ever lived in that had such a situation with the flooring.
• Elevator...some of my friends and I used to jump up on the handrails inside the elevator and perch on them.  A number of adults told us not to do that...that we might get hurt.  We kept doing it, but were careful not to do it when the elevator looked as if it were going to stop at some floor other than our own.  Playing in the elevator was common on rainy days.  An elevator building was a novelty for most of us.  The adults, particularly the janitor, did not appreciate this!  As an adult, I wouldn't either !
• We used to play "King of the Mountain" on the slide in the playground.  I was one of the smaller kids so I usually got knocked off quickly.  Sometimes I'd get hurt.  On one or two occasions, I became the King (the last to survive being pushed off).
• When I played outside, I was required, by my parents, to play where they could see me (thus, so I could see the windows of the apartment).  They stood in the window at regular intervals and I was to wave if ok.
• Sometimes my parents played outside with me.  I remember my mother helping me in the sandbox learn to make molds of wet sand using cookie cutters and the like.  Eventually, I got my own pail and shovel.  Then, I tried to dig through to China, as one of the fathers had suggested.  I thought he meant to find buried dishes.  I did not find any in the sandbox, so I started digging holes in the playgound grass.  Eventually, I did find a piece of a broken dish and claimed I had found China.  No one else was impressed and in fact they made me go back and fill up the holes I had dug over a period of several weeks.
• My father taught me to ride a bike, my green J.C. Higgins, from Sears. Steve, our janitor, also helped.  It was a 24 inch bike and too big at first, so they put blocks on the pedals.  I learned to mount it as if it were a boys' bike, by coasting it and then throwing my leg over the seat to the opposing pedal.  Soon, I was riding along 60th Steet sidewalk, up and down in front of our playground down as far as the Borgehese House (where the Good Humor Man parked his truck or his bike cart with bells on the handlebars.  I really enjoyed riding the bike and I also enjoyed the raspberry popsickles (full-sized, not twin pops).
• I remember when the Borghese House had a fire in the tower--I could see it very well from my bedroom.  Later the Wellivers lived in that house.  I played with Lucy Welliver.  We also visited them later in Italy at their home there.
  
• My father also used to take me out on the Midway to play.  I was not allowed to go there by myself, even though it was within sight of the apartment.  He taught me to throw a hard ball correctly (not "like a girl").  He brought me a marvelous plastic "auto-gyro" from New York and we took it out and set it up and sailed it.
• In my bedroom I remember various things:
• Coloring with my friends while sitting on the floor--mostly freeform coloring on typing paper (my mother was typing dissertations for Kate Turabian).
• Playing my toy piano and xylophone while sitting on the floor.
• Listening to records on my record player.  I liked most music I heard.  Among kiddy records, Kitty Konga, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Rudolph the Red Nosed Raindeer (Gene Autry) were my favorites.  I liked to go to sleep while listening to music:  Rudolph was one favorite.  Another was "Shall We Dance" (Audio sample) from The King and I (Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner)--some of these may have been released in the early 50s--what I remember is listening to them in the Faculty Apartments.
• I remember being sick on several occasions.  On one, I must have had a high fever.  I recall asking my father where I had been before I came to live with my parents, as from some time long ago.  On another, I remember my pediatrician, Howell Wright, and my godfather, Harold Wagner, visiting me in my bedroom and both of them telling my parent to keep the room darkened.  I also recall being given a shot of gamma globulin by one or the other of them.
• Sometimes, instead of listening to music as I was going to sleep, my father would tell me a bedtime story.  My favorites were ones he told of when he was growing up.  In particular I enjoyed the stories of his antics as a teenager in Morgantown, West Virginia.  Apparently, he and a group of friends found one man to be particularly nasty to them.  They got together and waited until the man went to the outhouse.  Then, they pushed the outhouse off its foundation and rolled it down the hill, with him in it, presumably in a compromising position.  I thought this story was very funny.  My father said that while is was indeed funny in some ways, that it was a very nasty thing they did and that he was not proud of it--but, that he was willing to admit the error of his ways and hoped I would never do anything that stupid.  I asked him to repeat this story many times.  Eventually, he said that that was enough.
  
• Indoors, my father taught me to wrestle:  he taught me a hammerlock hold, a full nelson, and a half nelson.  He let me try them out on him until I could throw him on the ground.  He still walked with a cane, and reassured my mother that it did not hurt him very much because he was trained to take falls.
• He also played with toys with me; early on we built with American Plastic Bricks--first we would carefully read all the materials, then talk about what we had read, then find the suitable parts and develop a plan, and then, finally build, slowly and carefully.  My mother was on hand during these sessions to offer food and advice.
• My father and I used to stand in the picture window in the living room and watch the sun set to the west.  We counted the stories in the Woodlawn Hospital and discussed ideas of what it meant to be "twice as tall"--he maintained that Woodlawn was twice as high as the building we were in.  I maintained it was "once" as high.  Clearly, we were talking about different mathematical operations:  He about multiplication (2*1=2) and I about addition (1+1=2).  Eventually we worked that out.  We also talked about language; he made up a rhyme for me--"Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was black as ink; it chewed the paper off the walls, and spit it in the sink."  I thought that was hilarious.  I learned some from my mother that she had known as a child growing up on a farm:  "Mary had a little lamb, she fed it oats and corn; And everytime it turned around, it tooted its little horn."  I did not understand that one until I was much older but remember it because when I repeated it to adults it got a reaction.
  
• My mother helped me a great deal with music (toy piano and xylophone) and art.  She taught me how to blend colors by putting down swatches of crayon on paper and then using a Kleenex to blend them and even pick up the new blended color and rub it elsewhere.  Clearly some clever variant on using a paintbrush and pallette.  I loved playing my musical instruments and would play them for hours.
• My mother used to like playing with a pinball machine with me.  We'd play that for quite awhile at a sitting.  We played Bagatelle.  When my father played, we played baseball.
• My father taught me to read a map.  We drew maps of the apartment and of the area outside.  They helped me to understand where I was allowed to go and where I was not allowed to go.  My father took me, for example, to the south side of the building to ride the sled with me in the winter down the steep, icy slopes of the hill of excavated material remaining from building the building.  That is also where most cars were parked (I remember the Blochs had a Ford with a sharp "nose" on the front; Konrad used to drive us to school in it).  We had a burgundy Chevy that my mother drove and later a light green Chevy that she drove.  The maps helped me to point to "gray" areas in terms of permissions--I used to like to walk along the ledges (as if they were balance beams) adjacent to the rear entries on the north and south of the building.  I was told that the one to the south was absolutely off limits and that, if I must do this (although they preferred that I not), I must do it only on the north side of the building.  Exercises of that sort reinforced, as well, the cardinal points of the compass in linking them from the map to the ground.  Once I got the hang of it, I could spend hours reading  a map.
• Both of my parents took me to Chinatown to Tai Dong restaurant, upstairs and across the street from the fire station.  We often went there with Uncle Harold Wagner.  I learned to use chopsticks, much to the delight of many of the adults there.
  
• My mother also taught me simple kitchen skills:  using a knife, peeling eggs, and so forth.  I remember once we were cutting carrots during a thunderstorm.  Lightning his the top of Harper Library across the Midway and knocked a cross off the top of the west tower.  I cut my finger and had a scar on it for many years...longer than it took to fix the library!