Gay Adam: I did not choose Monongahella, Living in Arizona, I was five, & Money -o-to-Hella!

I did not choose Monongahella to live
We lost our first house in a landslide
the year after my mother died
We were seven orphans—
six girls and a young boy—
but we had each other
My mother died when my oldest sister was 21
so we were able to stay together as a family
We felt quite fortunate before that
We had our own home my father had built
We grew up in the country
We had the freedom of an orchard
We had the freedom of our own land
We had to find another place to live

So we had to rent a house there on the hill.
Everybody pitched in
We did the best we could with what we had
We planted a garden, canned vegetables & fruit
during the Depression—at a time
when nobody had very much
We had to survive the best we could
with what we had...
We didn’t have much but we had each other

—Gay Adam



Living in Arizona
I had a white kitten named Snowball
Living in Arizona
She didn’t know what a snowball was
She grew up to be a cat,
a mother cat, and she gave birth
to kittens born without mittens
which made my mother very unhappy
Living in Arizona

—Gay AdamGay Adam & Betty Jean Leonard



I was five when my father died
The one thing I picture
is my father grafting fruit trees in the orchard
That’s all I had to remember
I spent a lot of time with him
He took care of me
He was always grafting trees
I could do it myself from watching him
It’s something you can visualize
It’s what I remember
I don’t have any later memories
I recall a quince tree in my father’s garden
only because I remember him talking about it
Quince trees were rather rare
People talked about them mysteriously
My sisters often said they wished they had
that quince tree when they made jelly.
#
My life has come a long way,
it’s changed dramatically
because I lived in the country then, when I was five.
Because I’ve moved on,
because we moved away from the country
when we lost the house
because I went to a different school
because I got married in 1945
because we moved a lot, I had three sons
because I never lived in that area again.

—Gay Adam



It was March, St. Patrick’s Day,
I was in the downstairs bedroom
and a big slide came down the hill
and knocked the house off its foundations
The railroad went through our property
Above the house they put gravel
because the hill was starting to slide
when it was raining
It hit the house, plaster falling
hitting you in the dark
We had to jump from the house to the porch
I couldn’t see my little sister
I thought she had fallen in the cellar
We gathered in the yard in our nightgowns
My oldest sister ran to my uncle’s house
That’s when we had to move
to my grandfather’s house in Monogahella
We called it Money -o-to-Hella!
We used to call it that in high school.
Money -o-to-Hella! The place
where we had to start all over again.

—Gay Adam