Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Share some of your memories

Randy Seaver has a long-running blogging prompt - Saturday Night Genealogy Fun. This week's prompt is based on a keynote talk Judy Russell aka The Legal Genealogist gave at the RootsTech 2014 conference last week in Salt Lake City. I was not at RootsTech but watched her address recorded at this link. The link to Randy's post is here.

Here is Randy's task and my answers-
1)  Judy Russell asked six questions in her Keynote address at RootsTech to determine if audience members knew certain family stories about their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.  She demonstrated very well that family stories are lost within three generations if they are not recorded and passed on to later generations.

2)  This week, I want you to answer Judy's six questions, but about YOUR own life story, not your ancestors.  Here are the questions:

a)  What was your first illness as a child?
I had to get out the baby book my mom made to look this one up. The first recorded illness for me was measles during the summer of 1962 when I was 6 1/2 years old. I am sure I had many colds and other mild illnesses before then too. Summers were rough for childhood diseases in my family. All three of us kids had measles, German measles, chicken pox and mumps during June and July and in 3 successive years in the early 1960s. Because of advances in vaccines, my children only had to suffer one of these - chicken pox. They got it a year or two before the vaccine was available.

b)  What was the first funeral you attended?
We did not have a lot of close relatives so the first funeral I attended was for my grandfather, Harold Veith, who died in December of 1978. I was in my last year of college and home for Christmas break.

c)  What was your favorite book as a child?

Holiday for Edith and the Bears - This was one of a series of books by author and photographer Dare Wright. Edith was a doll and the bears were stuffed animals. I vividly remember a photo of Edith falling out of a rowboat, after she and Little Bear went out in the boat without permission. The photo fascinated me - I am not sure why. 

After I learned to read and I was a bit older, my favorites were any of the books about the detective children in the series The Happy Hollisters by Jerry West.

d)  What was your favorite class in elementary school?
I'm not sure about this one. In general I liked school and I loved to read.

e)  What was your favorite toy as a child?
My doll who I named Merry Christmas. I was 4 or 5 when I received her (for Christmas, duh!)

f)  Did you learn how to swim, and where did you learn?
My brother and sister and I learned to swim at Lake Rickabear in Kinnelon, NJ. When I was in elementary school, my dad worked as an engineer at Curtis-Wright. An employee perk was membership at Lake Rickabear which I think was owned by the company. It was a great place to go when we were little, and I think my mom took us 3 days a week for swimming lessons. The lessons were taught by the lifeguards who were all youngish school teachers during the school year. I  remember thinking it was so strange that we called them by their first names during the summer. None of them taught in my school, but I was aware they were teachers.