Simple first sentences

 Some chapter beginnings from Roger Ebert’s Life Itself  

My Old Man

UNTIL THE DAY he died, I always called him "Daddy." He was Walter Harry Ebert, born in Urbana in 1902 of parents who had emigrated from Germany. His father, Joseph, was a machinist working for the Peoria and Eastern Railway, known as the Big Four. Daddy would take me out to the roundhouse on the north side of town to watch the big turntables turning steam engines around. In our kitchen, he always used a knife my grandfather made from a single piece of steel. "That is the only thing you have from your grandfather." There was a railroad man's diner next to the roundhouse where we would go for meat loaf and mashed potatoes, but my first restaurant meal was at the Steak 'n Shake on Green Street.  "A hamburger for the boy," my father said.

St Mary’s

MY GRADE SCHOOL probably couldn't get state approval today. The teachers were unpaid and lived communally. Two grades were taught in one classroom. There were no resources for science, music, physical education, or foreign languages except the Latin of the Mass and hymns.  No playground facilities. The younger students were picked up by the single school bus; as soon as we were old enough, we rode our bikes to school, even in winter. A typical meal in the lunchroom might consist of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread, a dish of corn, a dish of fruit cocktail, and a carton of milk. If you had a penny, you might buy a jawbreaker afterward.

I received a first-rate education. At St. Mary's Grade School in Champaign, one block across Wright Street from Urbana, we were taught by Dominican nuns who knew their subjects cold, gave us their full-time attention, were gifted teachers, and commanded order and respect in the classroom. For eight years we were drilled in reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. Periods were devoted to history, geography, and science, taught from textbooks without visual aids or any other facilities. We learned how to write well, spell, and God knows we learned how to diagram a sentence. 

410 E Washington

I LIVED AT the center of the universe. The center was located at the corner of Washington and Maple streets in Urbana, Illinois, a two-bedroom white stucco house with green canvas awnings, evergreens and geraniums in front, and a white picket fence enclosing the backyard.  Hollyhocks towered above me by the fence. There was a barbeque grill back there made by my father with stone and mortar, a dime embedded in its smokestack to mark the year of its completion.