Biography: Ira Reese DAY, Junor

Ike as Santa about
 1960 Prospect Park

 Ike was named after my father,  Ira Reese Day.  Ike was 13 pounds at birth. He was called Junior until he was 4, then they decide to call him Ike after President Dwight (I like Ike, was the saying ) Eisenhower. When I was five my father was asking the rest of us kids what we wanted to be when we grew

up.  Ike was three and he immediately started barking and said I want to be a dog.  At that time we lived in a house off a cemetery. I'm mother took Ike and the youngest brother for a walk in the cemetery in the dead end we lived on. Flags were on veterans graves. Ike was walking behind her plucking out the flags to wave. Mom had to ran around finding the graves and putting the flags back.

Ike Grad-Eastside High School 

We lived in Prospect Park New Jersey, a small community for some time that was adjacent to of Paterson new jersey, for about 7 years.  It was a Dutch community at the time and we were supposedly Irish so we thought, and weren't really accepted there.  Though now we know we had as much as they did.  My mother would get hang up phone calls in calls calling her names.  She always suspected The neighbors but I suspected it was my father's mother's friend old friend.  There was a small grocery store and butcher shop in the '50s and '60s on our block in prospect Park and my mother had an account there she would pay it weekly. 

One day Ike, age 5 or 6, not knowing you had to pay for things in store went into the corner store and told a candy bar and went on his very way.  The man called my mother and she said, sorry, just put it on our bill, thank you. 

Years later and after his parents died, his dad in June 1970 and his mom a year and a half later, Ike was orphaned at age 17 and lived in the YMCA, then with his closest friend, Tom G and his family. 

Ike went into the Navy. There was some high jinks with some friends one day and the police got involved and instead of going to jail the police drove him to the recruiting station where he enlisted in the Navy.  He much of his time on the USS Lyndsay McCormick (a battle ship) for about 4 years. After he got out,  for  a time he live with me, sometimes with Tom's family and sometime with his young brother and his wife in New York. He worked fixing cameras and as a letter carrier in the Post Office, Paterson, NJ. He along with Tom and his wife, Elaine, bought a house on 8th Street in Paterson. Ike finally received his college degree in history and Post Office a Postmaster. After his death, the family learned he would have gotten that promotion.

  I was working full-time and living next door to my mother-in-law during this time.  I wouldn't have lived there if I could have afford it somewhere else but it was a cheap place to live because it was lower middle class area.  My husband, Bud, a childhood name, as he was call was living in Pennsylvania with his aunt Lena, his mother's sister, while he interned at Temple University to be a nuclear medical technologist.  I always wanted to play the piano and Ike knew this and he wrote me a letter and said he was sending money for me to buy a piano.

Ike, and his friends Tom and Elaine had bought 2 houses together. One was on 8th Street Paterson.

It was a run down house but it was theirs. The other house was in Upstate New York and not in any better condition than the other one. 

Fortunately the property wasn't worth much with the house in less than livable condition. Heart disease in my family. Our Dad died at 49, and Ike died at 35 from a heart attack. We all care about Ike and he would tell us things that we felt were symptoms. He promise us all he was.  After he died, Tom and Elaine who lived up stairs in a house the three of them bought together told us Ike did not take care of himself. He would just tell us that. Ike would say I know I'll die young. Ike died on August 8, 1989. He was 35.