Soon they moved to a three-bedroom apartment in nearby Bedford, Pennsylvania, where they lived until Dean was five. At his father's insistence, he became the mascot for the Blue Devils, Bedford's football team, when he was three. Florence Koontz, usually called Molly, was a sickly woman, and Ray Koontz was often abusive; so it is not surprising that Dean relished the escape he found through books. When Dean was four, his mother was hospitalized for ten weeks, during which time he went to live with Bird and Louise Kinzey, his mother's friends. According to Katherine Ramsland's
Dean Koontz: A Writer's Biography (1997), Koontz credits his stay with the Kinzeys for instilling in him a love of books and remembers the time spent with them as one of the happiest periods of his young life.
In 1950, when Dean was five years old, his parents could no longer afford to pay the rent on their Bedford apartment and moved into a house built by Dean's maternal grandfather, John Logue, as a summer home. The house was smaller than the apartment; it had only two bedrooms and an outhouse for a bathroom, was not particularly well built, and was in the less desirable part of town.
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