Hilltop

 

We bought a 1965 Shultz mobile home, a classic that was no longer made by that company, and moved it onto a brand new lot in Hilltop Mobile Home Court. His mother loaned us the money figured at 7.5 percent interest by her bank and we paid it back every month in regular payments. I was promoted to secretary in Personnel and life was good! 

We joined a gourmet group that met monthly at different people's homes and it never bothered me that they all lived in fancy big houses while we lived in a trailer. Our trailer was really nice. However we didn't have a dining room and our table was not large enough for a formal dinner with so many people, so we took our closet door off in the tiny second bedroom, put it on two card tables then covered it in a nice table cloth. It looked elegant with our good china, but I have to say the sauerbraten I made did not impress me. Of course the paella someone else had once made did not impress me either. The eight dollar a pound squid and the oysters were rubbery and I think I swallowed one oyster three times before it stayed down. I couldn't even eat tuna fish for a year after that!  But we enjoyed that group in spite of the food.

Many of our friends already had children by this time and we decided to start trying ourselves, but nothing happened. After several months we decided I would stop working and stay home. The idea was that it might make life calmer and I might get pregnant. That was the beginning of years of hope, disappointment and despair.

I began sewing more. I embroidered pillow cases for our dog's bed, made Valentines out of felt and lace with Shakespearean sonnets embroidered on them, and kept on making some of my own clothes. I even made an outfit to wear to our Newcomer Luau. That night I wore a flower from my own garden pinned in my hair. It wasn't until I got home that I discovered the tiny red mites crawling in it! He built a shed. I planted a vegetable garden. He built a porch. I planted a beautiful line of flowers across the end of our driveway. I loved the song, The Happiest Girl in the USA. Those lyrics felt like they were written about me.

I finally joined the Episcopal church and we became very active. We joined the young couples group and he was the Thurifer for special Sundays while we both took over the youth ministry for Father Lyons. It was a group of kids ages 12 to 21 and I was 22. We were tuned in! Father Lyons had an ancient Cadillac and he would take Ninna, our dog, with him and follow us on our long bike rides across town to the park. He even allowed us to take her to the church when we had lock-ins. In between chasing would-be lovers out of the choir loft we had deep discussions and some games. I played my first trust game with this group. I crossed my arms over my chest, closed my eyes and allowed myself to fall straight back! Of course they caught me (but I have to admit I was much smaller back then, probably 110 pounds.) The weekend we went to Lake Bloomington was one I will never forget. Two of the kids lost their oars while canoeing. None of them brought any warm clothes and I ended up handing all of mine out while I froze in the relentless rain. I slept with the girls. He slept with the boys. And the kicker for the whole thing was the giant mud slide most of the kids participated in just before their parents arrived to pick them up.

I began playing tennis during the day. I'd be on the tennis courts right after I took him to work and play with a friend of mine until it was time to pick him up, often six hours a day with a small break for lunch. My tennis partner was a woman I met in Bloomington, but she had actually grown up about a block from my house as a child. She was a few years older than me and we were well matched. Then she got pregnant and began having problems. We had to stop. I still played with my husband at night, but I missed Marian.

We decided to become foster parents and began the necessary classes. Every week we would go to a house over by Miller Park to join several other couples waiting to be licensed. Our first foster child was Roma a nine month old baby girl whose mother was in the hospital. We had no notice and borrowed a bassinet from some friends. It turned out a bassinet is not really appropriate for a nine month old, so we found a net porta-crib. Roma was a learning experience. She got into everything! She was adorable, but tore the books off my bookshelves, messed with the television knobs, opened doors . . . she taught me a lot and kept me running. One day I made the mistake of giving her a teething biscuit while she was in that crib. She went home that night when the case worker showed up to get her and it's probably a good thing, because it took me days to get all the teething biscuit goo out of that netting in the crib. We were supposed to get a sixteen year old girl, but she kept running away and we never actually met her even after thinking we would three different times. Eventually we became emergency care foster parents. Those are sad. A social worker calls and shows up at your house all hours of the night with a child or children who have been dumped at a local grocery store or something similar and they've waited hours for a parent who never returned. These children never stay more than a few days or until they can be placed in permanent foster care.

Now we played in three Bridge groups. Couples, Twin City and Duplicate. He was such a hard core partner I used to drink Mylanta before the games, but sometimes it was fun. I also played in a ladies bridge group that was much more relaxed.

I even went back to school and took a class at ISU. It was Fantasy literature and I really enjoyed it. I was only a year older than most of the kids in the class and we were reading books I found fascinating. One of the books on the syllabus was The Hobbit, but we got into such spirited discussions that she ended up adding Tolkien's whole trilogy! It was a lot of reading, but it made me a life long Tolkien fan.

Cooking became another one of my passions. I made homemade yeast doughnuts and hung them on rods between my kitchen chairs when I glazed them I put newspapers underneath to catch the extra glaze. I made popovers and Yorkshire pudding, red velvet cake from scratch and Boston creme pies. I tried everything. One of our wedding gifts had been a splatter screen to put on top of frying pans to keep the oil from splattering on everything. One day I had it sitting on the stove and when I grabbed it, it was so hot and soft It forever left my fingerprints on the handle! It's amazing I wasn't burned badly, but I wasn't.

I remember telling my dad one day, "You know how people are always trying to keep up with the Joneses? We are the Joneses in Hilltop right now."

The mobile home was paid off and we began house hunting. Thus began a tradition I call the Goldilocks game that would follow me the rest of my life. Everything I saw was not quite right. It was too big, or too small. Too old, or too lacking in character. We looked at so many houses our realtor finally gave us a copy of all her listings so we could peruse them, by then everyone knew we were on the look out. 

We were playing bridge with an older couple whose house was beautifully decorated except that, in the fashion of some people back then, they covered all their furniture in clear plastic to protect it! It was cheesy and uncomfortable, but we would have never stopped playing Bridge over something like that. However, one night while we were playing they got into a disagreement over a play they'd made. First they argued. Then they shouted at each other and finally she threw up her cards and shoved the table towards him so hard she knocked his chair over and he fell on the floor! We were in total shock and it wasn't over yet. She got up and stood over him, arms on her hips, screaming at him while he lay there blinking. Imagine watching two well dressed people in their sixties doing this!

We decided not to play Bridge with them anymore, but she kept calling. I kept putting her off and then one day she said there was a young couple in their synagogue who was selling their house and she thought it would be perfect for us. We were very reluctant to look at it, but in the end we decided to go check it out. That was the first time we saw the house on Bradford Lane.

Bunn Street

 

We rented a two bedroom ranch house on Bunn street right under what is now Veteran's Parkway in Bloomington, Illinois. There was a viaduct directly south of us that traffic ran over and a day old bakery store across the street. We didn't know it at first, but we shared a long driveway with a family that lived way way back behind us. Soon we discovered they had a yard full of tires and car parts and Sunday afternoons were their special time to ride little motor bikes up and down our shared driveway. It was like living next to a nest of giant bees. The buzzing was so loud you could barely hear yourself speak when they were riding. And they rode all Sunday afternoon.

The very first day we moved down there, we had to buy a bed. We went to several stores downtown and bought a queen size mattress from the first one who would deliver it, along with a simple metal bed frame, that afternoon. Now we owned a bed and a small Danish table! The angora goat rug was a casualty of having a dog who thought it smelled heavenly and peed on it the moment we laid it on the floor. No amount of dry cleaning could stop that smell and the cost of cleaning the leather backing was horrendous. We also bought an old refrigerator from a second hand store on Empire and Grandma gave us the old library couch that we refinished and recovered for our living room. 

Money was running out, but there was a sliced ham at the Eisner store that someone had not taken. We bought it and froze each slice separately. We also bought some hamburger and figured we could make it to our first payday without starving. I applied for a job at State Farm and he was working a lot of overtime. One night he came home, gobbled down his dinner and I walked him back out to his car when he went back to work. When I went back in Ninna, our dog, was sitting on my chair at the table. She had eaten my dinner! I remember I cried and she seemed very remorseful.

One of those early weekends when we went home to visit my parents they cooked a ham because they knew we had been scrimping on money and they wanted to do something special! The homemade macaroni and cheese my dad made was extraordinary, but more ham? Ugh! We never said a word though.

I was offered a job in Personnel Records at the downtown Home Office. He would drop me off when he went to work and pick me up on the way home. One time our car was in the shop and we had to call a cab. Imagine our surprise when it showed up with two other people already in it and dropped us all off one at a time like some sort of bus. He was still working overtime nearly every night, so after picking me up from work we would often go to Steak N Shake and split a cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate shake before I dropped him back at the Grossman building and went home. This was a true luxury back then.

Working at State Farm was okay. I shared an office with three other women. Two of them were the group insurance people. Two of us were Personnel Records Clerks.  It was the second to the lowest pay grade in the company, but because I was the wife of new career level underwriter I was invited to a tea by the wife of the company president. I didn't go. First of all I wasn't sure what to wear. Also driving out there was going to require a lot of car shuffling and finally there was the fact that I had just started a new job and I felt funny asking for time off right away.

These were the last days in the old Home Office before State Farm moved us out to the new Corporate building. There were sill huge mirrors on every corner, because couriers used to roller skate through the building delivering the in office mail and their first computing machine was up on eighth floor for display. It was enormous. My job took me all over the building from the ground floor to the executive floor, but I was walking, not roller skating. We kept the personnel files up to date by typing new admissions and filing salary sheets, employee evaluations and conflict of interest statements. I learned to recognize the scrawls that were the signatures of all the important people in the company and I had to take care of OSHA demands by being sure contract employee's seniority dates were correct and all the up to date information was posted at all the right times.  It was a varied and interesting job. And because we were just across the alley from the back of Kresge's we could sneak down there once in a while and buy a grilled caramel danish from their counter.

Now that I was also working we could afford to give Grandma back the library couch to put in the attic and we bought a two piece tuxedo sectional from Goodwill. It was ivory satin and ninety inches long if you put the two pieces together. It was not new, but it was a real couch and we were even taking tennis lessons at Sate Farm Park. We were beginning to feel like we were moving up a bit.

One of the women I worked with lived in a lovely mobile home and that led to us finding a very nice used one in a beautiful mobile home court. We were ready to stop renting and buy something.

Dixon

 

The army sent a moving van owned by a man and his wife to pack up and move us back to Illinois. I remember she wore flowered coveralls and he wore standard ones. I liked the idea they could always work together and they seemed like a good team. All we packed was a bag to get us through a few weeks at his mother's house in Dixon, Illinois while he job hunted.

My husband's parents were much older than mine. In fact, his mother was close to my grandmother's age and his brother was the same age as my mother. His brother's daughters were almost the same age I was. 

Ronald Reagan grew up just a few blocks from his mother's house, the one my husband grew up in. The Reagan house was a very simple one with a secret tile in front of the fireplace where he used to hide things as a child. Of course we visited and his mother just raved about how cute Ronnie was and how all the girls had a crush on him when he was a lifeguard.

His mother was glad to have us there. We helped her do many of the things Jimmy, my husband's dad, had done before he died. She had raised two sons and I think I was her chance to have a daughter. She took me with her when she subbed at schools and she arranged for me to attend quite a few coffees and teas, so I could meet her friends. These were informal affairs with a formal twist. The silver coffee and tea sets I had grown up seeing just sitting on sideboards and inside china closets were actually used by all these ladies and everyone seemed to take it for granted that they used the best bone china to go along with it. I felt like I had stepped back in time.

She also took me to Virginia's, a private little boudoir where Virginia herself unlocked the door and invited us in to look at clothing. I got to pick out an beautiful tailored blouse and a skirt with a fitted suede belt that had a silver buckle. I was a bit in awe. 

One of her best friends was Bernice,  an elegant diabetic woman in her eighties who wore her shiny gray white hair up in a chignon. Bernice and her brother lived together in their old family mansion. It still had a port cochere from the old days when there were carriages and people needed that high porch to step onto. Bernice always made regular cookies when I came, even if she couldn't eat them and she told the most delightful tales. I remember how she impressed me when she hopped up on or off  of that port chochere porch because there were no steps. Then I found out she had reroofed her own house and repainted it herself -- just a couple of years earlier. Her brother was an invalid and couldn't really do anything except read. They did a lot of reading because they didn't have a television and she liked to walk to the library summer, winter, spring and fall. I knew right then she was the kind of woman I'd like to be.

All my life I had done certain things to kill time when I was anxiously awaiting something. As a child I made clothespin dolls, embroidered or knitted. Later I made a "Baby Sergeant" doll out of a sock and my husband's old fatigue shirt. I even used one of his sergeant pins on the hat to make it look more official. I paper mached a ketchup bottle and painted it to look like my husband wearing a suit., I read voraciously. I sewed and made dresses or long nightgowns, I painted with my great grandfather's old art box, or I played the piano. Here and now I could only walk my dog, hang out with his mother, or play Bridge with my husband, his mother and his aunt.

He interviewed with the State Farm Home Office Life Company for a position as a Health Underwriter at what used to be called the Grossman Building. It was out near where K-mart was back then and across the street from what would become Eastland Mall, but all I remember being built at that time was Sears. Around noon he came out to the car where I was waiting with our dog. A  tall, distinguished, gray haired man he introduced as Jack wanted to take us to lunch. Jack agreed to ride in our car because I had the dog and he insisted on sitting in the back seat. In my nervous rush to clear the floor of Ninna's paraphernalia, I accidentally dumped a gallon of water right on his shoes! I was horrified. I just knew I had ruined everything, but he was such a gentleman. He refused to make a big deal out of it. We went to a place where we could get a nice lunch relatively fast so we could leave Ninna in the car and he could get back to work.

A few days later we got a letter in the mail offering us the job. Now we were house hunting in Bloomington, Illinois.

The Airstream

 

We rented a beautiful little Airstream trailer in Fairmont Trailer Court right outside of Manhattan, Kansas, the home of Kansas State University. Most of the people there were also in the army, but a few, including some army wives were going to school.

Money was a concern now. My husband brought home $450 in cash from the army every month. We bought a little lock box and put our money in there. We divided our money into envelopes with $60 for groceries, $92.50 for rent, $33.61 for our car payment, $40 for recreation and entertainment, and money for things like gas and doing laundry, etc. in other envelopes, we were careful to always put $20 into a joint savings account. I still remember these things because it was really the first time I had ever thought about paying my own bills and what things cost.

I had lots of time on my hands here and this is where I began to do a lot of the things I still do. We bought a second hand Dressmaker sewing machine and a friend taught me to sew. After that I made most of my dresses for a long time. It was easy in the early seventies. A yard of material made a darling little mini-dress. I used leftover fancy jars that syrup, or other food came in to make paper mache art projects. Our landlords let us bring our little dog, Ninna, out to live with us and there were dozens of things to do together. For one thing our landlord had a big boat and he invited us out on the lake. One day when we were out there a big inboard motor boat filled with teenagers flipped up in the air and turned over! I'll never forget seeing those kids leaping like frogs into the water. One night a week we joined the long line to Pizza Hut where anyone could get a medium pizza and a coke for one dollar. Sometimes when he had to work overnight he would bring home Spudnuts, the best donuts ever!

We were proud of our little trailer and bought an angora shag goat rug to put under our Danish table topped with glass, our only personal furnishings. Our friends were mostly the men he had been in Vietnam with and those people became our surrogate family. All of us were young, far from home, and eager to establish relationships with each other. When the army kept us from going home on a holiday we spent it together. All of us lived in furnished trailers of one sort of another, had one car and learned to lean on each other in times of need.

Other couples we met were a veterinary student, his wife and their baby, Will. She was a telephone operator and on the rare occasions they could go home we filled in for them at the Veterinary school insemination labs where we swept the floors around the gigantic bulls stabled there. In return he would trim Ninna if she needed it. 

This was the year I had to go to an army dentist and discovered my wisdom teeth had grown in pushing down and to the front,  All of my teeth were being crowded and deformed by those teeth and needed to come out. It was a horrendous process leaving me with dry sockets both times and in so much pain I thought I would die. Then, when it was all over, they said I had an unerrupted tooth above my canine tooth that needed to come out. That time the dental surgeon actually hammered a rubber triangle into my mouth with his mallet, springing my jaw. I went home looking like the bride of Frankenstein with three long black sutures hanging down from my top gum and a plastic plate in my mouth. None of this was especially painful, but my jaw was so damaged from being sprung that I couldn't open it. By the time I had recovered from this I weighed 102 pounds, which is not much for a five foot seven woman.

We bought a five foot Christmas tree that year from a place called Paradise and since money was tight we bought a cheap pink feathered angel at the dime store for the top. We called her our Floozy Angel. I made cookies to hang and we sewed long chains of popcorn and cranberries to decorate it. I was going to decorate styrofoam balls with sequins, but that turned out to be more expensive than buying some small red glass ornaments. We soon discovered that one of the downfalls to decorating a tree with food was the company that followed. At night, while we were watching our tiny little black and white television a little gray mouse would come out, climb up in the tree and munch on cookies and popcorn. He was cute, but he was a mouse and my husband put out Decon much to my distress.

That year for Christmas I asked for a strawberry cookie jar and got a mushroom one. I don't remember what I got him, but we were happy.

When my parents came out to visit I proudly served them stuffed duck and pudding ala messe. Imagine their faces as I undid the safety pins I'd closed that duck up with! It tasted great though the stuffing was so dry you could blow it away with a breath. The pudding, which was supposed to be a chocolate cake from a recipe I got from his mother's church cookbook never turned into a cake, but scooped over ice cream it was delicious!

I had three other visitors from Illinois that year. One night we were having an argument when I looked out the window and saw two people I did not recognize coming up our driveway. "I suppose you invited somebody over and forgot to tell me!" I exclaimed indignantly. He glanced out the window. "That's your sister!! He was right! It was my sister, who had always been a petite size 5, and her new husband. Evidently being married improved her appetite immensely. And another week, when he had to spend the week out in the field,I drove home by myself and brought back my eighty year old Great Aunt Lela! On the ride back she asked if we could turn the air conditioner in the car back on and I had to tell her that it hadn't been the ac she felt. It was simply the vent under our dash. She wanted me to teach her how to drive that week, but we had a stick shift and I didn't think eighty was a good age to take up driving, so instead she taught me to crochet granny squares, which I quickly forgot after she left. Still it was fun having her there.

We were always trying to think of ways to save money and one of those was by not sending his fatigues to the dry cleaners. I washed them at home and hung them on the trailer court clotheslines. After they were dry they had to be starched and ironed. Starching was quite a process. I dissolved the starch in a green wash tub and soaked the clean uniform in it, then re-dried it, sprinkled it with water and put it in the refrigerator. Finally I ironed it the rest of the way dry in order to get the proper creases and stiffness required. 

We also thought I could cut his hair when his unit bought a barber's chair and set of clippers. Of course we couldn't use the chair, but he brought the clippers home and insisted I try. "Just hold the hair in a comb and run the clippers over it." He said. I did. I scooped up a big thatch of hair, ran the clippers over the underside of the comb, which knocked them out of my hand and promptly left him looking like a tonsured monk! Fortunately only the really tall guys in his unit could see this.

I decided I should get a job, so I applied for positions near Camp Funston where he was stationed during the day. I got a job pumping gas and rode to the post with him early in the morning then parked at the gas station until my job started at ten. When he got off after work around 4:30, he waited until 6:00 when I was done. It was not a bad job. There were five us working there and we rotated between working in the cooler, selling beer and pop and pumping gas. I learned to use a cash register, but somehow no matter whether I worked the pumps or the cooler I tended to come up with too much money! My boss thought maybe people were tipping me. I didn't, but we will never know. Of course men were always trying to give women a hard time, so if they asked us to fill it up and we did, then they said they'd only asked for two dollars worth, we just had them pull inside and someone would siphon out all the extra plus enough to start the siphon. Once a man insisted that his Volkswagen beetle radiator needed water and no matter what I said to him, he insisted, calling me names and being a general ass. I finally just opened up his trunk and put the hose in. As the water began to pour over his engine he immediately recanted. I was not prepared for working on my first army payday. The lines for gas never stopped and it was 120 degrees out. I was so sunburned that the part in between my braids could not be touched for days. Those were good days, but hard.

Eventually we decided it was too hard. Then I applied for a job in Manhatthan. I would drive him to work when he couldn't get a ride and then I would go into work. I was a Bumper Bunny at a local gas station. It was all women except for our boss and we wore white cowboy hats, short white shorts, red tight shirts and washed windows with squirt guns. The money was great, but the job turned out not to be. I had men grab at me and paw me and one guy even cut me with his ring. I still have the scar. That was when I quit.

My husband thought of himself as a swinger. He loved the movie, Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice, and since we were always having get togethers for fondue, or Bridge, or something, he wanted to have a party that was risque. The only problem was that I didn't and neither did our friends. He thought this was simply because we didn't get it, so he invited them to a Pajama Party. Everyone wore pajamas, but they all put a humorous touch on it and that party was all laughing and playing party games like passing the spoon on a string through your clothes, or passing the orange using your chin or your body. It did get a bit rowdy but that was because he was drinking and mixing drinks and towards the end he was mixing liquor with liquor instead of coke or seven up, We all survived. Both physically and as friends.

The only sad thing that happened that year was when my husband kept signing up to work nights. He would have his best friend come keep me company. We would go out to dinner, or dance, or simply sit and talk and we got way too close to each other. Finally it was too complicated, awkward and painful so we had to break off.  They stayed friends, but I don't think he ever realized how close we had come to destroying everything..

When his time in the army was finally coming to a close he began job hunting in Illinois. We thought Bloomington might be a nice place to live since it was midway between our two parents and we were close to both of them. His mother was now a widow who shared a hundred year old family duplex with her sister and my siblings were still all living close to home.

Junction City

 

We bought a little second hand red Toyota sedan, packed up everything we owned into the smallest U-Haul trailer and set out for Kansas, only to arrive and find out there wasn't any place to rent because the army was bringing so many people to Fort Riley that some families were camping at the lake. We went door to door knocking and asking if they had an apartment or room to rent. Finally, late that night we found a man who said he had an apartment he could rent us, but not for a few days. He agreed to put all our stuff in his storage shed if we paid him a month's rent, about $65 I think. That meant we could return the U-Haul, but we still needed to find a place to spend the night. 

We didn't have any camping gear and all the motels were full, so we kept driving east towards Illinois and finally found one room just outside of Manhattan, Kansas. It had four double beds, but the manager said if we promised to only sleep in one of them we could rent it as a single room. We were exhausted and grateful. I remember waking up all night long wondering if he was going to rent those other beds to other people. He didn't. The next morning we drove back to Illinois and stayed with my parents until the apartment was available.

It was an old two story house behind the landlord's house. We went in the back door to the kitchen and the only other rooms were the old dining room which was now our bedroom and a bathroom that had a brown wooden shelf built into the wall for toiletries. The people who shared the house told us where to put things so neither of us could peek into the other's bathroom through the pinholes in that shelving. It was a bare bones apartment with paper curtains over a box closet in the kitchen and all the windows. A bare bulb hung in the middle of the kitchen ceiling. There was an old gas stove that I had to light with a match and an oil stove in the bedroom for heat. I was afraid of lighting matches so my husband gave me a long rod that could hold one match when I lit the stove. One day the match blew out and I didn't turn off the gas while I got another one.  As I lit that match the whole room flashed around me and there was an awful smell. Later when I looked in the mirror my eyebrows looked funny. When I brushed them, they fell off. I had burned them, my eye lashes, and the fringes of my bangs right off!

Our bed was up against some old fashioned pocket doors dividing our apartment from the adjoining one. We did not think about this the first night when we went to bed as a newly married couple in our first home together. The next morning the girl who shared the house with us laughingly told us about all the banging our bed made on their side of their living room door. I was so embarrassed, but most of the couples around us were newlyweds. I remember hanging laundry on the shared clothesline and hearing people making love in their bedrooms around me.

Money was tight and we only had one car which he had to use to get to work very early every morning, so I tried washing clothes in our bathtub. I aso spit shined his uniform dress shoes by using a piece of cotton dipped in water and shoe polish until I could see my face in the shoes. Anything so that the time we had together wasn't spent doing chores. The army had lots of rules and sayings. One of them was, "If the army wanted you to have a wife they would have issued you a wife." That meant mess up and they will require you to move back into the barracks!

I wasn't working so I had lots of time. The girl next door and I became friends and she put some eggs on to boil for tuna salad while we walked to the grocery store to buy a can of tuna. When we came home something smelled terrible before we even opened the door to her apartment. The eggs had boiled dry and exploded all over her wall!

I polished the windows, bought a plastic lamp shade I could screw on over the kitchen light bulb and I cooked. I bought a clear round plastic cake box so I could make a pie and display it on top of the refrigerator like they did in cartoons. Then I made a butterscotch meringue pie like Grandma used to make me and put it in the box. I felt like the perfect homemaker! Imagine my surprise when I went to get it after dinner and discovered the heat from the refrigerator had melted all the meringue. 

I had learned to cook by cooking for our family of six growing up and helping the nursing home cook cook for forty. My husband would come home to a huge plate of pork chops, a bowl brimming over with mashed potatoes, a basket of hot dinner rolls, and a big bowl of vegetables. No one in his family ever ate more than one piece of meat and small portions of other food, but they did eat dessert almost every day. I loved the idea of dessert and made all sorts of things, including caramel dumplings which was a recipe his Scottish grandmother passed down to his dad, who taught me how to make them. Eventually he began bringing home his bachelor friends to share our food.

For entertainment we would play Putt Putt Golf at night or go see movies like Oliver. Sometimes we would go to the NCO club for dinner or dancing, but I always had to dance with friends. Once in a while I just danced with another guy's wife! And then there were places like The Rogues Inn. They sold 3/2 beer because you had to belong to a club to sell real beer and they had live bands singing things like Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay, or I Could Put Time In A Bottle. They also sang homemade songs like "Never let your dingledonger dangle in the dirt" when they drank out of their four foot stein.

We were happy, but we only lived here for about a month. It was a distinctly army town and once when I was downtown alone, a guy called me over to his car to ask directions. When I got there he tried to pull me into his car. Luckily my neighbor's husband saw us and intervened. 

Gas was about twenty eight cents a gallon and we would drive out of our way to save a few cents, but we were actively looking for a new apartment. Eventually we found a place in Manhattan, Kansas and it was time to move.

College?

 

My parents settled me in at my brand new dormitory and as I watched them drive away down the long driveway, I was stunned by the wave of homesickness that completely enveloped me!

Then I met my first roommate who informed me that she came to have fun and if I wasn't happy about that I should probably get a new room. Approximately three weeks later I gave up and transferred to another room on the same floor and we were both relieved None of this helped my homesickness. I went home every single weekend even if it meant getting a ride with someone part of the way and making my parents drive thirty miles to pick me up.

Higgins Hall was built on the ninth hole of a golf course and it was not finished when I moved in. The phones did not work for the first week or so. Neither the cafeteria nor the laundry facilities were up and running so we had to walk to the boy's dorm across a long parking lot for both of those things. 

My resident advisor seemed very old and grown up to me. She was twenty one and she and her brother were both RA's to help pay their way since their parents had been killed in a car accident a few years before. I was seventeen but so immature and so homesick. I alternately sat in her room crying or playing little tricks on her like putting a squishy frozen gargoyle in the bottom of her bed.

I met an English major at English club, but he was Japanese and into Japanese poetry. We tried sitting up in the empty football stadium on school nights and sharing poetry, but it just never jelled. Then my girl friend invited me on a blind date with her and her date. My date was a drama student. He worked part time for the local radio station during basketball games and I loved listening to his shows. Sometimes I even got to accompany him. We would practice his parts for plays in my dorm lounge. Back then no boys could go above the first floor of a girl's dorm. I felt very cool sitting on his lap with the script hidden behind our chair, reading lines. with him.  We were very dramatic!  We had to walk everywhere we went because freshman could not have cars, so when we went to the show we would act out scenes along the way where he was stalking me, or a detective was pursuing me, or once I was a cat, and he was chasing me around the park. Goofy kid things. Very funny and just reeking of a need for attention. He made me much less homesick, but eventually he wanted to seriously make-out and pet. I thought only really bad girls did those things. We ended up breaking up and I was heartsick

My freshman English teacher was a hippie who perched on her desk in old brocaded mini dresses and black holey ripped stockings. She had a boyfriend who had just published what was reportedly the dirtiest textbook around and we had to read it. It was pretty bad. I remember one long poem dedicated to a menstrual spot. She would give us credit for going to sporting events and once a poetry reading that was so bad I crawled out halfway through. 

I also had to take a speech class and I was terrified. I thought I would die before I got up in front of people; but that teacher was amazing, allowing for lots of creativity, which was good. One time I forgot I was supposed to have a visual for a speech that I had not even written. I got up at the last moment with a handful of paper scraps and gave a speech about my pet monkey destroying my visual aids. 

They put me in fifth year French and I was lost. My years of French had been juggled around different schools and different methods, mostly just learning to speak it. Our professor expected us to read Balzac!

Gym was required, but I discovered that if I signed up for specialized classes when I showed up they would inform me that I wasn't eligible and then let me pick the class of my choice. (Otherwise those classes were often closed or full.) I managed to get bowling, golf, fencing and archery before they caught on to me.

That year was more about socialization than anything else I think. I learned to live with other young women and take part in their ceremonies and events instead of just being with my family. We used to have a thing called a Candlelight. Someone would post a note in front of the elevators that said there would be a Candlelight at 7 pm. When we went to the lounge and stood in a big circle our RA would pass a lit candle around the circle while we sang, A Tree In The Meadow. The secret person would blow out the candle when it came to her and announce her good news. Usually that she was pinned or engaged. 

I ate in our cafeteria and gained the freshman twenty plus pounds, eating hot rolls and desserts. I met girls who would iron my curly hair on the ironing board at the end of our wing, because straight hair was the "thing." I shared clothes with other girls and they became my surrogate family. I also learned to do my own laundry and discovered there were pianos in the practice rooms on third floor if I wanted to play.

I spent more time doing almost everything except studying that year and went on academic probation the following year. No one in my family seemed to notice! There were no recriminations about wasting their hard earned money, or advice on what to do next. It felt like it might be true. I was only there to get my MRS. My dreams of some day being an architect or anthropologist just all got lost in the chaos, but I never stopped writing and I never stopped playing the piano.

On May 17, 1968, my friend Mouse invited me to join her and her friends on a blind date with a guy who had a car! Now any car was something in those days. His car, it turned out, was a 1950 Jeep with a 1946 engine. It was dark green and went down the hills of the state park much better than it went up. Going up only the driver got to ride. The rest of us had to get out and push. My date turned out to be the driver. a very good looking guy who was 22 and a graduating senior. We were on what they called a laker, my first drinking party at Lake Argyle State Park. There was an assortment of liquor they placed on a blue blanket along with a carton of fresh strawberries.  The park ranger came by and my date tossed a blanket over our booze. I remember the ranger saying how glad she was to meet students  picnicking and not drinking. I had my first drink that night. I think it was CC (Canadian Club) and coke. Then I had more and more and finally I had to pee, so I went off into the trees, but I got lost trying to find my way back. By that time there were dozens of people partying out there. I stumbled from group to group calling out, "Strawberries! Who has strawberries?" When it was time to go home one of the other guys drove and my date kept throwing up in a bucket in the way back of his Jeep. Every time he did that someone would push the bucket under my nose just in case and finally the smell got to me. I ended the night throwing everything up on the way home.

The next day I called his room on some pretext and left my phone number for him to call back. He called me and asked if I wanted to go see what ducks do in the rain? I thought this was so creative and we began to date. He asked me if I wanted to go on a camp out with him just before graduation, so neophyte that I was, I called my mother and asked her if I could go! She of course said no and I, of course, went anyway. 

I was probably lucky my period started just before that camp out, because while it never occurred to me that he might expect to have sex, he was determined to until he found out I couldn't. Instead we roasted hot dogs and made s'mores. That night I saw his beer opener had a name on it. It said, "Angell." I thought this was hysterical. "You named your beer opener Angel?" I laughed. That was when I discovered it was his name. I was dating an angel, although not the heavenly sort. His  name was spelled with two L's. The next morning I woke with the sun glaring down into my face. I had just spent my first night with a boy and he was leaning over me, backed by that halo of sunlight. The radio was playing,  Angel of the Morning and these were the words he said to me, "You've just complicated my life. I think I might be falling in love with you." I was completely overwhelmed and, I thought, in love.

He graduated and I sat with his parents during the ceremony. He was easy to spot. He was the only guy wearing a mini gown for graduation because he had failed to try it on until it was time to go. Afterwards he drove me home to Taylorville and met my parents. When he went home a week later I went with him to meet the rest of his family. 

One night when he was he was at his house in Dixon, Illinois and I was at my house in Taylorville, I had a terrible dream. I dreamed I was in a church with an upside down cross and he was the priest doing a black mass. He would point at me and I would say one of the ten commandments. "I will not honor my father and my mother, "or "I shall commit adultery." I could hear ominous chanting all around us and I woke up terrified. My dad was working in his office next to my bedroom and I told him about the dream. He said to get a drink of water and go back to sleep on my other side. I did. And I had the same dream again! Maybe that should have been a warning of some kind. But I chalked it up to the fact that he was so active in his Episcopal church. Sometimes, when I was visiting, they would call him at the last minute to be an acolyte for a wedding. In fact, the church had a hidden button that would call him back from the Rec room where he played pool during communion if there were a lot of people. That way he didn't have to just stand there waiting.

When we spent time at his house his cousins said we could use an empty house on the river if we wanted time alone and at first I thought this was awesome. It turned out not to be. He kept pushing himself on me and finally forced me into having sex with him. It was so unlike anything I had ever dreamed of that I didn't know for sure what had happened. It certainly hadn't been making love. I remember saying, "I guess it would have been okay if we'd made love." The shock on his face when he realized I didn't even know we had had sex for the first time was memorable. He continued to push himself on me whenever he came up to the room where I was sleeping in his house and even my threats to call his parents didn't stop him. Of course I was too ashamed to ever call out for help or tell anyone. I think he counted on that.

It was going to be a long distance romance. The Vietnam war was in full swing. Graduating seniors were just waiting to get drafted. He decided to enlist, theoretically it meant he got to choose what he did in the army. My Dad talked him out of being an officer. He said those guys were just cannon fodder. He asked to work in supply and eventually became an E-5 Supply Sergeant.

When he was in basic training at Fort Leonard wood I rented a trailer with another girl who was dating a guy down there and we rode with that guy's entire family down to see them graduate. Their family slept in the trailer. We slept in the car. I remember they were very religious and the whole family would pray when they crossed a bridge, or it began to rain. After all that traveling I only saw him for that one afternoon and there was nowhere to go so we went bowling.

We both agreed that we would date while he was gone. I probably would have been happy not to, but he was insistent. Still, we wrote every single day and once he called me from Vietnam via short wave radio.  The surprise call came through in the middle of the night and we had to talk through someone and say "over" when we finished our sentences. When it was done he said "over and out." Then in August of that year his father died unexpectedly and the Red Cross flew him home for the funeral. I went up and stayed with them while he was home, but he only had three days before he had to fly back.

We planned an April wedding, because that was when he would come home. He took his R and R (Rest and Relaxation) in Australia and had a big fling with some Australian girl. Back in Vietnam he was fixated on the girls who did the laundry or girls he called Donut Dollies.  

During this time I also went back to school and did much better because I was less distracted. Although I did have a few funny escapades now that I felt so worldly (having learned to drink and having had sex?) Once I was at a party where we were all dancing and singing Hava Nigila. They would push someone into the middle of the circle at the end and everyone would dump their beer into that person's glass so they had to chug it. By the end of the night I was seeing two of everything and I assumed my date was even drunker so I refused to ride home with him. I stayed on the couch in the living room and it was funny because when I said goodnight he stood up to undress! I quickly put a stop to that and he fell on the floor in a stupor where I let him sleep.  Another time I was riding through the beautiful snowy Illinois countryside with my friend, Gross Eugene, so named because the first time I saw him he was carrying two big bottles of beer in his arms, one in each of his boots. The new falling snow in the light of the moon was truly breath taking, but then we came to a hill and his car's racing slick tires would not go up it! We had no traction. We went back and tried to go up the other way, but the roads had become too slippery. Finally, in desperation, we pulled into a farmer's driveway and asked him if we could stay until morning when, hopefully, the roads would be better. He said fine. And left us out there in the cold all night long! When morning came we were half frozen when they invited us in for breakfast. His wife made the runniest, most unappealing, flattest fried eggs I had ever seen and served them with yellow tinted water! I was almost afraid to eat, and I didn't drink any of the water, but we thanked her and finally made it out of the country and back to my dorm. The dorm matron grounded me because I hadn't come home the night before.

In those days women had a lot more rules then men in dormitories. We had to be in before ten on week nights, eleven on Sunday and midnight on Saturday. Skirts or dresses were mandatory unless it was ten below zero and a sign was posted in the lounge. Then we could wear slacks under our dresses!

Planning our wedding was awkward. I wanted to be married barefoot in a woodsy setting, carrying daisies. His mother and mine wanted a formal church wedding in the Episcopal church. Then I wanted gray morning coats and gloves and maybe even top hats!

In the end we were married in the Episcopal church with rented tuxedos and a Juliet bridal dress with bishop sleeves and a lovely coronet covered in pearls. I carried white roses and my bridesmaids carried daisies.  They did let me have a cake with white doves on it instead of the traditional bride and groom. We had the reception in the basement of my grandfather's restaurant and left for a honeymoon in The Ozarks.

I'm not sure either of us knew what The Ozarks were, but they were close. we could drive and they sounded nice so that's what we chose. We only had a certain amount of time before he had to report back on post and we didn't have a lot of money. After many hours of him driving and me navigating we discovered we had driven straight through the Ozarks. So we turned around, found a little two bedroom cabin with a blooming cherry blossom tree in front of the kitchen window and began our marriage.My mother had packed a white nightie and robe for me.  My godmother told me to put the nightie under my pillow in case of fire. He gave me a sheer black pornographic outfit every night, which I mostly refused to wear. It was not the most auspicious start. 

At breakfast I made coffee with a coffee pot you set on the stove. I had never seen anything but a percolator, so I kept waiting for it to stop percolating! That coffee was the strongest I ever poured into a cup, but we survived the honeymoon and packed up our wedding gifts to head out for Fort Riley, Kansas.

Taylorville

 

That summer of 1966 we moved to a large old rental in Taylorville, Illinois just before my senior year in high school. I dreamed of going back to live with Barb in Springfield, but leaving the family was unthinkable. It was the only really stable thing in my life.

This is probably why the trip my youngest brother and I took with my uncle's family was not a good idea. I was already feeling a bit fragile and right after our move to Taylorville Henry and I went to Tennessee to help our youngest uncle move his family to West Virginia. He was a mining engineer and he and my aunt had a baby daughter and five year old son. Henry and I had to share a bed with the five year old who was still waking up wet, Then there was the move and new job jitters my uncle had to deal with. It was a chaotic trip. My uncle had envisioned letting me drive part of the way, but I didn't have my license yet, so he drove straight through with two very young children, two teens, an unhappy dachshund and his wife. When we got to West Virginia things were not hunky dory. The house was covered in coal dust. The water was polluted and they had to put a nylon stocking over the shower head to catch worms and bugs that came through. The drinking water was non-existent. We had to take a clean barrel to a mountain spring and fill it up.  People there often thought I was the mother of my cousins and their mother was my niece! She looked so young. In the end my brother and I came home on a very long and harrowing bus ride that tore through the mountains like there was no tomorrow. We ended up at a bus station in Ohio and my parents waited for us to come in at another bus station in Ohio. It took four hours before they realized what was going on and found us. The next week that bus went over the mountain!

My other brother and my sister went with my dad to visit his mother and sister in Texas. They met the pet skunk and St. Bernard there as well as getting to eat Grandmother's fantastic cooking. Their trip was much less traumatic.

My brothers got the third floor bedroom and my sister and I shared a double room separated by a double pocket door that we mostly left open. At night she snored like a buzz saw and set her record player so that it would play and replay the same record all night. Bobby Vinton, singing Blue Velvet, is burned into my brain. She let it play every night. All night long.

I was back in band here and back in French class because they did not teach German. The first few French tests were horrific combobulations of French and German, but my teacher was very understanding. I also took chemistry, which was not my favorite subject. I spent much of my time for this class devising what I thought were clever tricks like making a very large pink spider out of dough and having one of the boys attach it to a piece of fishing tackle in the ceiling grate overhead. He let it dangle slowly down as she lectured until it came into sight. Then our first year chemistry teacher, a tiny blonde glamour girl, flattened herself against the blackboard and screamed like a banshee. I'm surprised we did not get into trouble, but we didn't. I also roasted marshmallows over a Bunsen burner and one day, honestly quite innocently, I poured the chemicals we were using into the sink together in an attempt to clean up quickly. Instead I flooded the school with the smell of rotten eggs. I also accidentally burned the tip off of several flame testers and generally made a nuisance of myself. All of this while my dad was still the Title 3 Science director for Illinois.

I resented having to go to this school my senior year. I felt it was a step in the wrong direction, but I liked band. We had one band for the whole high school and both my sister and I played in it. Boys in band sometimes asked me out thinking I was the sophomore and she was the senior, for some reason. 

When his state job in ended my father considered moving us to Australia where they would pay for our family to come if he would agree to teach for a certain amount of time. I imagined being the kid with the American accent and never seeing my cousins or America again.  I read about dingos and wild fires and I did not want to go. My mother refused to go and in the end Dad did not take that job, but he was not having much luck getting back into teaching high school. They said he was over qualified and too expensive to hire. He was offered one job teaching if he would also coach the football team. That was like asking an owl to teach English while playing hockey with wolverines  As a boy my dad wanted to play violin, but my grandfather said the only way a son of his was playing violin was if he also played baseball. My dad tried, but by the time the ball was in sight of his thick glasses it was always too late to hit it and it often hit him.

Mom went to work for Grandma at the Big House which was now a very popular nursing home with a long waiting list. She became the administrator and loved it. My parents bought two small Datsuns with stick shifts on the floor. They warned us that we had better never have three people in the back seat unless they were three very undersized short people. They gave me the old Dodge my mother had been driving so I could drive myself, my sister and my cousins to school. We called it Shasta because she has to have gas and oil, lots of oil. I would drive to my grandmother's gas station and Forky, the owner would fill my car with gas on grandma's ticket, then put the oil he saved from other cars into Shasta. She had a few other quirks like the push button gear shift whose buttons sometimes pushed straight into the dash. I had a screwdriver and could remove the plate, reposition the buttons and be ready to go in a minute! She also had a poor defrost system, so on rainy days with a car full of kids, everyone except me, the driver, would take turns holding their breath hoping it would keep the windows clear. But I considered her my car and I spent many hours driving around the countryside exploring with my cousin and my sister by my side.

Sometimes my friend, Barb, would come down from Springfield and we would spend the whole afternoon driving around in her car, eating M&Ms and listening to KXOK radio.

I met Greg on a band trip. He was a ginger haired junior in 4H and a member of Future Farmers of America who also played in the band. I remember him defining cows for me. He said, " A bull is a daddy cow. A cow is a mommy cow. A heifer is a young cow that wanted to be a mommy but wasn't yet, and a steer is a boy cow that will never be a daddy." His face got redder and redder as he said these things! His project for 4H was a heifer he named after me! We took care of her all year until one fateful night in late summer when his parents invited me to dinner. There was cherry pie and ice cream and steaks from that heifer! We spent a lot of time together. He taught me to shoot both pistols and rifles and his mother really liked me, but that first day he introduced us he was standing in the doorway at the top of the basement stairs when he said, "Mom, this is Caroline." Immediately realizing his mistake he turned bright red and immediately stepped backwards and fell down the basement steps. He was my date to prom that year.

I played saxophone in the marching band because one cannot march with an oboe. I found the band uniforms and marching in parades and at school games fun, but I remember losing a shoe marching around the football field in the mud at Homecoming. I went to the Homecoming dance with another junior and discovered that in Taylorville, the parents came and sat in the balcony above the gym so they could watch all of us at the dances. Now I realize why parents would want to do that, but back then I considered it pretty voyeuristic. 

I didn't make a lot of friends that year. I mostly wished I was back in Springfield, but I did have one girl friend whose dad ran the pound. She was also a junior. Otherwise I was back to my old habits of reading and writing my thoughts on life as it was and as I wished it was, and I played the piano. I didn't think anyone really heard me, but just recently a man said that he used to walk by my house and listen to me playing.

My dad took me to visit several different colleges, but what I was looking for was the college most likely to have my friends from Springfield. In the end I got a teacher's scholarship to Western Illinois University in Macomb and that was where I went.

The summer following senior year was spent working in the laundry at the nursing home, or helping the cook there do odd jobs. My mother shopped for all the things she thought I might need when I went away to college and many of them were bought with green stamps. WIU was on the quarter system then and my parents dropped me off  at my new dorm right after Labor Day,

Back to my future

 

We made the traditional Christmas break move so that I could start eighth grade in my new school at the beginning of a semester. I was so hopeful about re-establishing old friendships, but two years is a long time for  thirteen year olds.

My grandfather had remodeled the Douglas Street house after we moved. The kitchen was completely different! There was a modern corner sink shaped like two triangles and a dishwasher! The back yard had been sold off and someone had built a whole house there! 

I got the front bedroom this time and my dad said I could paint it to match my grandmother's kitchen, bright reddish orange!  My mother dyed a pair of old polyester curtains brown and somehow they came out a gorgeous brown with gold lines running through them because the dye didn't really take. My grandfather gave me his clock with a blue luminescent face and a space capsule orbiting around as the second hand. My mother let each one of us have a book of green stamps and I used mine to get a black metal bookshelf with brass legs. It felt very modern and gave me room for all my books. Add my desk and a dresser repainted from Kelly green to white and I loved this room

My sister got my old room and mom painted what had once been mustard yellow to purple, but since she didn't have purple, she added red and blue food coloring to white paint. The walls were definitely purple, but they also had tiny little red and blue dots all over them. My brothers shared a room and nobody cared what color it was. I don't even remember it now.

I walked to school with my old friend Kathy. She had learned to sew and now made all her own dresses. They were beautiful shirtwaists which were all the style right then and because they saved her parents money she was allowed to buy Capezio pumps to match the color of each one. I pretended I didn't care, but I wore black cheap pumps that had a hole in the bottom from all that walking. I just learned to keep my feet flat on the floor and no one noticed.

However I also wore many of my grandmother's hand me down clothes. I didn't mind. Grandma was a petite classy woman and I loved most of her clothes, but my mother used to try and get fancy once in a while. Sometimes that was cool, like a collar that could button down over any sweater to dress it up. It was the time she tried to make me a matching skirt and blouse set that really backfired. You could see where she had taken the stitching out of the blouse. There were miniscule holes that left no doubt something else had been there and when I walked into art class, a girl named Lana looked at me and said, "Your mother made that outfit! I can tell. It shows. Then she sneered. "You gotta wear hand me downs!" Even though she was a girl no one cared much for, it was the first time I felt ashamed of my clothes. Top that off with the brown hounds tooth winter coat that my mom's friend had given her and I started to become more and more self conscious.

But mostly I loved eighth grade. I was now learning to play the oboe, another instrument chosen by my mother because she had played it in high school. I made a clay head in art class that was supposed to be emerald green and look like the boy I had a crush on. The general consensus was that it looked like a moldy neanderthal, but to me it was art. I ate a ham salad sandwich and drank chocolate milk every day for lunch because I loved it and it saved enough money for me to buy a much coveted 45 rpm record at the record store where you could go into little booths and listen to records if you thought you might buy them.  We listened more than we bought. The Beatles were in and I loved George.

That year my mother bought me my first pair of high heeled shoes. They were spiked and very fashionable  even if they were only an inch and a half high. I slept on huge brush rollers at night so my hair would be as close to a bouffant as I could get it and I had tiny little velvet bows that clipped right into the middle of the top. My mother used  some of her green stamps to get a hair dryer! What a novelty that was with its plastic cap and hose. Now we could wash our hair and dry it right away, or in about an hour. I used Ten O Six to keep my face from breaking out when we could afford it and I was right on the cusp between playgrounds and parties.

November 22, 1963. I was home sick from school when Kennedy was shot. I remember my mom and aunt crying, but it just felt unreal to me. Then, on my fourteenth birthday he was buried. It was all that was on television and no one was really interested in my birthday at all. I was a little hurt by that, but I understood.

My grandfather was a big Republican and he had a warehouse full of Goldwater in 1964. My mother glued big  sparkly eyed elephants on either side of Uncle Ralph's wheel barrel and filled it with cans of Goldwater. We had to go door to door trying to sell it. I cannot tell you all the ear-fulls I got doing this.

In ninth grade I went to my first dance. It was the school's end of year dance and the twist was all the rage back then. I felt very beautiful when I looked in the big mirror over our buffet and commented, "I look pretty!" to my mother. She promptly replied, "You aren't pretty if you think so." That made me feel terrible.

In ninth grade I was also invited to plan an Invite. An invite was like a coming out party given by a group of girls who spent a year raising money with bake sales, auditioning live bands and checking out hotel ball rooms. We sent out very formal invitations to our friends and our parent's friends that said Mr. and Mrs. So and So announced the presentation of  their daughter, (name), escorted by (name), son of . . .  I wore an emerald green velvet gown that my mother and Aunt Lou made, with matching green satin shoes, long formal white gloves, a pearl evening bag and had my hair done at the salon. Our theme was In the still of the night and we had tiny dance cards with tassels that said this as well as beautiful bouquets to match our dresses. An emcee announced each one of us with great pomp, one at a time, while we walked down the aisle and up to the stage. These things were all the rage in Springfield and it signaled that I was old enough to date, which actually I wasn't, but since Shawn and I were both fifteen and neither of us could drive we were allowed to "date" because his father would have to drive us. It turns out that our parents actually knew each other when we were infants. They would put us in a playpen together and the story was that Shawn was nine months older than me, but I always took his bottle and made him cry.

One day when we were all in the elementary schoolyard playing baseball, a sharp little Triumph TR4 pulled up to the fence. It was bright shiny red and had a black convertible top. When the door opened, Shawn got out! He said my mother told him it was okay if I went for a ride in his new car. I felt like Hollywood royalty that day!

I dated Shawn off and on up through my freshman year in college. I guess he assumed we would get married. I never even considered it. To me he was just a friend who liked to make out, which I didn't. It didn't help that my new best friend, Barb McClelland hated him. She referred to him as that red headed leprechaun. He was terribly smart, the youngest computer programmer in Springfield when he was a junior in high school and his hair was more strawberry blonde than red. He had an in-ground pool with a dome that inflated over it so we could swim all year long and he taught me how to scuba dive in that pool. I liked him. I dated him. I just didn't love him.

High school started when I was a sophomore. I switched from French to German and band to orchestra. I was in what they called tracked classes which is where I met Barb, my new best friend, and a lot of our work was independent research culminating in term papers and long speeches in front of the class. I was busy. Physical education classes were every other day at seven in the morning. I had no study halls and after school I took Driver's Ed my sophomore year, so I got home around 7:30 P.M.  Kathy, my best friend since fourth grade, and I rode to school in her Dad's station wagon, but we often walked the two miles home after school when I didn't have to do something else. 

On Tuesday I had candy striping and there were various other things on other days. Candy striping was something I did, not because I wanted to be a nurse, but because I thought I wanted to be a nun. I fell in love with Sister Eunice at the convent during candy striper parties and picnics.. She played guitar and led us in singing folk songs. The candy striping itself was sometimes tense. One day I was given a woman in a wheel chair by Sister Gerard and told to take her from Emergency to the surgery floor. Alone. Half her face was gone and there was a beaker taped there to catch the blood oozing down. Another time I had to go through the hospital basement and up a dark hallway to an elevator that opened to a back door. There I let in the ambulance people and unlocked the door to the morgue for them. There were stainless steel coolers on stretcher wheels in there and I had to open each one and read the tag tied to the waxy looking toe of the dead person until we found the right one. Then I rode back up with them and let them out. Riding nose to toe with a corpse in a tight elevator was unsettling. I spent hours studying the Catholic saints during this period of my life, dreaming of living with the sisters in a castle like convent and spending my life singing folk songs. Then Sister Eunice died of TB because she worked in the sanatorium and my enthusiasm gradually faded away. 

After Driver's Ed my mother let me drive our family's Vista Cruiser station wagon with her for practice. I loved to drive by the house of a boy I had a crush on, just in case he might be visible. He never was, but on Christmas Eve she let me drive with her to go buy a carton of Cokes and as I passed his house I clipped the bumper of his family's classic car! It completely crumpled the right front of our car and ruined the only snow tire my dad had managed to get on it so far. It put an almost invisible tiny scratch on the bumper of their car, but his dad, who was a lawyer (and had been drinking) came rushing out screaming and yelling at me. I was in shock. I don't remember how we went home. I went straight to my room. I was so scared and upset, but no one ever said one word to me about that accident! I guess they knew they didn't have to. I wouldn't drive at all for nearly a year.

I had Miss Fogarty for English in my junior year. She made us memorize big pieces of Hamlet and Macbeth and after she graded our themes we had to rewrite them in ink with no mistakes. Nothing says mistake more than me trying not to make one. I can't tell you how many times I rewrote some of those papers. Miss Fogarty was old. I studied my dad's old Crib Notes for one of her tests, the ones he had from the 1940's and her questions came right out of them! Sometimes she would get confused and say, "When I had your brother Harold in my class," and I would remind her he was my father not my brother.

One time a girl dating one of the Hell's Angels got in trouble and in retaliation they rode through our school on their motorcycles! Then there were the bomb scares when we had to evacuate the building. Times were changing. I remember two girls whose parents were in the military got into a fight in our cafeteria and one of them ripped the other's earring right out of her ear. There was so much blood! 

But most of my life was peaceful. I took my ACT test and all the other tests, usually with Shawn and I went to the show with my girl friends, things like Spartacus or West Side Story. Sometimes I rode the bus downtown to have lunch and shop with Kathy, or stayed overnight with Barb to study for tests. I played records and sang a long with them, read Teen magazines and on Sundays usually went with my siblings to have lunch with our grandfather at his restaurant. 

My sister and I worked for him for two weeks right after my sophomore year. He was in Washington D.C. with his friend, Everett Dirksen, so we held down the office. All we really did was answer the phone, go eat lunch at the restaurant and type up one contract. I guess he wasn't satisfied with something we did because when I asked if I could do it again the next summer so I could earn money to go on the senior trip to Washington, he said no. I never understood exactly why and I didn't get to go on the trip.

At the end of every year from eighth grade through my junior year in high school I played in the band for the Springfield High School Graduation ceremony in the Armory. That was where we had all our basketball games too, because the school auditorium was just not big enough. My junior year the school bought the old Orpheum theater organ and installed it in the auditorium. I was asked to take lessons on it my senior year. 

But it was not to be. The summer before my senior year my parents rented a house in Taylorville, Illinois. It was where I was born and it was my mother's hometown. She was going to go to work for her mother since Dad's job as a Title 3 Science person was a political appointment and Ray Page lost the election. Dad was going to try and get back into teaching.

Life in a fixer upper

We rented this house for $64 in 1962!  It was the only time I had any idea of the money my parents spent, or paid for bills. Although I was the one who had to answer the phone so that when bill collectors called I could tell them my parents were not home. 

My mother kept on working at the Velvet Freeze while my father took the four of us to Chatham, Illinois daily. He was plastering and painting while we played.  For lunch he brought a thermal bag with lunch meat and mustard along with a loaf of bread and potato chips. Each of us got a dime to buy a cold soft drink at the little grocery store up the street towards the square. That was a real treat back then. It was also a treat to have my dad home and available. I loved talking to him while he worked and I loved being the one to make the sandwiches.

This house was on the main street going out of town and the town was small. The population listed on the sign in front of our house said 1000 and we used to joke that now it was 1006. There was a funeral home across the street that kept long tailed smelly sheep in the back yard and an ambulance in the garage. Usually the wind blew the smell away from us. We could get our mail at the little post office near the square and the space around the square was divided pretty equally between taverns and churches. It felt very quaint, like I had gone back in time. 

I had been the only one in our family who attended Sunday school at the church next door to the house on Walnut Street and I thought I should pick a church to go to here. They were all little white wooden buildings with small steeples and they seemed much less daunting than the church in Springfield. I had not missed a single Sunday there because I wanted to win a white Bible at the end of the year, but they said I didn't get one because my parents weren't members. 

Our backyard was impenetrable, filled with apple and pear trees and two out buildings besides the old stable/garage. My dad hired a boy with a tractor to clear it out and we discovered a horse tethered by the back fence! However our attempts to ride him were futile. He simply walked over to the back porch of the house behind us, lowered his head and dumped us off! The side yard was a swamp! It turned out that when the house was built, a gazillion years ago, someone buried a barrel outside the kitchen window and the sink had been draining into it ever since.

We found some old dried up paint cans and mixed water into them to make a sort of wash we used to paint the inside of one of the outbuildings. I think it had been a chicken house. We called it our club house and cut a hole in the roof that we covered with an old grating for a door. In order to join you had to stand up on the roof and jump off. It was probably less than eight feet, but if you were standing up it seemed much higher. Playing in this yard made us feel like we lived in the olden days. We climbed trees, picked apples and made applesauce and tried to have a picnic in a sunny glade. It turned out sunny glades are full of insects that also love picnics. We were out numbered by the spiders ten to one. One afternoon my sister climbed way up into one of the trees. I can still see her standing up there. Crying. Dad had to come home and climb up to get her down.

The house was a rambling old, very old, two story wooden clapboard. Someone had tacked on odd little porches and windowed lean-tos around it, so it felt kind of mysterious, but it was damp and not well insulated. We turned one porch into a sort of play room. My dad used one for his office and books and there was one off the kitchen where our cats had kittens. We had two cats. One had a half orange and half black face. We called her Spitzer and she was a very good mother. The other was a little gray tabby we called Spit Fire who had kittens all over the room. She had one up on a ladder and one under a chair and so forth, but once they were born she wanted nothing to do with them. My mother put them on a dishtowel in the electric skillet to keep them warm until Spitzer adopted them as her own.

It was all uphill from the kitchen to the dining room. The intervening space became our laundry hall. We put the washer and dryer there. The only bathroom was off the dining room and my parents' bedroom was next to that. The living room had a staircase going up to the two bedrooms we used. One for the girls and one for the boys. These bedrooms were only heated by a vent in the floor open to the rooms underneath. I found I could watch The Twilight Zone after my bedtime if I lay just right and peered through the one in our room. The only other defining characteristic of this bedroom was the very shallow closet. It was only about six inches deep. More of a clothes press than closet.

In spite of all the work my father did on the house he described it as "Cold and drafty. At any moment I (he) expect clouds to form and rain to fall in the living room." We didn't really mind it. We were just kids. 

In the beginning we were allowed to ride our bicycles wherever we wanted. The idea was that it was a small town and very safe, but after we all rode five miles out to the quarry one afternoon, that ended. So we did what the other kids did. We watched the high school boys do tricks at the corner cafe. One of them could hold onto the pole and hold his body parallel to the ground. We decorated our club house, rode our bikes around the square and I made a secret place to hide my writing by hollowing out an old book my father had discarded. Of course that book stood out like a sore thumb among my other books, but I never noticed.

 My dad enrolled us in school. He liked to tell the story of how when they asked him which grades, he said 2,4,6 8. My school only had seventh and eighth grade. It was way out in the country and had once been an elementary school so there were swings and slides and teeter totters to play on at lunch. Lunch was different here. The food was made by the lunch ladies who inspected our trays before we turned them back in, to make sure we ate it! I felt like I had gone back in time, but they did have a personal hygiene class where they showed a movie that was very explicit. I remember the girl sitting next to me fainted and farted before she fell on the floor. Up until then I thought fainting sounded very feminine and delicate. That ended that!

They did not have an orchestra so I could not continue with my violin. Instead my mother decided I should play the saxophone because she still had her old one. My dad used to laugh when he described our band teacher. He said there were a lot of good players, but their timing was off. Everyone just played till they got to the end. Some faster than others. Band class was up on the gym stage. Mr. Chapman would direct with great gusto and sometimes got so frustrated he threw his baton up in the air over his head. One day it flew right out an open window! 

My mother quit working at the Velvet Freeze and became a Goldblatt's Paper Route Monitor. She would put us all in the car and drive around checking to see if kids had put the Goldblatt's ads on doorknobs.  Then she decided we could do Chatham ourselves. She gave half the town to two of us and the other half to the other two. She was still the checker, but we had to walk house to house and rubber band the rolled up paper to door knobs. That didn't last long. I was afraid of dogs and my siblings were pretty lackadaisical. 

My mother also decided that she and the other kids would all come to church with me. One Sunday while we were listening to the sermon everyone noticed the minister would occasionally twitch, jerk, or pause briefly before continuing. It turned out my brother, Tom, was surreptitiously shooting rubber bands at him. Mom thought this was hysterically funny? At Christmas they asked my mother if I would play my violin for the service, but I declined. I never played a piano, or violin, or saxophone, or oboe, recital. I was too scared and nobody in my family really encouraged me to do otherwise. Even though we were expected to take music lessons there was never any interest expressed in how we practiced or progressed.

I had my thirteenth birthday in this house and I remember how solemnly my father said, "Welcome to the world of teenagers. From now on you will feel misunderstood." I didn't understand, but I wanted to look cool so I pretended to. I cultivated looking like I understood many things I didn't, probably hailing back to first grade when my teacher tried to teach me that no one was perfect. And obviously failed.

My dad's mother, my grandmother Prehn, had moved after her divorce. First she, my aunt and my cousin lived in Colorado Springs and later they moved to Hereford, Texas. When I was very little she had showed me a matchbox full of dead baby mice! I thought they were so cute. Now she sent us a preserved scorpion and a horn toad from Texas. These were not so cute, but we kept them out in the toy room. Grandmother loved animals. When I was a toddler I remember walking among her pack of two collies and two English Spaniels. Later she had a pet skunk and a St. Bernard. When I was very small I would visit with her and she would give me dog cookies (Milk Bones) to chew on. I thought that was bizarrely cool. She had once been a teacher and she was very creative. She handmade many smocked dresses for me as an infant and later made us all beautiful dolls she called, Binkies. I think I have a lot of her characteristics, but after she moved away, I only saw her one more time when we visited her in Colorado. I was nine then. She and my mother did not get along. The story goes that she came for dinner one night and the napkins didn't match, so she left saying she would rather be hungry than improper. I suspect there was a lot more to this story, but who knows. Grandma was a bit of a social climber and snob, while my mother prided herself on what she considered her shortcomings like not going to college and was an ardent reverse snob. As two sides of the same coin they were bound to clash.

One of my mother's decorating techniques was hanging our stuffed animals around the edge of the ceiling in our rooms so we could see them, but not get them dirty playing with them. She also hung the souvenir dolls people gave us from our lights in the middle of the room for the same reason. Other dolls, like the mechanical babies from Germany that moved and cried, or the Dutch doll from Holland, lived in boxes in our closet along with our doll china. Her intentions were good, but somehow she did not realize that a toy you cannot touch or play with is not much of a toy.

One day my brother, Tom, caught a huge garden spider in the backyard. He put it in a jar and took it upstairs to his bedroom where he promptly lost it! It just crawled away when he was distracted and he never found it again. That night my parents were sound asleep when they were awakened by blood curdling screams. Rushing up to my room they found me in my bed, wide-eyed and still screaming. I dreamed that one of the dolls hanging from the light in the center of our room was that spider. It took them a while to wake me up and settle me back down.

Unfortunately I continued to have these night terrors and wake up screaming, sometimes running out of my room trying to escape. I still do to this day, but very seldom now. Back then they were so frequent my parents must have decided I was broken and made the decision to move back to our old house on Douglas Street in Springfield with the hope that it would fix me.

Walnut Street

 

We moved to the new house during the school Christmas break. And it was eerie to discover the house was across the street from a big stone church and right down the block from Aunt Evelyn. 

My parents talked about what a good school it was. My dad had gone there when he was growing up. They showed us a picture of him at eighth grade graduation wearing a suit and tie! The governor's granddaughter went to school there. I would still take violin lessons and I could take piano lessons from my mother's cousin, a student of Paderewski's student. 

The first thing that happened was my mother sold our Steinway baby grand piano because it took up too much room. Then she painted grandma's player piano white and pulled all the player parts out of it. Next they set up two play rooms in the finished attic. One for the boys and one for the girls. I found a whole set of Howard Pyle's Legends of King Arthur in our toy room closet, but I also found an old orange crate and began designing my own Barbie house and the furniture for it. I used sponges and hairpins to make a couch with wrought iron legs and a cigar box to make a four poster bed. I spent hours decorating and redecorating that doll house.

The new school was not on the same schedule as our old one of course. There were new term papers to write, new rules for what you could wear to P.E. classes, different clubs and it was a much bigger school, so everything was on a grander scale. Little things like having to sit on the floor during programs in the auditorium instead of the rows of chairs I was used to at my old school seemed awful to me. But the one good thing was that here girls could be safety patrols on the street and do all the things only boys were allowed to do at my old school. And it was cool to see the guards who accompanied the governor's granddaughter to and from school. I started going to the skating rink with my girl friend after I went to the Patrol Party that year. My friend was a very good skater and could do lots of tricks, but even though my mother said I had skated very early as a two year old, I had no memory of it and I wasn't very good. It wasn't expensive because Grandma gave me her old skates which saved having to rent a pair.

My dad had to go to Perdue that summer and take a refresher course for teaching calculus, so it was just Mom and me after the other kids went to bed. She would make clothes for my Barbie, prairie dresses and sunbonnets, a satin wedding dress with a pearl neckline made from my dad's old nightshirt. She even turned a boot box into a Barbie closet with a mirror and dresser! They were the last nights of my real childhood in many respects. 

I began seventh grade in this house and on my sister's birthday my period started - barely. I thought I had done something wrong. My mother was angry that my underwear was spotted and she drove me to the drugstore to buy what we needed. That was October 5, 1961. A few months later my period was late and I was terrified. I thought I had been thinking about one boy so much that God thought I was married to him and he was sending me a baby! Looking back I remember seeing a movie with my Brownie Troop when I was nine, but no one ever discussed it and most of it went straight over my head at the time. I was in an agony of shame for over a week when, of course, my period did start.

It was eighteen blocks from my house to the junior high and I had to ride a school bus for the first time. I was the very last person the bus picked up and the driver would open the door so I could squeeze onto the first step and lean forward, then he would close the door and that was where I stood until we got to school. Once I couldn't even squeeze in and the bus driver told the office I refused to get on. I had to get a ride to school with a friend's father but someone told them the truth so I wasn't in trouble. I did discover that if I got out to the bus stop a little early my seventh grade math teacher, Miss Tate, later Mrs. Royer, would come by in her little Volkswagen Beetle and give me a ride to school. 

Junior high was different. I had to go in early for orchestra and we couldn't leave the school for lunch. I think I ate a barbecue beef sandwich and drank a carton of chocolate mile for twenty two cents every single day. My parents gave me exactly enough money every week to pay for lunch, but if I saved some by not eating the hot lunch, sometimes I could buy a ten cent coke when my girl friend and I walked home. I did this as often as I could, carrying piles of books in my arms with a violin case slung over my shoulder. There was freedom in that choice. I joined the astronomy club and the camera club and life seemed good. 

My homeroom teacher wanted to nominate me for student of the year, but I hadn't attended any dances or sporting events. I was disappointed, but I'd had no idea these things were at all important and I didn't know how to dance or have a ride to anything after school.

Looking back I think I was kind of lonely for the first time. Even though my long time friends from my old school lived in the same town we never saw each other. I spent hours listening to some old records Aunt Helen gave me and writing about things I imagined. I played with the Barbie House/crate and made clothespin dolls, but I felt separate from my siblings sometimes. My mother said I was too old to share the bathtub with them and I had to wear deodorant and there was that awful bra and I was so embarrassed when I had my period. I felt awkward. Odd. I guess I looked awkward too. My mother said I walked like a chicken with its head stuck out.

I was allowed to ride my bike more freely now that I was twelve. I discovered I could ride all the way downtown to the Capital building and I spent many hours wandering through the Illinois State Museum. I also met the elderly woman who lived next door to us. Her name was Eliza Condell and she had been a teacher. Her brother had traveled all over the world. Many of the things at the museum were donated by him, Thomas Condell. She took me through her house, telling me stories about all the intriguing antiques she had. There was a big glass box filled with birds and bees and flowers that struck little bells and made music and she had paper dolls from the Ziegfeld Follies. I loved miniature things and she had a tiny tea seat forged out of pennies from the Civil War. I could see her sitting in her rocking chair reading in front of the window very late at night and I thought how happy she seemed even though she had never been married, or had children and had always lived alone.

Seventh grade ended. My parents were running a Velvet Freeze Ice Cream store together when Dad wasn't teaching, or tutoring, or working for my grandfather. During the school year we had a babysitter, but in the summer that was too expensive, so my grandfather offered to take the four of us to his house in Minnesota for a vacation. He drove Henry and me in his Cadillac and his wife, Aunt Helen, drove Caroline and Tom in her Oldsmobile convertible. He hired a nurse to bring her family and stay in the guest house while we were there and it should have been wonderful.

It was not. My sister and the nurse's daughter made me feel like the odd man out. I sprained my ankle and then my period started! Here I was was. Far from home feeling terrible and I had to ask Aunt Helen to buy me feminine products. To top it off my youngest brother, Henry caught a big fish that got away and he was so upset he got sick and ran a high fever. My grandfather took us home.  He never took us on another vacation to Minnesota after that. 

The rest of the summer we had to sit in the back booth of the Velvet Freeze when both of our parents were working. Sometimes they let me run the cash register and once I got to help scoop sherbet when there was a sale, but those were long afternoons. We didn't get free ice cream either. It was five scents a scoop and our parents had to pay for every one. I remember watching people buying five scoop ice cream cones and wishing we could have one of those. We never did. 

In August my dad told us he had rented an old house in the small town where he taught and once we fixed it up, we were moving! It sounded like fun and I looked forward to it. As long as our family was all together it was just another adventure.

Douglas street

 

We moved into the house on Douglas Street in Springfield, Illinois right after my fifth birthday. My father had a job teaching English, Physics, Chemistry and Remedial math in a high school in Chatham and Springfield had a public kindergarten, which was evidently not common back then.

The first day we moved in I saw a man trimming the bushes between our house and his driveway and I told him to stop cutting our bushes! That was the day I met Uncle Ralph. He and his wife, Aunt Jo, would become second parents to all of us, but especially to my baby brother who was born the following April. They didn't have children of their own, so they opened their hearts and home to all the children they knew.

My mother took me to register for kindergarten and I sat in the principal's office staring at my patent leather shoes and informed him that I would go to kindergarten, but I was going to be like my mommy and not go to college! He said that was okay, we'd start with kindergarten. His name was Mr. Head.

Those were busy years. 

My youngest brother, Henry, was born April 20th, 1955 and I remember looking in his crib. He was the biggest baby I had ever seen, but part of that turned out to be because he had club feet and my mother had put a blanket sleeper on him to hide his casts. The next five years were spent making trips to Champaign to get his casts changed as he grew, or to have him fitted for special shoes and night braces, but by the time he finished elementary school he was running and playing sports! Of course he had always been very athletic. He learned to walk and then run wearing casts from his hips to his toes!

My other brother, Tom, had problems too. They thought he might be slow, but it turned out his eyes were so bad he could only see things very very close to him. He needed glasses. Plus he had a stubborn streak. My mother took him to therapy when he was six and was told he was brilliant. He could read, play chess, and do anything he chose, but he often chose not to do these things! Because of his bad kidneys my mother tended to baby him a lot.

My younger sister, Caroline, was nicknamed Pretty. When she was born she had lots of black hair all over her body and my dad had called her his ugly duckling, but once she was old enough to introduce herself as that the family panicked and renamed her Pretty.

My nicknames varied. As a toddler I was called, Angel. Then Pumpkin and finally Injun. I was considered a bright, finicky child who worried about everything. My first grade teacher called a parent teacher conference after sending home a note saying my parents should explain to me that no one was perfect. I did not have to be perfect. My dad jokingly started that conversation out with, "Nobody's is perfect. Except me." Now they were concerned because I had begun to write my name on all my papers, starting in the bottom right hand corner and writing backwards! Every letter was perfectly reversed as was my name. Sometime during the conference they called me in and asked me to show them and I dutifully did. When my father asked why I wrote my name and all the letters backwards I told him, "The teacher said start in the lower right hand corner and write your name." That was the only way to do that and make it fit.

I had a boy friend starting in kindergarten. Both of our last names started with P and so we were often seated together along with another P boy. Linda, Billy and Shawn, a threesome that stayed in contact for many years. Three bright kids who were alphabetically connected. Billy's mom was a pediatrician and his dad was a cardiologist. Shawn's parents were also professionals. Those were fun days. We learned to play chess and marbles. We rode our bikes together, played with Billy's electric train, and once I got to go see Snow White at the theater with Billy and his mom.

Going to the show was a big event back then. People got all dressed up and stood in long lines to see things like Bambi and Old Yeller.

I did most of my growing up in this house. I took piano lessons from a woman two blocks away, but I was so terrified of walking past the loose dogs, that I almost quit. I signed up to learn the saxophone in fifth grade and violin in sixth. My brother, Tom, tried out a series of instruments too, but when he played oboe they were always on the next note before he got the last one out. Then he tried the bass fiddle, but, even though he was a big boy,  he hated carrying it the block to and from school. That was the end of his musical career.

I began sleep walking in this house and would wake up running down the stairs or standing in the living room. Once I read a book that talked about dough balls. I didn't know what they were and ran down to my parents while I was sleep walking to ask where the dough balls were.

I read a book called, The Fashion Doll about a girl finding a trunk in the attic with a doll who had the most incredible detailed clothing just like the most fashionable women in the 1800's wore. Then for Christmas I got the first Barbie doll whose clothing was also like real fashionable dresses! They were expensive and I only got a few outfits for birthdays or Christmas, but it was a dream come true. 

I also got my first desk at this house. It was a modern one with wrought iron legs and two drawers with a matching chair. I used to sit at it and pretend I was a teacher. The year I turned eleven I got my first bra. I was not impressed. I hated it and found nothing wonderful about having it. That year my mother also surprised me by painting my room mustard yellow and my furniture Kelly green. She thought it was a wild and wonderful teen girl room. I thought it was atrocious, but we couldn't afford to redo it.

The girl two doors down shared my birthday, except that she was two years older. When we were younger we played together all the time. We roller skated on her front porch with a broom across the steps so we wouldn't skate off. We held hands and ran to school, calling it flying our kites! We played Mother May I in the summer evenings and we tried to set up two tin cans connected by a string between her bedroom window and mine so we could talk without the phone. It never really got finished. Aunt Jo and Uncle Ralph's house was in between and there was no way to get our string over it. She used to let me read her Clara Barton and Bobbsey Twin books and sometimes we played Animal Rummy on the chaise lounge at her house. Our only problem until she went to junior high and I moved to a different elementary school was my brother's sudden interest in sleeping on the sidewalk in front of her house and her driveway. Their smooth finish that made it perfect for skating was evidently also wonderful for him as he lay basking in the sun, sometimes falling asleep with both arms crossed over his chest. My mother found this hysterically funny. Her parents did not.

Another girl father down the block was right in between us age wise. She had an antique baby doll the size of a real baby and a suitcase full of real baby clothes, but I was only allowed to go three doors down without permission for most of my childhood. At ten I was allowed to ride to the corner and cross one street in any  direction, but I could not stay anywhere. I had to turn around and come right back home. However this came in handy when my sister chased me with worms. She was not allowed to cross the street, but she stood on her side waving the wiggling worm in the air, threatening me if I tried to come home.

Life was different back then. We had a garage full of riding toys and I learned to get around on all of them. I could push myself with one leg while the other knee was in the wagon and zoom around the sidewalk. I could take corners inches from the ground on my bicycle, which backfired when I got too close one day and took about three layers of skin off my knee. And when Uncle Ralph edged his sidewalks and driveway, I would balance on the handle of his lawn mower so the wheel would create a trough around all his grass!

He had a beagle named, Hey Boy. We had a bird named Caruso. Caruso finally died of old age and we buried him in a paper bag in the side yard. I am embarrassed to say I went back many months later and dug him up to see what he looked like, but there was no sign of the bag or him by then.

We also had a few other pets that came and went. The Easter Bunny brought us four ducklings that played and quacked in our yard one summer until they disappeared. It took a while for me to connect that to the big duck roast Uncle Ralph had for the neighborhood. Then we had two rabbits for a long time until my mom gave them to my grandfather's chauffeur while we weren't home. I thought he was going to bring them back, but when I finally asked, evidently nobody had let him in on the secret because he said, "Those rabbits? We ate them a long time ago Missy."

My mother didn't have much luck with animals. When my grandfather brought her a prize dachshund from Germany she tried putting rubber pants on it. You can only imagine how that didn't work. Uncle Ralph gave me a little puppy one summer, but it wouldn't stop barking so we had to put it out on the farm and a train ran over it. Then there was Snorkel.

Snorkel was a rescue my dad brought home. He was a full grown Scottish Terrier that was already housebroken and he became my constant companion. When I ran out to play, Snorkel ran with me, Where I went he went and then one year my mother locked him in the side yard with a bone and later she let two little girls cut through there to go home. For some reason I will never know or understand Snorkel savagely bit both of them, requiring many stitches and my parents had him put down. I was inconsolable.

Later someone gave us another basset beagle, but once again my mother couldn't house train it so it lived outside on a chain and really wasn't much of a pet at all. I feel bad whenever I remember him.

This was the house we lived in when I woke up one night and heard someone's raspy breathing coming from my dresser! It was on an outside wall of the house and I was the only one in the room. I was terrified. I called for my dad who came up and listened. He heard it too, then he showed me how my sister's snoring in her room catty corner from mine was echoing off my wall. So it wasn't a ghost! I asked him if ghosts were real and he matter of factly said no one knows. That was kind of scary too.

In those days most families had one car and the dad took it to work. There were buses but I wasn't allowed to take the bus until I was thirteen, so there were no trips to the public library. Our school let us check out a book every week from the school library, but I read those right away and was left wanting. That was when I discovered the books my dad put in the hallway bookcase. I think I read every Junior Classic, most of the Books of Knowledge, and many of the Lands and People books before I began invading his personal library in his office.

It wasn't all reading though. Television was black and white and we could only get about three channels by using the rotor to turn the antennae on our house. It was a huge antennae. You could climb it like a ladder up past the second story of the house. We could tell time by what show was on. Wagon Train came on at 6:30 on Wednesday night and Twilight Zone on Thursday night. Mickey Mouse Club was right after school and on Sunday nights we watched The Wonderful World of Disney while eating hamburgers in the living room! We had wooden tv trays and felt very sophisticated.  On Saturdays we children got up early and watched the patterns on the tv until the programming came on for the day, then it was Fury and Rough and Ready and Sky King while we ate cinnamon toast sitting on the floor right in front of the television. Back then tv went off the air every night playing The Star Spangled Banner.

The house on Douglass was not as big as The Big House, but it was good sized. Upstairs were four bedrooms and a bathroom. Downstairs was an eat in kitchen, a formal dining room separated by an entry hall and foyer before you got to the living room. Then on the very end was a sun porch which varied over the years as a sewing room or office, or even a room filled with fish aquariums and one blind frog who couldn't catch flies anymore and had to be fed hamburger swinging on a thread in front of his face.

The refrigerator was so big it was on the landing outside the kitchen door and had a peddle to open it. The basement was all tiled and painted. The laundry room had the washer and dryer up on a platform next to two big lead wash tubs build into the wall. There was a toilet in the middle of the room on a big dais, like a throne. Next to that was the world's biggest hot water heater that my father claimed ate up so much money that he turned it off when we weren't home and finally a ceramic glazed shower. A swing hung next to the ironing board and an electric ironer sat in the corner. Back then my mother ironed everything from sheets to my father's undershorts. Plus we used real tablecloths and napkins for dinner! 

The middle part of the basement was our play room built around a furnace so intricate and old that when the only man who could work on it died, we had to buy a new one. There was a four foot tall incinerator against one wall for burning trash and then a little paneled room at the end that was my father's office. Like all children we took all of these things for granted.

Life was different then. Packs of dogs roamed the streets and even our school yard. We had recess until fourth grade and our playground had big jungle gyms and long lines of swings that were greatly coveted. I spent most of my recess walking around the roots of a great big tree with my friends. We never got to the swings in time, but there was a lot of imagination traveling around that trunk. If you stepped off the roots and touched the ground you might die in a swamp, or be eaten by monsters, or sometimes they just took you to a strange new world. Our imaginations were never at a loss.

These were good years, the longest I had ever spent in one house so far and then one night I had a dream. In the dream we moved to a new house. It was right across the street from a very large stone church and right down the street from a woman we called Aunt Evelyn. Aunt Evelyn liked purple and she collected elephants, both traits my sister took as her own for the rest of her life, because both she and Aunt Evelyn had asthma.

At lunch that day my mother broke the news. We needed to move, to find something more affordable and dad had found a house! It was the second semester of sixth grade and I was about to begin my preteen years making one mad move after another.