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.