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.
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