HOW IT USED TO BE

Last week I read my hometown newspaper online that an old neighbor of mine had passed away. I have not seen this woman for at least 35 years but her story explains how families dealt with difficulty in the 1950’s.

Her mother died in childbirth, leaving a newborn and 5 other children. That left a father alone to raise 6 children under the age of 10, one of which was a newborn. This was an impossible task for a man who had to work every day.

He turned to his family and his church. As hard as it must have been, he allowed the newborn to be raised by the child’s aunt and uncle (wife’s brother). I’m sure it was not an easy solution but he clearly was thinking of the baby first.

The other children went to live in a home for orphans in a city about 100 miles away. These children were technically not orphans but the sisters who ran the home made an exception for them.

The tragedy of the mother’s death split this family up but only geographically. The father visited his children in the orphanage as often as he could. He was also a part of his infant son’s life as well.

My family as well as other friends and neighbors went to visit the children in the home. This kept these children aware that they were really not orphans.

My neighbor who passed away was the oldest girl of the siblings and when she turned 14, the children were brought home again. The reasoning was everyone was old enough to live in a home without a mother.

I know it must have been hard but they were able to stay together. They visited with their father, relatives, friends, and neighbors as a family. And were returned to their home as soon as feasible.

The baby boy grew up knowing his siblings too, although he never lived with them and was adopted by his uncle and aunt.

This was a true tragedy with no easy solution but family, church, and community stepped in and met the need.

Reading my neighbor’s obituary, I learned she never married and is survived by all of her siblings (including her baby brother) and numerous nieces and nephews.

I have always admired this family because they stuck together through terrible adversity. I have a feeling they will deal with losing her in the same way. What could be better than that?

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I am wearing a new pair of glasses. They fit great and those that have seen them (including me) think they look pretty good. So what’s the big deal- I bought them online! Yeah, that’s right, on the internet. I bought progressive lenses and new frames from an online eye glass store. I got better quality lenses for much less money. I also avoided all that embarrassment trying on frames in the brick and mortar store. I don’t know which is the best part- the price, the ease of buying, the lenses, or the fun of doing one more thing online. Anyway, I was reminded of my first encounter with eye glasses and it wasn’t anything like this. I hope.

I was in the first grade when I started having headaches and vision problems so my mom made an appointment with the only eye doctor in town. Can you imagine a town where there is only one choice in an eye doctor? Fortunately the one choice was a well qualified opthamologist. And the doctor was a woman.

She did it all, from routine eye exams and fitting the glasses to complex eye surgeries. Our little town was very lucky to have her and everyone knew it.

My first encounter with the lady doctor led to my wearing glasses. I cried because I knew I was going to be called Four Eyes! I knew that because I had called kids that wore glasses Four Eyes. We did that sort of thing back then. It was called teasing. It taught the concept of reaping and sowing.

Once my eye problem was diagnosed and I was going to need glasses the next step was picking out the frames. It was almost as hard back then as it is now except for one thing. My mother! She could only stand so much indecision, after all it was just frames and I was only 6 years old. So she stepped in and chose them. The ones she selected had a modern look with contemporary colors (sounds like a brochure, doesn’t it?). They were a lovely shade of pink and blue. I’m not kidding! I thought they were going to look so cool!

Just like my online order, I had to wait a bit for the glasses to come. (One hour glasses were 30 years in the future.) Once they were ready it was back to the Doc for a final check and a fitting.

I loved my new glasses. I could see with ease and that was worth the teasing about having an extra set of eyes. I was beginning to read so I was happy to wear them. I was sure the colors looked great on me too. All in all I felt pretty special wearing my pink and blue plastic glasses every day to school.

Until I saw my school picture. I guess the mirror was magic or something because I’m certain I would have noticed how stupid I looked. How dorky and ugly. I had a major meltdown when I saw myself in my first grade photo. I tried to throw the pictures away. My mother refused to let me. I never exchanged photos with my classmates that year because that would mean they would see them. All in all it was a real blow to my self-confidence.

I was in my early 30’s when a church we were attending put a bulletin board up in the back and invited the congregation to share photos of themselves through the years. I decided it was time for me to get over that first grade picture. So I took a thumbtack and stuck that picture up for everyone to see. And the more I looked at it the better I felt. Seeing my picture all those years later I realized I wasn’t so ugly as awkward. I was glad to finally close that door even if it took over 25 years.

Now I’m wondering if my mirror is still magic when I look at my new glasses? I guess I better have a photo taken and then see what I think. I will say this the frames are not pink or blue!

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I was watching a TV show on my computer the other day and I actually paid attention to the commercial (embedding is disabled, hence the link). At first I was amused by it, then I was amazed, and then I was downright mad about it. It was a commercial from the US government encouraging children to get physically fit. The buzz phrase was ‘go outside for an hour a day to play’.

As I was a child, when I wasn’t working the rock pile or helping around the house, I was playing. I was too busy playing to see a television commercial to tell me to play.

In the summer, the neighbor kids, my brothers and I played horseshoes. The shoes were actually from some horse that had been re-shod. When the horse was done with them they gave them to the children to play with. Re-cycling at work again.

It was easy to set up for a game of horseshoes. We’d drive 2 pieces of pipe in the ground about 15 feet apart and we were ready. We’d decide beforehand how many points you got for a ringer, how many for a shoe that leaned on the stake, and how many for a shoe that was close enough to the stake that it could be measured with the opening of the shoe. We learned all of the ways to garner a point by watching the adults play. The goal of course was to ring the stake (pipe) with the shoe. Believe it or not, it takes some skill to make this happen. The shoe is heavy, the opening on it is small, and 15 feet can be pretty far away for a child. Sometimes the less even tempered among us could be downright dangerous during a game. One kid in particular had a hard time losing and sometimes he’d fling the shoes at his opponent instead of the stake. I’m sure this wouldn’t be allowed in government encouraged playtime. And truth is sometimes our horse shoe games lasted way more than an hour. I guess we were really physically fit.

When our own children were growing up they never needed a TV commercial to encourage them to play either. It was amazing but they seemed to take to it as naturally as I did. Maybe playing is a gene thing and my kids got it from me. They played baseball, hide n seek, put on plays in their playhouse, flew kites, and a few dozen other activities that I consider play. And they still managed to work around the house like I believe growing children should. Another generation of kids who were physically fit. And they didn’t even have a television to watch commercials on!

And now the next generation is taking up the idea of play (and work). Our granddaughter is always running, dancing, jumping, singing. She loves to play in water or sand. She thinks walking to visit her grandparents is a great way to get here. The kid just knows how to play and exercise naturally.

Knowing how to play just has to be inherited. I’m darn near convinced that if you don’t have the play gene to get physically fit you better watch TV to see how it’s accomplished. I’m so glad it came naturally to me and mine.

I know I have made fun about the physical fitness of the children of our nation but it is a serious problem as can be seen by the statistics below:

• Since 1980, the number of overweight children has doubled
• 1/3 of young people in grades 9-12 don’t regularly engage in vigorous physical activity.
• Out of overweight 5 to 10-year-olds, 61% have one risk factor for heart disease, and 26% have two or more risk factors.
• Hospital costs related to treating overweight and obese children and adolescents more than tripled from $35 million during 1979-1981 to $127 million during 1997-1999.  (http://www.adcouncil.org/default.aspx?id=389)

As my dear old dad said at nearly every evening meal, “You’ll never get fat if you go away from the table a little bit hungry.” Following this advice, along with lots of work and play has worked for my family fit for 3 generations!

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I recently baked an Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake from the recipe I found years ago. It was a birthday cake and it reminded me of one of my mother’s birthdays.

My mother’s birthday was also in July and one year my brother decided to make a cake for her from the recipe on the back of the Hersey’s Cocoa can. He had never baked anything before but that did not deter him, after all he could read. It was going to be a surprise so as soon as my mother left he began. I was the gofer again. (Go fer the flour, go fer the sugar, etc).

My mom was going to my dad’s store so we figured we had plenty of time. Bubba got out the bowl, put the ingredients in, and took a mixer to all of it. The mixer flung some of the batter on the wall and the flour dusted the counter but all in all it went pretty well. He put the batter into the cake pan, slipped the pan in the oven and noted the time. We didn’t have a timer so we had to pay attention to the clock. Everything was on schedule.  My brother was very proud of himself and I was pleased to be a part of it all.

While the cake was baking we decided to make party hats out of newspaper. We didn’t care that they weren’t party colors like the hats you buy nowadays. It was the truly only the sentiment that counted back then. So we were very occupied as the cake began to bake. And in the baking it began to rise. Rise, rise, rise right up over the sides of the pan. An 8 inch pan that was holding enough batter for two 8 inch pans! In reading the directions Bubba missed the fact that it would require two - 8″ pans.

With the oven at 350 degrees and enough cake batter for another pan the only thing that could happen did. The batter rolled up over the sides and down on the hot oven floor which I guess caught fire and burned to crispy hard cake rocks. This in turn caused an awful burn smell to fill the kitchen and then the whole house. Meanwhile the old saying ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ held true here too. The smoke came pouring out of the oven. It filled the kitchen and the rest of the house. By the time we realized what was happening the smoke was escaping out the open windows. (it was July) Panic set in. We didn’t know what to do. And then mom drove in the driveway.

I was so glad she was home. I knew she would know how to handle this. What I didn’t know was how my brother would react. As soon as he heard the car he ran to each of our three doors and flipped the locks. I couldn’t believe it. Of course when my mother saw smoke coming out the windows she panicked. She ran to the door and tried to turn the knob. No go. She started yelling for us to open the door because the house was on fire. Bubba looked at me and held his finger over his lips. Then he calmly told mom not to worry. He explained he was just baking. By this time she ran to the other 2 doors and found them locked as well. Smoke continued to pour out of the house while my mother began to scream. It wasn’t a fear filled scream. No, this was a rage, killing kind of scream. Occasionally in the midst of it I heard words that made me think I was not going to survive this standoff.

But Bubba never wavered. He knew she wouldn’t kill us and he was confident that once she saw the cake and party hats she’d be delighted. He was right. The smoke cleared and what was left was the sentiment that ‘It’s the thought that counts.’

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I’ve been thinking about the neighbors I’ve had through the years. Most have been good, some nosy, a few I could have done without, but one neighbor gave the neighborhood kids great fun.

His name was Teder, probably short for Theodore but I really don’t know. He seemed really old to me as a child but I think he was actually in his 50’s.

Teder lived less than a mile from my house. He was our summertime neighbor or at least he did not visit us any other time of the year. He was a single man but his sister and her family lived on our street, so he had relatives close by.

I don’t know how old I was when my father took our family to visit him. It was the only time I saw where his place was. He lived down a dirt road that had lots of ruts in it. At the end of the road there was a barn and a very small building that he lived in. He shared his humble abode with his critters. His chickens were in the house the day we visited. My dad said that Teder had no problem letting all of his animals in if they wanted. We didn’t go inside ourselves but think it would have been quite an experience.

Teder called my mother, ‘Mammy.” She was probably 20 years younger than him but I think it was his way of being respectful. We thought he was loony when he’d call her that. He would stop to visit with my folks on his way past our house. He would always have the same clothes on but I don’t remember them looking dirty or smelling. He would always stay outside, either sitting on the porch steps or a lawn chair. He’d wear a big wool jacket no matter what the temperature. If it was 85 degrees or 65, the wool jacket was a part of his attire.

I don’t know where or if he worked. I know he had a little farm and I guess he grew his own food. He didn’t eat much by the look of him.

The neighborhood children were particularly fond of this eccentric old man because of his mode of transportation. Even though it was the 1950’s Teder drove a wagon pulled by a horse whereever he went. When we saw him coming down the hill toward out house we’d run to our mother. We needed her permission to ride with him and we couldn’t waste time getting it so we’d yell as we ran. She always gave it but we knew never to assume. Once we were allowed to go we’d run to where Teder was. If he was halfway down the hill we would run halfway up. It meant a longer ride on the wagon.

The amazing thing was that what was happening at our house was happening all up and down the street. Kids were getting permission to ride with Teder on his wagon.

Teder was not a talkative fellow. I remember many, many rides on the wagon but I don’t remember him ever talking to us. We would ask him if we could get on and he would nod, pull his horse to a stop and we would hop on.  He often went to see his sister who didn’t live that far up the street from us so the ride was only about a quarter of a mile long. There were times though that he would go into town. On those days we were allowed to ride further, not much further but we relished every inch. We never minded the walk back home.

Riding on the back of that wagon I could imagine what it was like to be a pioneer, watching the road pass beneath my feet as we slowly made our way into the west. Never mind the road was paved with asphalt and I was actually going north. Never mind that I rode in cars, talked on telephones, and watched Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger on television. When I was on the back of that old wagon being pulled by one old horse I felt like a pioneer. It was an experience I’ll always be grateful for.

One day Teder was found dead deep in the forest behind his house. People speculated that he knew it was his time and wanted to die like he lived. Alone. Or maybe he really was just out for a walk. However it ocurred when Teder passed away he took with him one of the last reminders of what life was like for his generation.

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Growing up in the 1950’s, was an unusual time I think. World War 2 required so much from our country and its’ citizens. I think the memory of it made people appreciate one another more. People were willing to be involved with each other in a way that we do not see today. I know this was true in our neighborhood.

My neighborhood was just a street with houses on both sides. Most people had an acre or two of property although some folks had more. A lot of the neighbors were related to one another which sometimes made for interesting dynamics. Two families with small farms gave property to their children as they married. That meant sisters and their husbands or brothers and their wives were also neighbors. My dad’s nephew was our neighbor. It was a close little community for a good while.

When i think ‘neighbor’ the lady who lived in the house next to us comes to mind. Her name was Aggie and she was old enough to be my mother’s mother. Every morning at as close to 10:00 am as circumstances would permit, Aggie would knock on our back door while opening it at the same time. These actions were accompanied by her hollering, “Yoo Hoo!”.  She did not wait to be invited in, she knew she was welcome. My mother would stop whatever she was doing and the two of them would share a cup of coffee and visit.  Looking back on it she must have been a great help to my mother. I’m sure she shared her own experiences on running a house and raising children. The visit between these neighbors was quick, only long enough to drink a cup of coffee. The amazing thing is the very next morning around 10 it would happen all over again. Every day of the week (except Saturday and Sunday) we would hear the “Yoo Hoo!” and there would be Aggie to visit for a few minutes.

Our neighbors helped each other. My mother became the neighborhood beautician when I was around 5. I guess the other mothers were afraid to cut their daughter’s hair. Mine was not. My mother was well acquainted and very comfortable with scissors. My bangs were the shortest on any girls forehead on the North American continent. I cried myself to sleep more than once after my mother cut my bangs. She would use four fingers from my eyebrows to measure where they should end and then she would clip away. I warned my friends about the bang debacle. Goodness they could look at me and see it. But my mother did hair cuts for free and how could their mothers resist that. So all the girls in my neighborhood had the same hairstyle, with bangs 3 inches off the forehead. If  my mother cut your hair it was the style of her choosing you went home with. No one cared when they were really young and so she was always clipping away at some body’s head. Once the girls got older they didn’t want the four finger bang and went elsewhere or cut their own hair. I on the other hand had an exposed forehead for many years! In spite of my dire warnings, my mother saved our neighbors a lot of money.

Children were a big part of the life and activity on our street. We were always in each others yards or houses. My parents never left us home alone but T]that wasn’t true for some of the other folks on the street. Sometimes the kids from across the street would be locked out of their house in the evenings while their parents were gone. When this happened my dad would go over to their house, crawl through a window and unlock the door for them. He would turn on the lights and make sure the kids were okay. Nothing was ever said by anyone but everyone knew that my dad would watch out for those kids.

I spent hours and hours with Aggie’s daughter. She was about 15 years older than I was and I thought I was so important when I was with her. As a married couple, her and her husband asked me to be their very first dinner guest. I had to sit on Sears Roebuck catalogs to reach the table but I didn’t think of myself as a little kid at that dinner. This gal treated all the neighborhood kids special and we loved her for it. In the summer we would all pile in her car and go to Twin Lakes to swim. She would pack a picnic supper and off we’d go. In the winter she’d take me ice-skating. I hung out with her while she ironed and dusted for her because I wanted to. We were neighbors and friends.

I know there has to be some neighborhoods today that would rival the one I grew up in, I just haven’t seen one myself since I was a little kid.

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Toys are a big part of any child’s life. We all start out with a rattle and progress from there. Some of the toys I played with as a kid were home-made, one of a kind. They would have never been part of my life if I didn’t have my older brother who included me in the things he did.

The Soap Box Derby was a big event in our town every year. My older brother never ran a car in the race but he did build a few cars. We actually called his “crates” since they were constructed a bit differently than the regulation Derby car. They were made from things that he was able to gather from what my dad had laying around.

His crates usually consisted of a plank for the body.  I don’t know where he got the wheels or what he used for axles but I was the gofer (go fer the hammer, go fer the nails, etc) not the engineer. His steering system was 2 ropes attached to the front axle. Pull right to go right, pull left to go left. His design was all about simplicity. Brakes are always an important part of any moving object you’re riding on and the crates were no different. The first few that were constructed had the simplest method of stopping. We’d put our feet down and dragged them till we stopped. Obviously there were some problems with this- ruined shoes, sore feet and legs and sometimes it was ineffective so the second option was used. Crashing! The cars improved a little every time they were built or re-built. (after crashes). Manufacturers know their products are only as good as the materials  used to make them. My brother learned this when my dad brought home a set of real Soap Box Derby wheels and axles.

That wonderful gift caused him to aspire to a whole new level of engineering capabilities. There was a steering wheel to consider- gone were the ropes! And a real brake seemed important with real axles. He also created backs so that we could lean back while we rode.

The place we rode the crates was the same place we picked huckleberries. It was called ‘The Cuts’. It was an old abandoned strip mine. It’s not easy to describe what it was like but I’ll try. Holes were dug in the ground and the dirt from the hole was piled right beside it. Most of the dirt piles were very high which meant the holes were very deep. Lots of times the holes were filled with water. And it covered a very large area. What made this the perfect place to ride a crate was the hills. We pushed the crate up the hill and rode it down. (Playing was not easy, it was exhausting!) Sometimes, if we gained enough momentum on a hill and the next one was fairly small we could coast to the top and ride 2 or even 3 hills without pushing. The problem came it we chose the wrong hill. The wrong hill being one with water on the other side. I don’t know how we never got hurt or killed except our guardian angels were with us. We really had great times there.

I know my mother never knew what the place looked like or she would have forbidden us to ever go near it. But we would truthfully say to her “we’re taking the crate to The Cuts to ride”, and she would always answer, “Okay, have fun and be careful or be home for lunch.” I have no idea why she didn’t investigate or why my dad didn’t inform her. But if she had, I would have missed out on some of the best memories, not to mention the fun.

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Early this morning my husband and daughter went out behind our house to go blackberry picking. One of the blackberries favorite places to grow is along the perimeter of a field. You can pretty much always find some nice picking if you look in a place like this. They were gone about 2 hours and came home with 4 gallons. Considering that’s enough for 12 blackberry pies it’s not a bad return for the time and effort spent.

I grew up picking berries in the summer. First there were the wild strawberries. We picked them in the field beside the small airport that was up the road from our house. There were always enough for 3 or 4 strawberry shortcakes. When they would quit bearing we would move to the huckleberries.

Huckleberries are the wild cousin of the domesticated blueberry. Most of the time they are smaller and     black. The taste is pretty much the same but they grow on bushes that are low to the ground. (perfectly suited for children to pick) We would pick our huckleberries at a place we called “The Cuts” it was an old strip mining area not too far from our house. It had hundreds of bushes and my brother and I and other neighborhood kids would pick gallons of these berries. My mom would make up pies in aluminum pie pans and freeze them. Then all through the fall and winter we would have huckleberry pies. It was a great feeling knowing there were pies waiting to be baked. When these berries played out we moved on to blackberry picking.

Blackberries were picked at a place called “The Pits.” It was a very large area with a huge, deep hole in the middle of it. A factory used the place to dump garbage in when I was a kid. I don’t know what the original purpose was. It had tons of blackberry bushes. The berries were usually big and juicy. We would pick gallon after gallon of blackberries. My mom would repeat the pie process with these berries but she would also make jam. I still love blackberry jam but with less seeds than my mom made. The last berry to ripen was the elderberry.

Elderberries grow on small trees or large bushes. You can find elderberry bushes just about anywhere. They have a very sour taste on their own. (No problem getting all you picked home with these berries.) My mother used the elderberry exclusively for jelly. They are easy to make juice from and the jelly has a wonderful taste.

All of these berries have a limited time to be picked before they dried up or critters would eat them. That meant when the berry picking season began you could not procrastinate. I guess as kids we felt like it was our responsibility to get the berries while we could. And it felt good to know we had contributed to the food supply. Especially the one that answered the sweet tooth cravings.

Berry picking continued to be a big part of our children’s lives as well. While my husband was at work, I and our children would often go blackberry picking. Because my husband loves to use jelly on hotdogs, hamburgers, and other sandwiches, this meant using every available berry around for making jelly. One year we managed to pick enough berries of various kinds to make 100 jars of jelly. Now that’s some serious berry picking!

No matter where we have lived we have managed to find berries to pick, and with those berries make wonderful desserts, jellies, or pies.

Berry picking is not only how it used to be but how it still is.

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This July 4th we will have a small picnic and set off some sparklers with our granddaughter. It’s different this year than last and next year we will probably do something else. But when I was young, it was the same celebration every year.

It would start with a girl named Izzie. She was an only child and she always had an endless supply of things that burned, sparkled, popped or made noise. Izzie’s aunt was our next door neighbor and every Fourth her family came from out of town to spend the day with them. We were the kids she played with because her aunt’s children were older.

She’d arrive about 10 in the morning with a bag of surprises. I have no idea where her dad got the things in that bag because my dad always said he couldn’t get any of that stuff. We would have a new cap gun and a box or two of caps. We’d also have some ordinary sparklers. But Izzie’s bag- it was magical.

First of all, she always had lots and lots of matches. Matches were a controlled substance in our house. She would also have a new cap gun but it was bigger than any of ours and usually a repeater unlike our single shot pistols.Ours would go Bang! Her’s would go Bang, bang, bang, … (do you sense my envy even now?)

There were the snakes. They started out as a little piece of black stuff but when you struck a match and lit the stuff it would start to grow. It would look like a snake was forming right there on the sidewalk. (The reason they were called snakes!) There were small firecrackers. My older brother and Iz would use these. I was always considered to little!

We always had an ample supply of sparklers but her’s were often colored and bigger. And she would have rolls and rolls of caps so we could take the hammer and smack them on the sidewalk for a very large bang! Sometimes she would have green caps. They were sticky on the back and had a louder sound.

The amazing thing about Izzie was her generosity. She could not wait to show us what she brought and then was just as enthusiastic about sharing all of it with us.

I don’t remember any picnics though I’m sure there were some. I really don’t remember any fireworks. Up until I was about 8, my Fourth of July celebrations were all about my out-of-town friend Izzie’s visit and the goodies she shared.

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Writing about the whole wash day experience when I was a little girl brought to mind the only time I was on a talk radio program. Yep, that’s right. As a litte kid I was actually on talk radio or at least what I think was talk radio.

It was a Monday. I know that because my mother was doing the laundry. (no need for calendars!) I was about 5 years old and it was the good old summertime. I grew up in Pennsylvania and windows were always open in the summer. My mother and I were outside, she was hanging laundry and I was playing. The telephone began to ring and in those day the ringers were very loud. I don’t know if my mother told me to or I decided on my own but I ran in the house to answer it. When I picked up the phone there was a kind of an echo. Funny how I can still remember it but I do. The lady on the phone said “Hello! This is Dialing for Dollars!” (not exactly the Rush Limbaugh Show, but hey!) Our local radio station had a program where they would select numbers from the phone book, call and ask a question. If you answered the question correctly you won some prize. I was 5 years old and didn’t care about the question or the prize. I wanted to talk. And the echo I mentioned earlier was because our radio was playing in the background. My mother kept asking who was on the phone and I just kept trying to talk. Finally she came in the house and took the phone from me. I have no idea if she won the prize but I do remember getting a scolding. But that’s how some talk radio used to work - they called you not the other way around.

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