These pictures show my doll house version of my parent's various bedrooms in all my childhood houses.
It was not the "Master Bedroom." I never heard that phrase growing up. The room was just "Mother and Daddy's room. It was the safe place you could run to if you were sick or scared in the middle of the night.
When did real estate ads and designers start with the master bedroom thing? Oh no, let me correct that. They are ideally called "Master suites." Yes, I am addicted to HGTV. And no self-respecting twenty something buying the first home would have anything less than a master suite for heavens sake. Nor would they accept anything less than a bathroom for every bedroom for heavens sake.
Well, I grew up in a family of seven with a grandmother who visited for three or four months every year, and we never had more than one bathroom. It sometimes wasn't fun, but you just made it work. And, anyway,
isn't it rather sexist to call it the "Master" bedroom. I'd say that in our house Mother had a whole lot more to do with the care and cleaning of the room and everything in it.
But I do digress. Front and center in the picture you see Mickey, the dog. Mickey was that ugly little puppy that my oldest brother, Jack, brought home when I was three or four. I swear that dog lived until I was almost through high school. Mickey was much whiter and uglier than my little statue dog. He also had a chronic case of eczema on his back, so that he had a large pink bare spot there. And he smelled exactly like a dog. Although I wasn't aware of that until someone told me a few years ago that our house always smelled like Mickey, the dog. How embarrassing is that? But Mickey and Mother loved one another. He followed her around the house all day when he wasn't out chasing other dogs or scratching his eczema. He also slept by their bed at night. So their room probably smelled like dog, too.
The little black chair beside the bed is the ironing board chair that my Grandpa Lininger made. I am sure he made it as a "time out" chair for my older brothers. And he made it out of an old ironing board. But all during my time at home it sat on Daddy's side of the bed and was filled with a large stack of "Saturday Evening Post" magazines. My dad always subscribed to this magazine, and read them every night before falling to sleep. See the bed lamp hanging on the head board? Do you remember those? Well, they were great for night time reading. I just remember lounging on Mother and Daddy's bed on hot summer afternoons with a breeze coming in the window. I loved to read the Saturday Evening Post. Well, I suppose I first looked at them, and then, when I learned how to read, I read them. The procedure was: get the windows opened wide, get the breezes going, select a Post, first go through and see all the cartoons, then check to see if there were any movie stars pictures, or any pretty ads, then read something if it attracted my attention or I understood what I was reading. The Saturday Evening Post taught me a lot about America and American culture. Oh, and I loved the Norman Rockwell painted cover pictures. I loved them then, and I still do.
On the dresser you see Mother's extensive collection of cosmetics. That would be Pond's Cold Cream and Pond's Vanishing Cream. I think there might have been some loose face powder and one tube of lipstick.
That was it! She used the Ponds every day, but the powder and lipstick only when going somewhere. But I thought my mother was very pretty. And Ponds was scented like roses. So my mother always smelled like a rose. I remember that Mother could only afford the beauty shop every other week. And she waited a long time between permanents. So her hair had a pretty natural look a good bit of the time. I loved it when she had a new permanent or had just been to the beauty shop. I thought she looked beautiful. I always wished she could go every day. Silly child. Oh, and she always had a blue rinse put on her grey hair. All the grey haired women did that. Why, I don't know. And it always rubbed off on the pillow cases.
On the shelf you see some of her unfinished crafts. I swear that when I was born my mother had a half-finished hooked rug in her cedar chest. It was still there when we disposed of her household goods at the time she had to have full-time care. In that chest were some baby books. Jack, the first born, had a pretty complete book. Clyde's was so-so. After that the baby books were pretty much non-existent. I didn't understand that until I had three children. There was also a curling iron from the 1920's. As a child I thought it was a weird thing. Mother always put my hair up on rags every night. When I grew up, you would have thought that curling irons were the hottest new inventions around.
On the back wall hang the framed senior pictures of the five children. When my parents finally bought their first house (a year before I was married), they did have those five pictures framed and hung in their bedroom.
I'm so happy that for a while they were able to have that nice big "master bedroom" in a house that they owned, after all those years of too little money, too small rental houses, and too many kids.
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