K3 - Kids and Pastimes

I'm considering another question from the book "Reflections from a Mother's Heart."
The question asked was, "What were your favorite pastimes as a kid?"

You need to know that there were five kids in our family, and very little money. These two circumstances certainly set limits on the pastime possibilities. It caused us to be pretty creative in finding things to do. For instance, I never had a bike of my own until I retired from teaching - almost too late. Now, I couldn't begin to ride a bike. Although I did ride mine around Redbud for a few years into retirement. We also didn't have transportaion of other kinds. For several years at the end of World War II, we had no car. My dad rode the city bus to work, and we walked to school.

The time frame that remains upper most in my mind when I think about my childhood, were the years of middle elementary school, a time that we lived in a rental house on south Meridian Street. Being the only girl and the youngest in the family, I had to follow around after my brothers a lot of the time. In the summer David and I would walk from where we lived at 23rd and Meridian to the city swimming pool on
East 8th Street in Park Place. That is a good long walk! I think we swam most every nice day all summer. We never rode the bus there. If we used the money to ride the bus, we couldn't afford to pay to get into the pool. I remember that it took me a couple of weeks every summer to get up enough nerve to go down the big slide into the water. Then, after the first time, I did this over and over. David and I would also throw something into the water, and dive down to find it. This required that we keep our eyes open under water. Our eyes would be so sore from chlorine all evening that we couldn't keep our eyes open. Hmmm, maybe this is one reason we both have such bad eye sight now.

The magical summer there on Meridian Street was when Clare
Windsor moved in across the street. Clare was really smart, and really imaginative. We spent several weeks in their attic arranging all their attic stuff into "artful arrangememts" and pretending that the attic was a gift shop, and we were the proprietors. Clare's older sister, Prudence, made marionettes. Not puppets, but real marionettes with strings and all. Of course, we were not allowed to touch them. But I loved to go into her room and look at all of them.

Clare, my brothers, Dan and Dave, and I then fixed a stage (I don't know how) in our garage. Clare wrote a whole show. We rigged up costumes, made scenery, made and sold tickets, and had the neighborhood kids there one evening for our production.
You know, I don't remember what the show was about, or what role I played. I think Clare did most of the show. My brothers rounded up kids and acted like fools. I think, being younger than the rest, I was just awe struck by the show biz glamour!
What fun it was!

In the winter, unless there was snow for playing, we mostly stayed indoors. We listened to the radio: The Shadow, Jack Armstrong, One Man's Family, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Gildersleeve. We had no television. Actually there was no television yet. But I was entranced by those radio shows. I can tell you exactly what all those people looked like, what their houses looked like, and the streets where they lived. Even though those visions only existed in my mind.

David and I made a lot of cookies. Mother had a recipe book with something called Hermit cookies. We made them a lot because they were pretty plain, and we usually had all the ingredients. As I recall, they weren't terribly good to eat, but we dunked them in our hot chocolate that we made from the recipe on the Hershey chocolate powder can. We also made Mother's "Never-Fail Fudge" from that same cook book. Sometimes it was scrumptious. But sometimes it did fail, let me tell you.
We dropped lots of drops of fudge into a glass with cold water to test for the right doneness and we could quit stirring and pour it onto a plate to set up. Yum! Maybe that's why our teeth aren't so good.

I went bare foot all summer. Did cart wheels and back bends in the yard. I would get poison ivy at least once a summer, and could hardly stand putting on shoes when school started. I dreamed a lot that someone would give me lots of beautiful hand- me- down clothes, so that I would have more than two outfits to wear to school each year. I envied my friends who had older sisters and received the hand-me-downs that they so hated. That never happened. Although when we finally moved to a house where I actually had a bedroom of my own, Mrs. Canaday gave me her married daughter's beautiful long vanity with a pink sateen skirt and a long mirror, frilly lamps, and matching drapes. I was in heaven. I felt like a real princess. I slept with those in my room until I got married and moved away from home.

All in all, not a bad childhood.