Visits to Santa

When I was very young, my mom would take me downtown to visit with Santa Claus. I always thought we were going to the real North Pole (which I called “the Near Pole”). Downtown Houston was an awe-inspiring place to a four year old. The buildings were so big and the streets were so busy! Very different from suburban Overbrook. Mama and I would head downtown, all wrapped up in our winter coats and park in one of the utterly fascinating parking garages. It was like climbing a mountain in your car: you drove up and up and up to find a parking spot. Then you rode an elevator back down to the street level.

The place she took me to see Santa was the luxurious Foley’s department store. Part of the journey included a trip out onto the chilly streets to walk by the Christmas displays in the store windows. Animated Christmas elves and reindeer would nod and blink from their artificial snowbound winter scenes. Peppermint candy cane fences and sparkly sugarplums abounded in these small vignettes. I was always quite enchanted with them, and it was worth the blast of icy cold wind howling down the concrete and steel canyon walls of Main street.

Once inside, we began the wonderful excursion up to the fourth floor of Foleys. We had to pass through rack after rack of beautiful clothes, exotic colors and fabrics of all kinds, all at eye level for a child. I can still remember the smells and excitement I would experience when we entered that store: dozens of shoppers pushing in off the streets, tightly bundled in woolen coats and sweaters, sometimes lightly dusted with sleet or ice, bringing in with them little bursts of cold, fresh air to mometarily dispel the heady cloud of fragrances that hung over the perfume and makeup counters.  There were loudspeaker announcements from the PA system heralding sales and specials, and above it all, Christmas music played enticingly, as seductive to a 4-year old as a siren’s song, luring us towards the holy grail of our quest—Santa Claus.

I held tightly to my mother’s hand as she wove us in and out of the crowds of shoppers and various departments until we arrived at the very center of the store and there before us rose the magic escalators. I loved the escalators. Better than the ferris wheel at the fair, better than the pony rides at the park, they were the best attraction at any department store when we went shopping. Imagine the wonder to a small child of being able to rise magically up, up, up above the crowds of shoppers below, becoming taller and taller than everyone else, just like Alice in Wonderland.

[In fact, I loved riding the escalators so much that my mother tells the story of one time when she “lost” me inside of Joske’s, another Houston department store. I was about four years old at the time. My mother was frantically searching the store for me, and then she glanced up and saw a big red bow just peeping over the top of the escalator rail going up and up. It was me, of course, barely big enough to hold onto the rail, but having a grand time riding the “magic carpet ride”!]

While part of the excitement of going to see Santa Claus was definitely wrapped up in the thrill of getting to ride the escalators non-stop straight up to the fourth floor, the real treat was the absolute conversion of a portion of that cavernous fourth floor into the North Pole. The staff at Foley’s really outdid themselves at Christmas time. An entire winter wonderland had been set up, complete with sidewalks and tunnels through artificial snowbanks that winked and shimmered with gaily colored lights and glistening diamond drop snowflakes. More animated characters—elves busily making toys in their workshops, oversized ballerina dolls and toy soldiers turning like marionettes, reindeer “grazing” on bales of hay—greeted us along our journey, promising the most wonderful delights to a four-year old child who fervently “believed”. Christmas tunes carried in the air and the excitement just built and built.

And finally, after winding our way through the entire wonderful maze, we approached the most wonderful sight of all: Santa Claus. Santa was always seated on his golden throne, as godlike as Zeus on Mt. Olympus. One of Santa helpers, a beautiful lady elf in a green velvet skirt and red tights would come to take your hand and lead to you sit in Santa’s lap.

When it was your turn, of course, you had to be very brave and actually leave your mother behind at the gate, but the lure of seeing Santa was a very powerful motivator. Sometimes the children would cry—if they didn’t like being separated from their mothers—and sometimes siblings would be taken up in pairs or trios—so their mom could just pay for one group photograph—but mostly we went up one by one.

Once on Santa’s lap, things moved very quickly. The lady elf retreated to a camera, the bulb flashed with a loud pop! and almost before you could recover from the spots in front of your eyes, Santa would ask what you wanted for Christmas in a very gruff voice. I always got stage fright at this point and could never remember my list. I remember being so shy! I wouldn’t cry, but I would sit on Santa’s lap and my mind would go blank. I couldn’t remember a single thing I had planned to tell Santa I wanted for Christmas. Fortunately my mom was always standing just a little ways off and she would prompt me from the sidelines:

“You wanted some dishes, and a Chatty Kathy, and record player, remember?”

Oh, yes, of course. With a great whoosh of relief, the words would come tumbling out. Santa would remind me to be a good girl, give me a little pat on the back and a lollipop from the big red velvet bag at his side, and down I would go. Duty done, I was free to tromp down the descending ramp and into the waiting and proud arms of my mother.

A few days later, my picture with Santa would arrive in the mail, and my mother would proudly display it as part of our overall Christmas decorations for that year.

Of course, once you had been to see Santa, the pressure to "be good for goodness' sake" was on.  Santa had your list, he knew what you wanted, and if you messed up between your visit and Christmas Eve, you knew what you would find on Christmas morning: nothing but lumps of coal in your stocking.  And somehow, even though I had known plenty of children to misbehave, I had never personally heard of anyone who failed to receive their presents from Santa, so he must have been a pretty forgiving fellow.

Christmas Trees and Christmas Lights

Thanksgiving weekend always heralded the official arrival of the Christmas season. There was always an unofficial contest among the neighbors to see who could get their outdoor Christmas lights up the fastest. If my dad hadn't gone hunting, we would string up our outside lights that weekend, and they would stay up until after New Year’s. I remember having the very strong belief that if we didn't have our Christmas lights up, then Santa Claus wouldn't be able to find our house on Christmas Eve!

The outdoor Christmas lights in the early 1960s were not the sophisticated, sparkly twinkle lights that we have now. They were huge old bulbs of green and red, and they got HOT to the touch! They also burned out quite frequently. Daddy would always string ours around the eaves of the house. I can remember him climbing up and down and up and down the ladder, moving it along as he strung the twisted black wires with the big empty sockets, stapling the strands in place with his big blue staple gun. Then would come the fun part!

We had a huge box full of bulbs from the previous year. I got to be his helper and hand them up to him, so therefore I got to establish the "pattern" for the lights each year. It might be green--red--blue--orange--white--yellow, or some variation thereof, but our lights were always multi-colored. Some of the neighbors used all red or all blue or all green lights, but we always used all the colors at our house.

I remember every evening the thrill of plugging in the lights and watching them glow brighter and brighter as darkness fell. You could see the red ones come on right away, even before it got dark. The blue ones were harder to see in the twilight. Thus the nightly ritual of walking around the house every evening after supper, looking for the bulbs that had burned out the night before and replacing them. Sometimes we would run out of a certain color and the pattern would have to be altered a bit, but it was great fun and something I loved to share with my dad.

Another fun tradition was to drive around different neighborhoods in the evenings and look at all the decorated houses with their pretty lights and the decorated trees in the windows. Oh, how I remember those beautiful old Christmas trees! In some ways, they were always the best part of Christmas because they were a tradition that children could fully participate in.

At our house we always had a real tree, a Douglass fir. We would go to the tree lot at Fed Mart’s to buy it. We always bought the biggest one we could find. It would be bound up in netting and the men at the tree lot would have to tie it on top of our car, running the ropes through the open side windows to secure it to the roof. We would drive slowly home with the tree dangling precariously off the rear and the front of the car roof.

When we got home, Daddy would tie it up in the garage. He would hang it by a rope from the rafters, cut the confining net away, and slowly its bound limbs would begin to stretch and fall out gracefully from the trunk. Daddy would trim away however much was necessary from the bottom to make it fit in our house. But then the best part happened! My mom would FLOCK the tree!

You don’t see many flocked Christmas trees anymore, but it was very popular in the 1960s. We always flocked our tree white, to look like snow, but I do remember you could buy flocking in pink or blue or other wild and psychedelic colors. What is flocking, you ask?

Well, as best I recall, it was some sort of white powder that my mom mixed with water in a tub and then it was attached to our vacuum cleaner hose (you had to have a vacuum that would blow OUT) and the whole soggy mess was sprayed onto the tree. I can remember my mom going round and round that tree, fighting with the extension cord and spraying that white goop everywhere. I’ll bet there’s still flocking on the ceiling of that garage to this day!

Anyway, after she had coated the whole tree to her satisfaction, it had to hang there and dry a bit, and then my dad would carry it into the house. Once we had all the lights and ornaments on it, it really was quite beautiful. Just imagine: snow covered boughs in muggy ol’ Houston, Texas. Oh, those real trees always smelled so good! Mama would let me help decorate it. We always put the tree lights on first (again, HOT!), and then the ornaments. Our living room had no carpeting, so there were always a few shattered ornaments, but Mama never fussed at me about it. It was such fun to help her decorate the tree.

At the bottom of our tree, after carefully filling the reservoir of the tree stand with plenty of water so the tree wouldn't dry out, she would wind yards of fluffy cotton batting around the tree stand and the trunk. Then came the sparkly white felt that looked like drifts of snow. And finally came the best part: our lighted Christmas village! Mama had a set of little cardboard houses that all had holes in the backs to allow you to insert a small light bulb through the opening. The little windows were made of yellow cellophane and glowed at night. But you had to be very careful that the hot bulb wasn't touching the window or it would melt! She would always allow me to help arrange our "village" around the base of the tree. There were even miniature pine trees and villagers to complete the set. At one point, she had cut a hole in in the white felt, and she would insert a little mirror underneath it, so that it looked like a frozen pond in the center of the village for skating.

We always sat our tree in front of the living room windows where it could be seen from the street. I always thought we had the prettiest (if a tad unrealistic) tree in the neighborhood.

Our next door neighbors always had a real tree, too, but they always bought a Scotch pine. It was short and squat and thick with sticky, prickly needles. But they ALWAYS completely covered their tree in icicles. Icicles were thin strips of aluminum foil. You could just toss them all over the tree willy-nilly, or you could carefully hang them strand by stand. However you did it, the effect was always the same. Garish. My mom didn’t believe in icicles and would never let us have any on our tree. I guess I can see her point: after she did all that work to flock the darn thing, she didn’t want to cover it up with aluminum foil!

And speaking of aluminum foil, there was another type of unrealistic Christmas tree in the 1960s. My cousins had one. It was a silver aluminum tree with a motorized base that turned it 'round and 'round. That tinsel tree would turn in its motorized base, and as it rotated, colored lights shown up from the bottom of the base and changed it from red to green to yellow to blue. Only in the 1960s! My cousins always hung little Styrofoam balls covered in colored thread as their Christmas ornaments, which did have the advantage of being non-breakable.

Once the outside lights and Christmas trees were finished, our humble little neighborhoods glowed like magical fairy lands. Even though I never experienced a white Christmas in Houston, Texas in all my years there, the Christmas spirit was definitely in the air--whether that air was cold and crisp or warm and muggy made no difference to a child. And after the thrill of our home decorating was done, the next big Christmas adventure loomed upon our horizons: a visit to Santa Claus!

Holidays--Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was a big family holiday for us. We always watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV in the mornings, had tons of food at noon, and, of course, spent the afternoon in a food-induced stupor watching college football on TV.

Every year, we celebrated Thanksgiving at Mommaw’s house. How she produced such big meals out of such a small kitchen is just a marvel to me. She had no food processor, no blender, no microwave oven, not even an electric can opener. All she had was a single oven range and her two hands. She had to have started cooking at 5:00 a.m. to have it all done by noon.

Each year she made the same menu. We had roasted turkey with a huge pan of cornbread dressing, and often there was also a ham. Every year there were candied yams, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, black eyed peas, green beans, gravy, cranberry sauce, and lots of butter and hot rolls. (Sometimes the rolls got a little black on the bottom and we had to peel that part off!) And there were always at least three kinds of pie (pumpkin, pecan, and either chocolate or coconut) and a big bowl of banana pudding for us kids for dessert.

When our whole family was gathered together, there were fifteen of us—too many to all eat at the kitchen table. So we children were relegated to eating in the living room on TV trays. TV trays are not much seen these days. They were simply a metal tray that snapped onto a folding metal stand. Mommaw always had seven or eight of them handy. Old, beat up and rickety, still they served the purpose of giving us kids a place to eat. And we loved being separated from the adults. It gave us some sense of independence, even though our mothers were really just a few feet away in the kitchen. We enjoyed the separation no doubt every bit as much as the adults did.

The usual order of events was this: the children would take their plates and make a circuit around the big kitchen table while the moms hovered strategically, dishing up spoonfuls of this and that onto their plates. We would then parade into the living room and carefully set our plates on our afore-chosen TV trays, which were free standing in the middle of the room. We would then wiggle our way onto our designated seats (Neal and Susie and I always got the couch, since we were the oldest), and the moms would push our TV trays up to our laps. Sometimes pillows and phone books would have to be brought out to adjust the height of the small fry and finally everyone would be settled.

Then Mommaw would say grace from the kitchen and dinner would begin. The eight adults would be seated at the big table in the kitchen and conversation would begin to flow. Every few minutes, a mom would appear in the living room asking who needed more rolls or iced tea, but for the most part we were expected to stay put behind our trays until the meal was over.

After we had eaten ourselves in to a stupor, the TV trays disappeared and the men folk took over the living room to collapse in front of the TV—unless they were going hunting, in which case they left right after the meal was over. Football was the name of the game on Thanksgiving afternoons. It was always college football, too: the Longhorns vs. the Aggies. This was made more interesting by the fact that my Uncle Wally was an Aggie and hated the Longhorns, so my dad and Uncle Bob always rooted for the Longhorns, just to be contrary. Since neither my dad nor uncle had been to college, it didn’t really matter to them, but what good is a football game without a little friendly rivalry, huh?

The women would, of course, still be in the kitchen, trying to clean up. There were no dishwashers back then, so all those dozens of dirty plates and bowls and glasses had to be washed and dried by hand. Not to mention the sticky, greasy pots and pans. Although I don’t ever remember being told to stay out of the kitchen (or the living room, for that matter), it was understood that you didn’t interrupt or bother the grown ups for anything less than a medical emergency immediately following Thanksgiving dinner.

If the weather was decent, we cousins would adjourn to the back yard to sit and rock on the porch swing and think up mischief. November in Houston is unpredictable and tricky. I can remember Thanksgivings where I wore short sleeved shirts or at the most a simple sweater and we would frolic outside in the Indian summer. Other times it would be cold, wet, and freezing, and we would be confined to the house for the afternoon.

My grandparents’ modest brick home had only 2 bedrooms. It was an unspoken rule that we didn’t play in my grandfather’s bedroom. In fact, I can hardly remember what it looked like, so seldom did I cross its threshold. No, our sanctuary was the front bedroom, which Mommaw always referred to as “Aunt Kay’s room” even long after my aunt had married and moved into a home of her own.

Seven children confined to one small bedroom for an entire afternoon is just a breeding ground for trouble. Squabbles inevitably broke out, and so gradually we were released from our confine into the rest of the house. Once the moms had finished in the kitchen we were usually welcomed back. Card games or dominos were popular choices around the old kitchen table. As the ball game played out, the men might migrate outdoors to stand around in the garage and smoke. The boys would often follow them and try to work up a little game of touch football.

Although you wouldn’t think it possible, we often ate another meal again that evening before we left for our individual homes. Since we didn’t have the convenience of a microwave, and the moms most definitely didn't want to wash any more dishes, we ate our food “cold”. Leftover ham and turkey and macaroni and cheese—all eaten cold and quite delicious. One of my favorite sandwiches during the holidays is one that my dad used to make: cold sliced turkey on white bread with real mayonnaise, topped with a scoop of cornbread dressing and a slice of jellied cranberry sauce, then mashed into a delicious savory wudge. Loaded with carbs, fat and calories, it's still the most delicious sandwich you can imagine and I still have one every year.

Immediately following our noonday dinner, the dads usually left to go hunting for the remainder of the holiday weekend, while the moms and cousins stayed at home. That didn't bother us though. We happily spent our time either shopping or getting ready for the biggest holiday of them all: Christmas!

Holidays--Halloween

Holidays are another great childhood memory. I was so fortunate to have a mom who believed in making childhood special. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I don’t ever remember feeling deprived. Each holiday was a great occasion filled with homemade fun and many family traditions.

Halloween was one of my favorite holidays and still is. Overbrook was one big family type neighborhood. Kids could go anywhere within its bounds and feel safe. We spent months exploring our boundaries on our Schwinn bicycles in the summers. It gave us a roadmap of all the streets and cul de sacs and nooks and crannies. We knew our territory like the back of our hands. So on Halloween night, like the world, Overbrook was our oyster. We were set free to roam.

I always had a special costume for the evening, usually one that my mother had sewn for me. I was a princess or a fairy or a witch or--one year--a little red devil. Boys might be farmers or policemen or firemen or Superman. For the most part, cartoon characters were not yet commercialized in the 1960’s, and so our costumes were manufactured at home by our mothers and sprang from our imaginations rather than from the media.

Unfortunately, despite all the work that went into making our costumes, it was usually cold on Halloween night and our mothers would make us put on a coat or a heavy sweater, thus completely ruining the costume's effect!

I remember I had a big orange plastic pumpkin for a candy bucket. It held an enormous amount of candy. Sometimes it would get so heavy that I would have to come back to the house to empty it, and then start out again. We went all over the neighborhood, hollering “Trick or Treat!”, and loading up on goodies of all kinds.

Besides candy, we were often offered homemade treats such as cookies or cupcakes and cups of hot chocolate. Some of the neighbors went all out and created miniature spook houses in their driveways or entryways. I remember one house always had a witch with a bubbling black cauldron. If you were brave enough to approach her, you got a cup of hot apple cider. It was scary and delicious fun.

We went in and out of strangers’ houses with no fear. For about three hours each Halloween evening, it was pure magic.

And there would always be a Halloween carnival at our school. The dads would all come together for two or three afternoons and slap together booths out of sawn 2x4's and plywood counters, hammers ringing in the crisp fall air. The moms would decorate the booths with crepe paper streamers and balloons and tablecloths brought from home. The carnival booths were assembled around the edges of the playground, and a feeling of great excitement would tremor throughout the school for days, like an underground earthquake. I guess it must have been a fund-raiser for the PTA, but the carnival was pure magic for us.

I remember walking around the transformed playground with wide eyes, marveling at the teachers who dressed in costume, too, and playing Ring Toss or Pop the Balloons with a dart. My mom would always buy me a roll of tickets at the ticket booth and I could enjoy as many of the activities as I wanted until the tickets ran out. There was always the tantalizing smell of fresh hot popcorn and sticky-sweet candied apples wafting across the night air. And, of course, our school had one of those magical cotton candy machines. I loved to watch the pink spun sugar appear like magic to be whisked around and around onto a paper cone. It looked like fairy candy, so light and ethereal on the cone, but it quickly melted into a hot sweet burst of pure sugar once you pinched off a bit and popped it into your mouth. No matter how careful you were, your cheeks and fingers would be covered into sticky pink goo, but for once, nobody fussed at you for making a mess.

My favorite event of all was the Cake Walk held in the school library. I loved to play the Cake Walk. The cakes--dozens of them, all wrapped in plastic wrap and set on foil-covered circles of cardboard--were on display on a table as you walked into the library. Each cake was numbered. The librarian would be at the front of the room, holding up the needle on an old record player as we all got into place. Someone would have marked off a circle on the wooden library floor using black electrical tape, and sectioned it off into twenty or so spaces. Each space was numbered. The music would begin to play and we would all march in time around and around that circle until the music stopped. Then one of the PTA volunteers would reach into a bowl and pull out a number. If you were standing on the number she called, you won the cake with that number!

Halloween always seemed to me to be the start of the real holiday season. All of a sudden there was excitement in the air. The choir teacher would begin to teach us holiday songs for the Christmas program. The teachers would start us on arts and crafts projects that centered around pumpkins and turkeys and Pilgrims. Days grew shorter and night fell quickly. Mornings were cold walking to school, and we scurried along laughing at the chill. Afternoons warmed with an autumnal glow, lasting only a few hours before fading into a chilly purple gloaming, a sweet farewell to summer. It was an exciting time for a child to feel the seasons change, and to know that Thanksgiving was just around the corner.

The Drive-In

Entertainment in the 1960s may have been unsophisticated by today's standards, but it was lots of fun. The one thing it wasn't was a constant companion. We didn't have hundreds of channels all running 24/7. We couldn't watch DVDs at home or movies on demand on our computer screens or cell phones. We only had AM radio stations and the three major networks on TV, which switched off every night at midnight. And going to the movies was a real treat. But you can't miss what you've never had, and we were all quite happy with our choices.

My first memories of the radio actually are from my grandparent's house. Every morning my Pop used to get up really early and sit in the kitchen listening to the Farm Report. Mommaw would be up, too, fixing him breakfast. My cousins and I often spent the night there, and in those early morning hours we would lie half-awake, half-asleep in our bed, listening to Dewey Compton's easy southern drawl faithfully reciting the prices for corn and soybeans or the current market value for cattle and hogs, all underlaid by the comforting smell of hot biscuits and fried bacon. I never understood a word of what he was saying, but it didn't matter. If Dewey Compton and the Farm Report were on in the morning, then all was right with the world.

As I've already discussed, there wasn't a lot of daytime programming suitable for kids, but we used to watch TV in the evening. For some reason, I most remember watching TV at Mommaw’s house on Sunday nights. I guess we must have had Sunday dinner there often. We might watch the Lawrence Welk Show or Dr. Kildaire. But without fail, we always watched the Ed Sullivan Show. I remember seeing the Beatles on TV for the first time. Everyone kept exclaiming over how long their hair was! It was very exciting, mainly because it upset all the grownups so much. It was the first time I became aware of “the generation gap.”

As we grew older, we were sometimes allowed to stay up later and watch The Late Show on weekend nights. After the 10 o'clock news, the TV stations would air old black & white movies from the 40s and 50s, filled with enough commercial breaks to take them up to sign-off time at midnight. Or we might stay up late to watch Rod Sterling's The Twilight Zone, which were very creepy and scary stories for the time. It was fun to huddle together under a blanket and be scared en masse, then trundle off to bed and hope we didn't have nightmares.

We usually got to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons, if there was anything playing that was suitable for kids to watch. We spent a lot of time in the old Santa Rosa theatre. It had a real stage down front and tons of deep red velvet curtains with gilt tassels. It also had a balcony where the older kids sat, but our mothers never wanted to sit up there. I remember my mother took me there to see the first Beatles movie. I watched it again the other day, and it really wasn’t a very “kid” oriented movie. In fact, it wasn’t a very good movie at all. But that didn’t seem to matter. In the sixties, movie goers were a pretty easy-to-satisfy lot.

We went to see a lot of movies. If it was Saturday afternoon, it would often just be me and my mom. Sometimes, though, the cousins would come along, too, and we would take up a whole row. We would buy candy bars or popcorn and settle in for the afternoon. I saw all the Beatles movies, all the Elvis movies, all the Beach Party movies with Annette and Frankie, and all the kid flicks that came out. I remember seeing Haley Mills in Pollyanna, and I fell in love with Flipper! And I guess we saw every Disney comedy and animated movie there was as well.

It was different if we went to the movies at night. The dads came then. On Friday nights, our family often went to the local drive-in movie theatre. I really miss those old drive-ins. Our local one was called the “Hi Neighbor!” on Mykawa Rd. No kidding. That was its name. Oh, how I loved that old drive-in movie theatre.

I guess our family didn’t have much money in those days, but we could afford to go out to the movies on Friday nights. The drive-in might show 3 or 4 movies in a single night, all for a single admission price! My mom and dad would make a pallet for me in the back seat of our old Pontiac. When I got sleepy, I could just lie down and go to bed.

I remember those nights as being such good times! You have to remember that this was before daylight savings time was introduced. It got dark a lot earlier then. Daddy would get home from work around 4:00 p.m., and Mama would be in the kitchen frying chicken. She would pack us an entire picnic dinner--fried chicken, potato salad, hot biscuits--complete with iced tea in Mason jars and maybe even some slices of apple pie or chocolate cake.

We would arrive at the drive-in early enough to get a “good place” near the center. If you parked too close to the movie screen, you would get a crick in your neck trying to look up at the big screen. And too far off to either side, the picture would be distorted. We always tried to park right in the center, but not too close to the concession stand. If you were too close to the concession stand, you had to put up with people walking all around your car all night.

We would drive in and pull up to our spot. Daddy would park the car close enough to the speaker so that it would reach his window. You had to roll your window down at least half way and then hook this big metal box (speaker) onto the inside of your window. It was big and clumsy, and often full of static. Sometimes we would get a “bad” speaker and have to move the car after the movie started. That would always make Daddy very aggravated! We also tried to avoid cars with lots of small children and crying babies!

There was a grassy lot down at the very front of the big screen and the movie managers had put some old swing sets there for the kids. Daddy would usually walk with me down to the front so that I could play on the swings while we waited for it to get dark. I remember those twilight evenings so well, swinging and screaming and running around with dozens of other children, so happy to be out in the world and free. The fireflies would twinkle on and off as darkness began to fall, and the mosquitoes would begin to bite, and you would know it was almost time for the movie to start.

As soon as it was dark enough, the lights from the movie projector house would start to flicker and the first thing to come on was always a cartoon! Sometimes it would be Woody Woodpecker, and sometimes it would be Heckle and Jeckle. Or maybe Mr. Magoo. Oh, how we loved those old cartoons. We all watched them together and laughed at their antics as they flickered across the big screen.

Then the advertisements for the concession stand would start. They sold hot dogs and hamburgers and French fries and popcorn, and something else that always sounded so exotic: pizza! Do you know that the first place I ever heard of pizza was in those old advertisements at the drive-in? It always looked so good, but Daddy would never buy us any! He might go get us a popcorn and Coke later on in the evening, but we never ate any of the other concession stand goodies. As we settled in to watch the first feature, we would eat the picnic dinner that Mama had fixed for us. And oh, was it so good!

There was usually a family type picture on for the first movie, and then the more “adult” themed movies would come on later. I must have seen hundreds of westerns at the drive-in. Even today, sometimes an old John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart movie will come on, and I’ll have a flash back to the old “Hi Neighbor” theatre. It’s one of my fondest childhood memories.

I guess the last time I ever went to a drive-in movie theatre, I was in high school. They were almost all gone by then, replaced by the multiple screen movie theaters at the malls. I went to see Gone with The Wind with a couple of my girlfriends. It was in November and we nearly froze to death, but it was such fun. I sometimes wonder why the old drive-in theatres don't make a come-back, but I guess, like the dinosaurs, their time has come and gone. All I know is that there will never be a big screen TV in my living room that will be able to duplicate the same bigger-than-life feeling of watching a favorite movie at an outdoor drive-in theatre.

A Glimpse of Politics

I would be remiss if I did not mention at least a little of the history I experienced during the early sixties. Most of my extended family lived in neighborhoods near Hobby Airport, which was Houston’s main airport at that time. My grandparents, Herschel and Thelma, whom we called Mommaw and Pop, lived the closest to the airport. Our church, Garden Villas Baptist Church, was directly under one of the flight paths from Hobby. I can remember our pastor having to stop several times in the middle of sermon to wait for the deafening, thundering noise of an overhead jetliner taking off to pass.

Sometimes we would go to the airport on Sunday afternoons, just to watch the planes take off and land, followed by a trip to the drug store to get an ice cream cone from the soda fountain there.

Airport security was almost non-existent back then. I remember going with my grandmother to mail a letter airmail at the airport. Thinking back on it now, I realize she must have been mailing a letter to my Aunt Kay who was married and living in Seattle, Washington at the time. Mommaw would just drive us right up to the loading dock at the airport. She would get out and leave me in the car while she climbed up the steps and walked right into the postal station there. A few minutes later she would be back, and whoosh! her letter would be flying to Seattle that afternoon.

Anyway, being near the airport, we were able to take advantage of any local excitement that might occur when visiting dignitaries would come to town. Sometimes there were even parades down Airport Blvd. I actually remember seeing John F. and Jackie Kennedy riding down Airport Blvd. perched on the back of a convertible car one afternoon. Picture the motorcade at Dallas, and you have the right idea. I don’t remember many details, of course. I was barely six. But I do remember the enormous crowds of people lining the streets as the motorcade drove by. Someone, my mother I suppose, held me up so that I could “see the President!” The Kennedy’s were riding in a convertible with the top down, and they were sitting up on the back of the trunk, so they would be up high and people could see them. I remember them waving to the crowd and my Aunt Kay trying to get a picture of them above the crowd.

I also remember when President Kennedy was killed. I was at the home of my good neighborhood friend, Phyllis, who lived down the street from us. My mom had taken a job when I was in first grade, and I would stay at Phyllis’ house after school until she came to get me. I remember her grandmother telling us the news that the President had been shot. Then later all the grownups were crying, and so I cried, too, although I wasn’t sure why. I was just in the first grade, but I knew that something terrible had happened.

I also remember having special drills at school when I was in the first grade that must have been prompted by the Cuban missile crisis. Houston, being right on the Gulf Coast, was considered a prime target for Fidel Castro. We always had regular fire drills at school, but these were different. We were taught to take cover underneath our desks and to duck and cover our heads with our arms. I remember being told we were NEVER to look at the bright light or we would go blind.

I can also remember a little of the start of the Vietnam War. I remember that my mother wouldn't let me watch the terrible news reels on the evening news for fear that they were too graphic. I can remember President Johnson on TV talking about Vietnam. I believe I had an older cousin who was in Vietnam at the time. I'm not sure of his relationship to me, but I remember a letter that came. My grandmother was telling someone about it and I overheard part of her conversation. My cousin had written home and asked his parents to send him a large hunting knife. Later, my cousin wrote again, telling his parents that that knife had saved his life in hand-to-hand combat.

The "generation gap" got a lot of press back then. My dad, who was a straight-cut as they came, couldn't stand those "long-haired hippies". Of course, I was too young to really be aware of the drug culture, but I remember hearing about it all the time. And then there was the music. My parents only listened to country and western music, but it was impossible not to be influenced by rock and roll in the sixties. Those were turbulent times, and even a young child could not help but be aware of the Civil Rights Movement, the war protests, the threat of nuclear war, the NASA space program, and all of the changes our society was experiencing. But like most of my young friends, I only experienced these things in passing glimpses. My world was safe, secure, and actually very small in terms of national turmoil and world politics. For me, the sixties were a time of innocence and fun and security.

Family Fun

As I’ve already alluded to, I had a large extended family. Not having any brothers or sisters of my own, my cousins were a big part of my childhood. I really had two sets of cousins. My first cousins were my "almost" siblings. I had six of them: Neal (who was one year older than me), Susie (who was one year younger), and their little brother, Rusty; and then there was the younger set—Jeff, Steven, and Julie. When we were little, it seemed like we did everything together.

Then there were my second cousins. Most of them were older than me, and although I loved them, they were too old for us to really be playmates. However, they were always there, at church on Sundays, at every birthday party, every Christmas, every Easter, and every summer at the bay. It was a large, happy, boisterous family, and I loved being part of it. In my large extended family, it didn’t matter that I was an only child. Acceptance as one of the crowd was an automatic given. We were all loved and we all belonged.

What I remember most about my large extended family is the time we all spent together at “the bay house.” It was actually more a collection of bay houses that various members of the family owned in a tiny community called San Leon on the edge of Galveston Bay. For years, the entire family came and went during the summer months, vacationing together and having a marvelous time.

The first bay house I remember was called “the Big House.” I’m not sure which family members actually owned the Big House, but everyone was welcomed to stay there. I think I was about four years old the first time I really remember it. It was a long wooden frame building painted white with big wooden shutters. What impressed me the most about the Big House was that it was really just one great big room with what seemed like dozens of beds! A long row of double beds in old iron bedsteads with bumpy chenille bedspreads stretched the entire length of one side of that building. On the opposite side of the house there was a separate bathroom and then an open kitchen area with a large picnic-style table. That was it. The big wooden shutters were propped open to catch the cooling bay side breezes, a couple of big ol’ box fans to stir the air at night, and Lord only knows how many people all crammed up in there sleeping together every night.

But the bay house was just for sleeping. During the day, we spent almost all of our time swimming and fishing and crabbing on the Big Pier. There were no beaches at San Leon. There was, instead, a tall bulkhead that ran along the water’s edge and protected the land and houses perched along its shores. In order to reach the water, families built long, long piers that stretched way out from the top of the bulkhead over the shallow waves to finally descend down to the water. At the end of the pier’s long narrow walkway, the structure expanded into a large covered rectangle, much like a big porch, that sat high up out of the water (and away from the waves) on pilings. But there was always a lower deck or dock that stretched across the front of the pier for access to boating and for swimming.

I don’t know how many people that big ol’ pier could hold at one time, but I remember there were many, many families that used it. My dad, along with all of the uncles, shared the maintenance of that pier and all of their families used it.

We used to spend hours down on that pier. All of us kids were water rats and we all loved to swim. Even before we knew how to swim, we were out there in the water, bobbing around with our “inner tubes” on. Usually the water wasn’t really very deep, maybe four feet. As we grew older, we could “touch bottom” easily and the inner tubes came off. We played in that salty water for hours at a time, jumping off the pier to see who could make the biggest splash, dunking each other under the water, playing water games like “Marco Polo” and no doubt screaming our heads off.

Up and down the long walkway, the adults, usually the moms, were all busy crabbing for blue crabs. When the crabbing was good, we kids were often recruited to man the nets. Crabbing was so much fun! We would tie a long string with a big safety-pin type hook on the end of it to the edge of the walkway, usually right next to a barnacle-encrusted piling. Raw pieces of bony chicken that the moms had saved, usually either a neck or a back, were securely threaded onto the hooks and lowered into the water. Then the fun began.

We would run back and forth, up and down the pier, checking the lines for crabs. When there was a crab pulling and gnawing on that raw piece of chicken, you could feel it! First you would holler for somebody to “bring the net!” and then you would begin to pull the line up out of the water, inch by inch, holding your breath lest the crab get off. When you got the crab just to the surface of the water, your partner with the net would scoop the crab up, bait and all. And then both of you would try frantically to extract the hook without extracting the angry snapping crab from the tangled up net! Finally, when the hook was free, the crab would be dumped into a large galvanized washtub with a bit of salt water in it to be cleaned later that evening.

I can remember times when we caught so many crabs that they would literally climb over the backs of each other and escape the tub! Much screaming and running would then occur to try and capture the snapping, sideways-crawling crustaceans before they reached the edge of the pier and tumbled back into the water.

Cleaning the crabs in the evening was always an exciting and slightly dangerous occupation, and one that we children loved to watch. One of the adults would slip on a thick glove and using an ice pick, would make a hasty stab into the tub of crabs, spearing one of them in the back. Those pinching claws would be snapping madly and we would all scream in appreciation of the danger. Once skewered on the end of the ice pick, the crab would be held upside down and the claws could be twisted off. Thus rendered basically harmless, the crab would be passed on to another cleaner, assembly-line style, and the whole process started again.

Many times we sat down to a fresh-caught dinner of fried fish and crabs. I can still taste those fried blue crabs! They were so good. My Mommaw would batter them in buttermilk and flour and fry them up for us for supper. We might also have french fries or onion rings, sliced cantaloupe, fresh sliced tomatoes or cucumbers, and gallons of cold, sweet tea. Those were wonderful family dinners.

And of course there were boats. The older cousins all loved to water ski. I can remember as a little girl, being squeezed into sharing a seat with one or two other smallish cousins, and zooming around the bay in a big old wooden motor boat, bouncing over the waves: ka-woom, ka-woom, ka-woom. We would be pulling my older cousins around on skis and thrilling to every minute of the exciting ride.

Or sometimes we went sailing. But I’m talking about the old-timey kind of sailboat, one that was nothing much more than a wooden board with a sail perched atop of it. They were forever “tumping” over and throwing all of the sailors into the drink! Then the sailors had to climb up onto the rudder board and heave and pull to get the thing turned upright again, always accompanied by lots of screams and shouts of encouragement from the onlookers on the pier.

And then there were the jelly fish! We had encounters with all kinds of jelly fish down there at the bay. Most of these were of a common variety that were always around. Half-spherical in shape and about the size of a sand dollar, some were clear and veined with an iridescent blue; they were the "good" jellyfish because they didn't sting. Others were also clear, but with sizzling hot red veins; they DID sting. However we did also get the occasional man-o-war or other exotic variety of jellyfish. I remember one time my mother and I walked down to the pier and the water was filled with round PINK jellyfish which were covered in black polka dots. There were hundreds of them floating on the surface of the water. Needless to say, we did not go swimming that day!

One of our favorite occupations while we were waiting for the requisite hour of rest after lunch to pass was to take the crab net and swish it through the water. Invariably we would pull it up with one or more blobs of jelly fish hanging from its net. Oh, the horrible tortures we devised for those jellyfish! Sometimes we would stuff them into empty Coke bottles. Sometime we would pretend to be frying eggs and pour salt all over them. Other times we would just squish them into unrecognizable blobs. But don't feel too sorry for the poor jellyfish. We were all stung by them countless times over the years. The poor jellyfish definitely had their revenge!

Fishing was another favorite pastime at the bay. We would cast our lines rigged with big bobbing corks out from the pier and there was no telling what we might pull in. Mostly we caught mullets (which we used for cut bait as they were no good to eat) and a peculiar kind of fish we called a "croaker", so named because of the croaking sound it made once out of the water. They were delicious fried. But there were also salt water catfish and trout. Sometimes we would hook an alligator gar! The gars always seemed to move up into the bay in the late summer. Ferocious-looking (but probably harmless) we wouldn't go swimming while the gars were in residence.

But mostly the philosophy at the bay house was “live and let live.” Nobody minded the screaming kids, the roaring motorboats or the blaring radios. Adults drank ice cold bottles of dark brown beer from old washtubs filled with cracked ice. Kids drank gallons of Kool-Aid and bottles of ice-cold Coke or 7-Up. Picnic-style lunches were served on the pier with plenty of peanut butter-and-jelly or bologna sandwiches and Lays potato chips and cold dill pickles. And kids were made to sit on the edge of the pier and wait, kicking their feet impatiently, for one hour to pass after eating before it was “safe” for them to go swimming again.

(It was widely believed at that time that if you went swimming right after you ate a meal, you could get the cramps and drown. Our mothers may have been slightly inebriated from all the beer and sun, but nobody went swimming until that hour was up!)

Eventually several of the families in the Big House broke off and bought their own bay houses. Our own family bought a small blue frame house just one street over from the Big House. It, too, was a one-room house, but this time only shared by my grandparents, and my immediate family. I think it was originally built by my Uncle Frank. We only had three double beds and a couple of pull-out sleeper sofas, but it was all ours. There was a private bathroom with a big clawfoot tub and a small kitchen area separated from the living area by a corner bar. No air-conditioning, of course, but lots of old-fashioned hand-crank windows and a couple of fans made it quite comfortable.

We also had our own pier at the end of our street. It wasn’t as large as the Big Pier, but it was great fun. We kept that bay house until I was a teenager, at which point I guess we all must have lost interest in it. Or maybe a hurricane blew down the pier (again) and nobody wanted to build another one. Whatever the reason, that chapter in our lives came to a close, but I will always remember all of the good times we had in tiny San Leon at the bay house.

Other Pleasures

We did, of course, have a life outside of elementary school. Childhood in the 1960’s might not have had cell phones, texting, and video games, but we didn't seem to miss them. We did watch TV, although there was no cable TV. We had exactly three channels: ABC, NBC, and CBS. That was it. And there was very little children’s programming: Captain Kangaroo in the mornings, the Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights, and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on Saturday evenings. That was about it.

However, the local TV stations did have the freedom to put on the air their own programming in the mornings and the afternoons. On one of the local stations, “Cadet Don” was on every morning. Cadet Don sat at the command post of a space capsule. Think Buck Rogers. He had a big screen behind him, and that was where the cartoons appeared. Unlike Captain Kangaroo (which was a national broadcast), boys and girls could actually go to see Cadet Don at the local TV studio, and it was a big treat for their birthday. I think my cousin Neal got to go on his birthday one year.

It's funny the things your remember from those days. I can clearly recall Cadet Don "talking" to us one morning about how his mother-in-law could fry bacon in long, even strips. (God only knows what all that man expostulated on every morning in between showing cartoons; I'm sure he never had a "script" to follow.) I don't know if it's a coincidence or not, but today I always fry my bacon in long even strips, instead of all curled up. Amazing, huh, the power of the media?

Then there was Mary Jane’s Magic Castle show in the afternoons. She, too, introduced cartoons and had some sort of little puppet sidekick, but I can’t remember who or what it was.

However, the biggest and the best “star” of the afternoon was Kitterick! Who or what, you ask, was a Kitterick? Kitterick was a lady cat. That is, she was a lady in a cat’s costume with painted on whiskers. Her name came from the call letters of the TV station, KTRK. Kitterick lived in a tree house high up in a very tall tree. Next to the tree house was a very large bird’s nest. Inside the nest was a magic egg. Birthday boys and girls got to sit in the nest in a large circle around the magic egg. When the time was right, the top of the egg lifted off, and revealed all sorts of brightly wrapped packages. Kitterick would talk to each boy and girl for a moment, pushing a microphone in front of their face to hear the answers. Every day she would ask them what their name was and what they wanted to be when they grew up. Little girls always said they wanted to be a nurse or a teacher. The boys always said they wanted to be a fireman or a policeman. Then Kitterick would give them a present from the egg and they would go sit back down.

Now, looking back, I realize that this seems a little far-fetched, even for us naive and gullible children of the early 1960's. What was a cat doing living in a tree in a bird’s nest? I don’t know, but at the time, it seemed like the most magical, wonderful thing in the world.

I remember I got to be on Kitterick’s show for one of my birthdays. I don’t remember how old I was. I do remember being sorely disillusioned in the TV studio. Kitterick’s wonderful tree house wasn’t high up in a giant tree. It was sitting right on the concrete floor of the studio. There were wooden bleachers off to one side for the guests, and they had a special TV monitor to watch. But TV cameras and crew surrounded the bird’s nest, and when we were placed inside it, we weren’t able to see the TV monitors or the cartoons! Besides that, we had to sit perfectly still and be very quiet. I don’t even remember what my present was. I think my guests had a very good time, but I sure didn't.

I had other birthday parties, though. Birthday parties were A Very Big Deal in the 1960’s. There were always dozens of guests, mostly cousins and neighborhood friends, and lots of presents and a big cake and loads of games, balloons, and party favors. A real 5-star production, with all the mothers vying to out-do each other.

Sometimes the moms took us places for the parties. I remember having a least a couple of parties at a place called “Peppermint Park,” where there were small amusement rides, sort of like a miniature fair grounds. I think there might have been a pony ride, too. I also remember going to “Tootsies,” who was a lady clown, and she put on puppet shows in her back yard.

Other parties were held in our own back yard. We had hats and noise makers and played “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” and our moms took pictures and got out the old 8 mm movie cameras to film the big event of blowing out the candles. There was always a big homemade birthday cake and homemade ice cream to go with it. The birthday boy or girl was always the star of the show, which really meant that there was a lot of pressure from Mom to BE POLITE and always SAY SOMETHING NICE to all your guests and be sure and say THANK YOU for your presents. Whew! Lots of pressure for an eight-year old.

To this day, my favorite cake of all is the birthday cake my mom used to make for me. It was double layer chocolate cake with white seven-minute frosting. She still will make it for me sometimes on my birthday, even though I’m well past the age of celebrating birthdays now.

So my childhood memories of the 1960's are very pleasant ones. We had lots of fun, even if we didn't have lots of things. We enjoyed our free time more, I think, because we didn't have so many toys and gadgets. TV was an occasional treat, not a constant companion. We had a few after school activities, but our days were not scheduled perforce around mom and dad's long work hours. There was time to dream, time to read, time to just be a kid. We went to school, played with our friends, ate supper every night with our family, and went to bed early. It was a great time.

Elementary School Days

After my somewhat inauspicious beginning at Garden Villas Elementary school, I did go on to enjoy my elementary school years very much. I have much fonder memories of my second grade teacher, Mrs. Hoke, which rhymed with Coke, and made her automatically seem more approachable than my first grade teacher, Mrs. Langston. It was in second grade that we were first introduced to “Dick and Jane” and their dog “Spot.” Oh, how I loved to read those stories! I remember avidly reading anything I could get my hands on from that point forward.

It was also in the second grade that I began to realize that I was smart. I don’t mean to sound like I’m bragging. I was no genius child. But I was bright and learning came easily. This had never occurred to me before. I can remember always being one of the first to finish reading a chapter or finishing a test or working a problem on the blackboard. And it slowly began to dawn on me that not everyone was as smart as I was. It was a revelation that began to shape who I was.

I’ll never forget the first time I made straight A’s. It was in the third grade. My teacher was Mrs. Butler. Not a particularly sweet or sympathetic sort, she was exacting and demanding as a teacher, and I rose to the occasion. I had my best year ever, academically, under Mrs. Butler’s tutelage. No other teacher at Garden Villas Elementary after that ever really challenged me or insisted that I give my best, and so I didn’t. My parents were also undemanding of me, always happy with whatever grades I brought home, as long as my conduct grade was good. But I never forgot that I could learn and master anything I set my mind to, and that was what mattered to me.

Unfortunately, third grade was also the year that I began having trouble seeing the blackboard. Mrs. Butler had assigned us all seats based on the alphabetical order of our last names. Somehow I ended up in the last seat on the first row and I remember squinting and struggling to see the blurry white chalk marks on the blackboard at the front of the room. Toward the end of the school year my mother finally took me to see the eye doctor and to no one's surprise I tested nearsighted. Personally, I was just relieved to finally be able to see the leaves on the trees. In my youth and naivete, I was even excited to pick out my first pair of glasses--a truly ghastly pair of pointy pale blue frames with rhinestones glittering in the corners. I thought they were "cool." Little did I know how quickly my eyes would deteriorate or how thick my "coke bottle bottom" glasses would become in the future.

As third grade gave way to fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, I struggled to find my place among my peers. I might have been bright, but bright never did equal popular. I knew early the pain of being excluded from the popular girls' clique. I was fairly shy and a little bit "chubby" as we said back then. Not having any brothers or sisters, I had a hard time sometimes holding my own with the other kids at recess. I didn’t like being teased or picked on, but I always tried not to show it. One never forgot the lesson of poor James in the first grade. I wasn’t particularly athletic either, and from an early age, knew the shame of being picked last for dodge ball or kickball. But I wasn’t an unhappy child either. As long as I had one or two girlfriends or my cousins to play with, I was fine.

I remember reading a lot during those years. We discovered the Bobbsey Twins, Charlotte's Web, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, the Little House on the Prairie books, and a host of other childhood classics. I loved our weekly excursions to the library. I could spend hours alone in my room reading and reading. By the fourth grade, I was reading on a ninth grade level. Books were my very best friends and I loved them all.

There weren’t a lot of extracurricular activities for girls to choose from in the 1960’s. I never belonged to any kind of organized sports. I do remember taking tap and ballet lessons for awhile from Miss Emelda. Miss Emelda’s studio was filled with young hopefuls like me who soon discovered that we were born with two left feet and quickly dropped out.

I also belonged to the Brownies. I loved being a Brownie. My best friend, Martha Ann, was a Brownie, too, and we were in the same troop. I remember the special feeling of wearing our Brownie uniforms to school on meeting days. Later on, when we became Girl Scouts, we wore our green uniforms to school, too. It made us feel very special.

There was a rival girls’ group called the Bluebirds. They only had a blue vest to wear over their regular school clothes on their meeting days. I remember we Girl Scouts in our green dresses with our dark green sashes felt very superior to them.

Girl Scouts was fun, but I soon wearied of having to earn badges. I think I dropped out after fourth or fifth grade. I do remember that both my mother and Martha’s mother took turns being troop leaders of our troop. Those were the best years! We went on tours of several factories and went camping and did arts and crafts in the afternoons. I remember we went to a candy factory once, and I can remember them making candy canes. I remember the big machine with two opposing “arms” pulling the white candy into a huge satiny ribbon, looping it over and over, like a figure eight. Then, when the time was just right, the red candy was fed into the machine and viola! Red and white stripes appeared and the candy cane was formed. The factory visits were always so fascinating.

It was also along this time that I started piano lessons. At first I took lessons from a neighbor, Mrs. Delay. She was very sweet and patient with me and, as we didn't have a piano of our own, she allowed me to come over every afternoon and practice at her house for thirty minutes. I loved Mrs. Delay. She had three small children of her own, but she treated me like a long lost daughter. I probably played more with the Delay children than I practiced, but I did pick my way through Book A of the John W. Schaum Piano Course.

Christmas came, and lo and behold, a "new" piano arrived at our house. It was an old used upright, of course, but my mother had painted it and it looked brand new to me. Sadly, Mrs. Delay went to work shortly after that, and my lessons moved from her house to the nunnery at Mt. Carmel. One of the nuns there gave lessons in the afternoon, and I started taking lessons from her. I don't remember her name, but she quite intimidated me with her starched wimple and voluminous black robes. I do remember my mother being in a dither over what to give her as a Christmas present. She kept muttering about how the nuns weren't allowed to have any personal items. She finally decided on houseshoes, and I dutifully carried a package of pink houseshoes to her on the last lesson before the Christmas holidays.

But most afternoons we all just came home from school, changed into our play clothes, and went out in the yards and the streets to play until our dads came home and our moms called us in to eat supper. These were the days before daylight savings time, so darkness fell pretty early. My dad got home at 4:30 p.m. and supper was always waiting for him on the table. After supper, I sat at the kitchen table to do homework, and then maybe there was time for a television show or two. Bedtime came early, too. I remember watching the kitchen clock, even before I could really tell time. Each year my bedtime increased by one half hour, from seven to seven-thirty to eight and finally to eight-thirty. I'll never forget how grown up I felt when in sixth grade, I could finally, finally stay up until nine o'clock. It was a landmark of my youth.

I cannot leave my elementary school years without remarking upon my sixth grade year. It was 1969 and integration was beginning to be enforced on the schools in Houston. Many students were being "bussed" to different neighborhoods and schools in an attempt to enforce equality across the district. All of a sudden, the private school system of Mt. Carmel appeared to be a god-send for the panic stricken families in our all-white, but lower middle class neighborhood. I was not bussed, but I did draw the first black teacher at Garden Villas Elementary school. Not only the first black teacher, but the first MALE teacher at our all female-staffed school. Mr. Gillespie was alternately regarded with fear, scorn, prejudice and awe for daring to brave the bastion of an all white, all female populated staff.

It was a scary thing for me to walk into that sixth grade classroom on the first day of school. I didn't know whether expect the boogie man or what! But I soon realized that Mr. Gillespie was just like all my other teachers had been. He had his good points and his bad points. He did have a tendency to tease, sometimes unmercifully, which as I have already pointed out, I had a very hard time handling. But he was a good teacher and I like to think I began to learn to see other ethnicities as something more than an unnamed mass to be feared. I began to understand that people are individuals, regardless of the color of their skin.

However, this realization did not change the political climate of the times. My parents fell victim to the mass hysteria of the times and joined the "white flight" from the city to the outer suburbs and small towns surrounding Houston. They sold our house on Hirondel street and during the summer after sixth grade, we moved to League City, a small town halfway between Houston and Galveston. The secure cocoon of my young world with its familiar streets and landmarks and friends was abruptly severed, and I was forced to emerge into a scary new world, filled with new schools and new friends.

First Grade

I remember being very nervous and afraid my first day of school. Funny, I don’t remember having that same problem in early Sunday school classes or in kindergarten. But in first grade, I cried when my mother left me at the door of the classroom. Not a lot, but I remember tearing up. Thankfully, I didn’t make a scene.

I definitely remember one pudgy little red-headed boy whose name was James. James didn’t just cry when his mother left him. He struggled. He screamed. He held onto his mother’s skirts and sobbed for all he was worth. He carried this demonstration on for so long that he finally had to be physically restrained by the first grade teacher, Mrs. Langston, while his poor mother made good her escape. From that point on, James was a marked boy. He was the butt of all jokes, and this torment continued on for years.

Public school lesson Number One: don’t show your vulnerabilities to your classmates or they will persecute you unmercifully for the rest of your days.

I didn’t particularly like first grade. I didn’t particularly like Mrs. Langston. It was very hot in our room. Imagine going to school in Houston, Texas in 1963 with no air conditioning. It was hard to pay attention to anything the teacher was saying with the sultry humidity steaming in through the windows and the cicadas singing us to sleep in the trees outside. I seem to remember being thirsty all the time. I can remember raising my hand and asking permission to go to the water fountain again and again, but Mrs. Langston would always say no. I have a very clear mental picture of her standing over me one day with tiny drops of sweat beading on her hairy upper lip telling me to sit down and be quiet! Nope, not my favorite teacher.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first learned how to read, but I’m fairly certain it was not in the first grade. Mrs. Langston used to sit us in a large circle and hold up flash cards printed with words like “cat” and “dog” and “coat”. She would hold up the card, say the word, and we would all repeat it—just like a group of parrots. It was rote memorization, and it was very ineffective. I do remember being able to read my Highlights magazine at an early age. I remember reading The Timbertoes, so perhaps my mother helped me to learn to read.

I don’t remember doing any math that year either, although I have a vague recollection of her holding up apples and oranges. So much for first grade academics.

I do remember painting. Not long after school started, she sat a large easel up in a corner of the classroom. One by one we each got a turn to spend an hour painting our very own picture, which was then displayed along one wall on a clothes line, each picture held in place with wooden clothes pins. I remember waiting and waiting and waiting for my turn to come. Finally I got my chance at the paints. I painted a landscape. There was green grass and a large tree and lots of blue sky and a big yellow sun in the upper corner. I remember standing at the easel and thinking to myself, “If the sun is shining down on everything, and the sun is yellow, then I should cover the entire sky and all the earth with yellow paint as well.”

Well, no one had ever told me that yellow and blue make green. As I began to spread that cheery yellow paint across my canvas, all my beautiful blue sky turned green and the colors all began to bleed and run into one another. I was very surprised, but kept on spreading yellow sunshine, thinking that artistically, I just had to be correct. Mrs. Langston came over and said, in a very disgusted voice, “Just look what you’ve done! You’ve ruined your painting. Go sit down.” And she hung my painting up at the very far end of the clothes line, in a position of great disgrace.

I never picked up a paintbrush again.

The one bright spot I do remember from first grade is that I met my best friend, Martha Ann, there. She and I were best friends from 1st through 6th grade. Our class used to travel in pairs, and she and I were always buddies. We used to hold hands as we walked in rows, two by two, down the long hall to the school lunch room. We played together on the playground, were in Brownies together after school, and we had sleepovers at each other’s house and told each other all our secrets, then “pinkie swore” to be best friends forever.

So, first grade passed by like a 9-month prison sentence for me. About all I remember is physical discomfort, a lack of mental stimulation, and a great fear of the teacher. After such a poor start, it's amazing to me that I ever liked school at all, but then second grade was just around the corner. . . .

School Days

Who doesn't look back at the beginning of their school days with a bit of nostalgia? A bit of bemusement for how innocently we begin that long and laborious journey of twelve years of public education. Of course, if we dig a little deeper, those halcyon days of our youth are never quite as perfect as we think; still, the joys of one's youth should never be discounted as trivial. A person of six is no less a human being than a person of sixty. And all the events of our lives--both the past and the present--continue to shape us even now into the persons we are today.

When I was in kindergarten, my mother took me back and forth to school every day in our old Pontiac. But beginning in first grade, I was considered old enough to walk to school with the other neighborhood children, unless it was raining. This was a great privilege. It was the beginning of my independence--a step away from my babyhood. We all walked or rode our bikes to school without parental supervision, and incredibly, we all made it to school and back home again every day. If you were tardy to class in those days, it was because you dawdled on your way to school and deserved to miss recess.

At the start of my first grade year, my mother, as so many others, walked with me, to show me the way and to teach me the safety rules. We would travel up Hirondel street and turn left at the edge of a big wooded lot. There was a mysterious “shortcut” path through that wooded lot that the older kids used, but I was strictly forbidden to go in there—and didn’t for years. I was afraid of the dark shadows cast by the huge old trees, and the rumors of a crazy man who lived in there.

We turned right at the end of the woods, walked another block, and then we arrived at the corner of the huge complex of Our Lady of Mt Carmel Church and parochial school. You cannot imagine the mass exodus of children on foot and on bicycle from our neighborhood every morning. We all walked to school together for years. But for most of the children in Overbrook, their destination was the Catholic school, and the rest of us Baptists, Methodists, and Lutherans had to walk on and leave them behind.

Another few blocks and we left Overbrook for the neighborhood of Garden Villas by means of a bridge over the lazy, muddy Sims Bayou. That bridge scared and fascinated me all at the same time. When I was very young, it felt so high. It was wide enough for two lanes of traffic, with a partitioned sidewalk for munchkin foot traffic on each side. Looking down through the metal safety bars at the brown sluggish water slipping by below made me dizzy with fear and excitement. Sometimes we would see a snake swimming in it. We used to scare each other with rumors of giant alligators that lived under that bridge. Sometimes it would rain, and then the bayou would rise up in a churning boiling mass of swift, hard current filled with swirling debris and unfathomable muck. The water would be louder then, and crossing the bridge felt like an excursion across the mighty and mysterious Amazon.

Once safely over the bridge, however, it was only another block until we arrived at Garden Villas Elementary school. Ancient-looking even then, it was constructed rather unimaginatively of square corners, sturdy red bricks, and old-fashioned hand-cranked windows. It was tall, foreboding, and made human only by the enormous pecan trees and live oaks dripping with Spanish moss that adorned the grounds. Huge old ligustrums were planted rather haphazardly around its foundation, and to this day, the smell of ligustrums blooming evokes a sense of nostalgia in me so strong, that I will all but stop in my tracks to breathe in their heady perfume and remember the smells of my childhood.

The inside walls of Garden Villas were pea green. Horrible, unrelenting, disgusting pea green. Every wall, every hallway, even every bathroom was green. There was no relief from it. I read one time that someone somewhere did a study (probably in the 1950’s) and determined that GREEN was the color of choice for school walls. I personally have no problem with most shades of green. But I have never ever been able to look at that particular shade of pea green without feeling slightly repulsed by it.

The floors were study, hard-wearing linoleum tiles, and so damn monotonous. No pattern to them, just a series of green and gray flecks, perpetually dull and scuffed, except at the start of each new year when they were buffed to a high glossy shine.

Each classroom came equipped with a blackboard, a globe, an American flag standing in the corner, and old-fashioned wooden desks. That was it. No colorful posters or bulletin boards, no reading corner with colorful rugs and bean bag chairs, no cubbies filled with enticing crayons and paints, no aquariums on the windowsill with pet frogs, no hint of anything beyond a strict academic atmosphere.

Perhaps that was the point. There was nothing for a child to do except look at the blackboard and the teacher, or stare daydreaming out the window.

In those days, children didn’t stay in school all day long as they do now. Most mothers didn’t work, and afterschool care wasn’t much of an issue then. Children were slowly and gently introduced to the disciplines of school and gradually built up to a full day. Kindergarteners went half a day. They either went to the morning session, from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. Or they went to the afternoon session from noon until 3:00 p.m. First graders got out at 1:00 p.m. Second grade dismissed at 2:00 p.m. And finally, in third grade, students stayed until 3:00 p.m.

There was no air conditioning in Garden Villas Elementary School. Given Houston's heat and humidity, this almost seems inhumane, until you remember that the school was built early in the 1940's, perhaps even in the 1930's, long before the advent of air conditioning. So each classroom had a solid outer wall of tall, old-fashioned hand-crank windows. I can remember the teachers dutifully working their way down the bank of windows each morning, cranking each set of louvers open as wide as they could go. Classroom doors stayed open, in the hopes of drawing in a cross breeze or two. Large double doors flanked every hall way, and stood open to the world to draw in as much air as possible during the sultry September heat. Security wasn't an issue then. Comfort was.

And so, in September of 1962, I bravely entered the hallowed halls of Garden Villas Elementary School with a lump of nervous fear in my throat, butterflies in my tummy, and my mother's hand clutched rather desperately in my own to begin the First Grade.

Growing Up

There are so many stories to share from my elementary school years. Growing up in the early 1960’s in America was in many ways still so innocent and idyllic. The sexual revolution of the late 1960’s had yet to occur. No one had heard of Vietnam. John F. Kennedy was president and life in white middle class America was good. Segregation was the norm at that time. Incredibly, I never met a single black person until I was in the 7th grade. I never made a black friend until I was an adult. We were isolated from most social issues in Overbrook, and we never even knew it.

Gender roles were strictly defined, as well. Little girls stayed inside and played with our dolls or our Easy Bake ovens. If we were outside, we played hopscotch or jump rope. We took piano or ballet lessons as our after school activity. We wore dresses and saddle oxfords or penny loafers to school every day. Even on the coldest winter days, we never wore pants to school. Instead we wore knee socks with our dresses--like that would help us stay warm. Play clothes, such as pants and shorts, were strictly reserved for the back yard in the afternoons. And no little girl wore jeans or pants with a front zipper or fly. Those were for boys. Our pants had side zippers because that was more modest.

The boys had a lot more freedom and were always allowed to have more adventures than the girls. Boys could wear jeans to school. Boys got to ride bikes and build forts and climb trees. Boys got to play sports. Boys got to run around with their shirts off in the hot summer. I went to many Little League games as a child, but always as an observer, never as a participant. Even if a girl had the athletic ability and desire to compete (which many girls did), there were no approved outlets for her save the occasional back yard game of softball.

Of course, the reverse was also true. If a boy were more inclined to play the piano rather then baseball, he was often ridiculed by his friends. A boy either played sports or he was considered a "pansy". It was a rather rigid caste system, and it was a rare individual who could buck it. Rather than be an outcast, most of us just conformed.

This was true of the adults, as well as of the children. Dads worked and moms stay at home. I remember that my mother sewed all of my clothes and used to scorn the notion of ready made clothes. She made me beautiful new dresses every year for school and church. I use to wear a lot of shirtwaist dresses: a fitted bodice that often buttoned up the front or back, and a very full skirt. When I was a very small child, Mama took great pride in making me petticoats of the fullest, stiffest tulle netting. I think she starched them. They sure did itch! They were three layers deep and they made the skirts of my dresses stand out wider and fuller than any of the other girls. Thankfully, by the time I entered elementary school, the trend for starched petticoats was waning somewhat, and my school dresses were a little less frilly.

She also curled my hair every night. I slept on pink sponge rollers for years. They were so uncomfortable! (Of course, she slept on “grown up” wire rollers—and they were ten times worse. So it was no good complaining to her about discomfort and rollers! It was a female rite of passage of sorts.) The only break I got from the curlers was on Friday nights because we didn’t have to worry about my hair (usually) on Saturdays.

Most mornings, she would fix my hair in “Shirley Temple curls.” It was a source of great pride to her that my hair was so curly and that she could form those big fat sausage curls around her index finger with nothing more than a brush and little spit. She would pull the top of my hair back off my forehead and tie the whole thing up with a big shiny bow. Let the other little girls who had straight hair wear pony tails or pig tails. My hair was curly and she wanted to show it off.

But for all of its seemingly archaic rules and restrictions, the early 1960's was a very comforting time to be a child. You knew who you were and where you fit in. Your mom and dad adhered to the rules, too, and you knew who they were. It often seemed as if everyone belonged to the same church, the same school, the same community, and there were no surprises to knock you out of your little bubble of contentment. Divorce was unheard of, political unrest was a thing of the future, and every family had about the same number of material things. We all had a black & white television set in our living rooms. Every family had a car, but very few had two cars. Sometimes the dads had a pick up truck. We all dressed alike, ate alike, and played alike. The world seemed to be one big homogeneous neighborhood of good will.

And so, with an incontrovertible background of middle class solidarity and prosperity, I was prepared to begin the next phase of my childhood--the elementary school years.

The Neighborhood

As I have already explained, almost all of the neighbors on Hirondel Street were Catholic. I grew up in the shadow of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church, and it made for some very interesting experiences. Of course, when I was a very young child, I didn’t understand the difference between Catholic or Baptist or Methodist or atheist, nor did I care. It seemed that every family went to some church on Sunday, and we were all united in faith simply because we all went to church every week.

As children in the early 1960's, we all understood the concept of "wardrobe", too. We all had three sets of clothes. There were church clothes, which were reserved strictly for Sundays, weddings, or whatever other function our mothers deemed "proper". There were school clothes, which were slightly less dressy than church clothes and, if you were a girl, always meant dresses. And then there were play clothes: jeans with button-front flys for the boys, shorts and pedal pushers with side zippers for the girls, and pullover tee shirts. We could run and play and ride bikes and just generally be kids in our play clothes without fear of scolding.

On our street there were scores of children to play with. Each yard came equipped with swing sets and sandboxes and water hoses for free drinks of water. We played wonderful games in the warm summer evenings like “hide and seek” and “freeze tag.” We caught lightning bugs in old mayonnaise jars and stayed out until the street lights blinked on at dark and our mothers called us in for the night. The ice cream truck made regular forays up and down the streets of Overbrook every afternoon. We could hear the calliope music tinkling merrily from two blocks over, which gave us plenty of time to race home and barrel through the house, shouting, "Can I have a nickel?!?"

No, theology made very little difference to the children on Hirondel street. But I always felt a clear separation from my neighborhood playmates anyway, because from the very beginning, I understood that in all those other homes on our street there were many, many children, and in our home there was just one: me.

My first real memory of a friend who was not a cousin (we’ll cover the whole family issue later) was a little girl named Eileen who lived down the street from me. Eileen and I went to kindergarten together at the public elementary school in Garden Villas. What I didn’t know at the time was that while Our Lady of Mt. Carmel had its own school for grades 1 through 12, it did not have a kindergarten, and so the Catholic families often availed themselves of the "free" public kindergarten in the next neighborhood before subjecting their children to the iron will of the nuns at Mt. Carmel for the following 12 years. Of course, the Catholic families all had to pay property taxes which supported the public schools, so the "free" public kindergarten wasn't really free for them at all. In addition, they then had to pay tuition for their children to attend the private Catholic school at Mt. Carmel. I do have some vague memories of adult grumblings along these lines, but as a child, I never paid them any attention.

All I knew was that Eileen and I laid down side by side on our little red and green plastic mats to take a nap each day at kindergarten (we only went for half a day-—did we really need a nap?), and we drank our juice and ate our cookies together, and we eventually discovered that we lived just 4 houses apart on Hirondel street.

I’ll never forget the terror and fear I felt each time I stepped foot in Eileen’s house. Eileen was the youngest of thirteen brothers and sisters. Her house was as foreign to me as Mars or Venus. The first thing I saw when I walked through the door was a horrifying, very real-looking crucifix of Jesus, bloody, torn, and naked, hanging on the living room wall. I was shocked. In the Baptist church we didn't have images of bloody Jesus. We had pastoral Jesus tending his "flock" of sweet, smiling children leaning against his knee. Bloody Jesus scared me.

But even worse than Jesus dying on the cross right over our heads while we sat on the floor and played jacks, were Eileen's five terrifying older brothers. Like birds of prey, they could swoop down on you at any given minute and pull your hair or steal your toy or say something mean and unintelligible (but even a five-year old could understand that they were making a joke at her expense). She also had hordes of older sisters, some of whom were nice, but they were all so loud and rambunctious and independent of one another. It was quite overwhelming for an only child who lived in a quiet house with only her parents for company.

I rarely remember seeing Eileen’s mother. I have a vague memory of a thin, weary-looking woman standing at the sink washing dishes. Her hands were very red and cracked-looking to me, as if they spent too much time immersed in hot soapy water. However, I never saw her dressed in anything other than heels and hose. Shades of Donna Reed and June Cleaver! If you thought those women were just Hollywood make-believe, think again. They really existed in Houston, Texas in 1962.

I only remember seeing her father once. Fathers disappeared from our neighborhood early in the mornings and reappeared at suppertime every evening. On the weekends they mowed the grass on Saturday mornings and hung out in their garages on Saturday afternoons drinking cold, sweaty dark brown bottles of beer. Occasionally, they barbecued and once in a great while, they played a game of ball with us. So all fathers, except for my own, were pretty much an unknown quantity to me, and Eileen's father absolutely terrified me. I don’t remember what the joke was, but I distinctly remember him saying (in a jovial manner, I am sure), that he would “string me up by my thumbs”. I took him quite literally and hid from him every time I saw him after that.

At Eileen’s house they didn’t have a regular kitchen table and chairs, as we did. They had a picnic table with long benches on either side. Imagine trying to feed 15 people at a time, 7 days a week, three times a day. You have to remember that in the early sixties, there were no McDonalds. No wonder Eileen’s mom had dish pan hands. I only remember having dinner with them once, but I’m sure I didn’t eat a bite. I was too shy around all of them.

One last memory, before I leave Eileen. It was common for the mothers in our neighborhood to feed “snack” to whatever youngsters happened to be around each afternoon. Most of the mothers during that time period stayed home, and so we were treated to homemade cookies and cupcakes, hand-squeezed lemonade, and even homemade ice cream wasn’t uncommon. But at Eileen’s house, when it was time for snack, we always got a big bowl of ice cubes. Just plain ice cubes. I remember asking my mother about why we didn’t get popsicles or cookies at Eileen’s house. She told me that not everyone had enough money to go around, and that we should always be grateful for the things that we had. It was my first glimpse into “working class” poverty, and I never forgot it.

Well, all my friendships always seem to come to an end, and so it was with Eileen. Kindergarten ended and we turned six years old. The next fall Eileen disappeared into the rabbit warren of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, and I went off to first grade at Garden Villas Elementary school. And although we lived on the same street together for the next several years, our friendship never renewed. Our lives became too different and we were too young.

Coming Home

Bringing a new baby home from the hospital is always joyous occasion, but bringing home a baby who was not expected to make it is quite a landmark, in any book. My parents were overjoyed when, after three long weeks, they were finally allowed to bring their new baby daughter home.

Home was a small 3-bedroom brick home in a brand new neighborhood in suburban Houston called Overbrook. The appellation “Overbrook” was a bit misleading. There was no brook, only a muddy, sluggish bayou called Sims Bayou, but I supposed the developers thought Overbrook sounded more inviting to potential home buyers. In fact, in that rather desperate, all-of-our-streets-have-to-have-a-theme mode that developers get into, most of the surrounding streets were named for birds: Heron or Thrush or (god-forbid) Flamingo. Our street was named Hirondel. I looked it up once; it means “swallow” in Latin. What were they thinking? I promise you, dear reader, most of the residents who lived on Hirondel Street in the 1960’s hadn't the slightest clue their street name meant swallow in Latin.

Besides having some rather odd ornithopic delusions of grandeur, Overbrook was also very Catholic. As a child, I once asked my mother why we, as good Southern Baptists, lived in an all-Catholic neighborhood. She just shrugged and said something vague about how our little house was just perfect for us, but I later got the whole story out of her.

During the Korean War, my dad joined the naval reserves, but he was never stationed overseas. After a couple of years of leading a rather nomadic life (they lived in shabby little apartments everywhere from sunny Key West to freezing Boston), my parents wanted a permanent home. They rushed back to Houston and bought the first little tract house they found. I think they paid $7000 for it. Turns out our home was one of the first spec houses built in modest Overbrook. It was the first house built on Hirondel Street. Only after my parents had bought the house did they learn that the Catholic Church was planning to build a huge complex called “Our Lady of Mt. Carmel” just a few blocks over. The entire neighborhood turned Catholic overnight, but my parents--childless at the time--shrugged and stayed put.

When I was older, my mother confessed to me that they had bought in “too big a hurry” and many times wished they had instead bought a home in the nearby neighborhood of Garden Villas, where later I went to elementary school and to church and to Brownies and everything else. But my experiences growing up in Overbook in the wild and woolly 1960’s were quite priceless and I wouldn’t trade them for any other history.

But to return to our story, I was finally ensconced safely in the little white bassinet in the little brick house on Hirondel street. My mother, well-rested after three weeks of enforced bed rest, was ready to take on the challenges of new motherhood. But something was wrong. The baby wouldn't quit crying--or spitting up--or projectile vomiting. What could it be? Was she just a bad mother? Did she not know what to do? Everyone told her it was just the colic. Not surprisingly, my mother couldn't quit crying either.

In that peculiar way that doctors had back then, each doctor had his own office and his own staff, and there weren't any large pediatric practices with multiple doctors taking turns being "on call". My doctor was taking his annual summer vacation and there was no one else available until he returned. For two long weeks my mother was at her wits' end as she struggled to cope with a screaming, colickly baby. When the doctor finally returned he pronounced I was allergic to baby formula and that my mother must feed me soy milk instead. Soy milk?

You must remember that my mother had had no opportunity to breast feed me, even if she had wanted to, which was highly unlikely. I was nearly a month old by the time I came home, and her milk had long since dried up. Breast feeding was strongly discouraged by the modern medical community of the 1950's and was looked down upon as being extremely old-fashioned and slightly unclean. New mothers, forced to stay in bed in the hospital for up to two weeks' recovery time after giving birth, readily submitted to having their tender, swollen breasts bound after childbirth to stop their milk from coming in, while down in the nursery, the staff took care of feeding the babies. Breast milk was considered a poor substitute for modern, clean, sanitized baby formula. But soy milk was a hard-to-find commodity and expensive to boot.

However, on the doctor's advice the switch in formulas was made and the baby, thankfully, finally quit crying and began to thrive. There was peace and joy in the little brick house at last.

Where to Begin?

I was born in the muggy summer heat in the bayou city of Houston, in the great state of Texas, in June of 1957. It was not a very auspicious beginning. My parents were healthy 27-year olds, but there was a problem. My mother was RH- and my father was RH+. What that means is virtually from the moment of my conception, my mother’s body was fighting to rid itself of the parasitic being lodged in her womb.

Nowadays, modern medicine can fix the problem of RH incompatibility between a fetus and a mother with a simple injection. But in 1957 there were no injections, and so I was born in a very poor state of health. I don’t recall the number of blood transfusions I received in the first three days of my life, but Daddy always said I looked just like a little pincushion.

There were no neonatal care units in the hospitals in 1957. There were only doctors in white lab coats and nurses in starched white uniforms. Medical care was determined by people, not by machines. Hermann Hospital came equipped only with a standard maternity ward and nursery, but the nurses there took very good care of me. My liver was not functioning at first, and I was quite jaundiced and sickly-looking. The doctors told my parents that they might could “go in there” and clean out my bile ducts, but there was nothing they could do for my liver. For three long days my parents waited in terrified suspense while I clung to life like a tiny mewling kitten.

Luckily for me, however, my liver did finally begin to function, and I slowly began to thrive. Mama was sent home from the hospital after the requisite 10 days, but I spent three weeks in the hospital before I was allowed to come home. Daddy came to see me every evening when he got off work, but my poor mother was "confined" to home as was the practice of the day. I can only imagine her anxiety and distress while she waited. On the day of my release, as a word of warning, the doctor also told my parents that I would always be a rather weak and sickly child, prone to illnesses and infections. He must have scared my poor parents to death.

Something I probably should have told you at the beginning was that I was not my parents’ first child. (That’s the problem with these life stories. Life is rarely linear; it has all kinds of twists and turns, and until you have the whole background, nothing makes sense as it should.) My parents had already lived through the terror and grief of losing a child once before.

My parents were married in February 1950. They were both 20 years old. They had a one weekend honeymoon in New Orleans and then came back to Houston to resume their lives. But to their great surprise, my mother had become pregnant on her wedding night and almost exactly 9 months to the day, in November 1957, they had a baby boy.

My brother was not as fortunate as me. Again, there were complications because of my parents' RH incompatibility. He only lived a few hours and then he died. My parents were grieving and shell-shocked. They had not even been married one full year, and already they had had to bury a child. It took them seven years to work up the courage to try again. My mother once told me that if I had died also, she would have never tried to have another child. It was just too hard for her.

But, obviously, this time the story had a happier ending. And at the tender age of three weeks, my parents were finally able to bring me home.