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.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, August 28, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
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.
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.
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