Category: When I was a kid

The World According to Me– Part 3 of “Who am I?”(originally posted 3-21-15)

About Me, Sometimes re-runs, This and That, When I was a kid, Writing and Blogging

{Having outlined important features of my life at Age 6, and again at Age 11… through early childhood,  into World War II and out by age 11, what follows here is a rather well-edited version  of the highlights of my life during the decade of 1945-1955.}

[THE END OF WWII ]

On the last day of World War II, when the armistice was signed with the Japanese, the official word report for that the war was indeed over, came from 11-year-old-Me…at least for my elderly neighbor, Mr. Myers.  I proudly delivered the news report, standing in the front yard.  He was the only person that I actually discussed the war’s end with, as my parents were not into talking of important world issues with kids.

Next followed several years of childhood and Junior High.  This half dozen years or so was a very difficult time in my life, in which my school life was marked by depression and questionable educational progress.  The less said about that era the better.

[THE LIBRARY BOOKMOBILE]

One of my favorite good memories was of the library Bookmobile.   There was not a branch of the regional public library in our town, but the Bookmobile did come around once a week.   It parked in an area at the center of town, behind or adjacent to a new car dealership.  During the war car sales had slowed to a stop, and it was a couple of years before new vehicles began to appear–once the resources and manpower needed to produce new cars became available as the soldiers returned from the war front and went to work in the factories again.

Anyway, the Bookmobile was a highlight of my young life.  The vehicle was an old bus that had been made over into a make-shift library, with shelves built into the sides and some portable shelves that were moved out into the  parking lot when the weather permitted.   Even today I can recall choosing books from the shelves, with guidance from the librarian, who was kind and liked to read.   She knew about books and the types of books children liked to read, and supervised the avoidance of inappropriate materials.

I seem to recall sitting on the steps at the entrance to the Bookmobile, but that memory may be an embellishment of my active imagination.  At any rate I sat there and read for hours, and always went home carrying an armload of books that the library lady had approved and recommended.  My library card was one of my favorite possessions, and my goal was to read every book in the Bookmobile.  I modified that goal shortly to include reading all of the books on certain shelves stocked with age-appropriate materials.

When the Bookmobile was not there, I had another hang-out where I could go and spend afternoons–high in a cherry tree in the field at the back of our half-acre lot.  That tree was a refuge and a joy for me, as I was the only person in the world who knew about that particular tree.

But I want to get on with it, and so I’ll skip to junior and early high school.

[THE COLD WAR]

Although The War was over, the Cold War had begun.  This time the enemy was the Russians, or more specifically the dreaded Communists of the Soviet Union, and Red China.   We kids and teenagers were still very well aware that we were within the easy sights of instant annihilation, and soon there was another war demanding our allegiance–this one in Korea.    My primary remembrance was the Korean War (er…”conflict,” it was never a declared war) was that a lot of our schoolmate boys joined the service as soon as they could, and one of my best friends…a mild-mannered red-haired guy who went off and never came back–died when  the army tank he was riding in over in Korea  hit a land-mine and exploded.    The military draft was in effect, and many of the boys in our school joined up with one of the branches of the service.   It was permitted for them to quit school at age 16 as long as they went into the military.  My brother joined the U.S.Navy at age 17.   My boyfriend, who would later become my husband later, quit school and  joined the army, but was sent to Germany instead of Korea.

MARRIAGE OR CAREER?

The first half of the 1950s saw us growing up, and the girls all got jobs in offices or shops, although a few did manage to go off to college to   There really were not any other viable choices for girls: nurse, teacher, secretary.   Oh, there was also the opportunity to join one of the Womens’ Services: the WACs, WAVEs, SPARS…with the Army, Navy, Coast Guard.

I wonder now why I never thought of joining up myself.  It would have been a great job and something that I would jump at the chance––NOW–-to do.  Well, I could have gone to nursing school I guess, but my nonexistent math skills and absolute disinterest in school in general would have made that option unlikely.

A word about Girls of the era:  it was common to be planning one’s wedding at the same time as graduation.  A few girls got –OMG, pregnant– which completely destroyed any educational aspirations.  Even high school was out of the question.   Most of us who did NOT get into “trouble” and graduated high school were sent off to work in offices.  At least I did have secretarial skills which landed me a job and provided a respectable occupation.  Typing and Shorthand were the skills to have.  I did not qualify as a stenographer (who was proficient in secretarial skills–especially Gregg Shorthand, which was a mark of distinction.)  I was classified as a “clerk-typist,” which was higher rank than “file clerk,” but not as high as “secretary” or “stenographer.”

[OVERSEAS AS AN ARMY WIFE]

In 1954 I got engaged, got married in August, and on Christmas Day 1955 landed in Bremerhaven, Germany to meet a train which transported me to Frankfurt, and Giessen, and a U. S. Army base  in a small town called Butzbach.     I was 21 years old when I went to Germany on a troop ship which had been partially converted to transport officers and dependents.

That was an experience…at 21 I had no clue.  Spoke only a little bit of German, and had never been farther away from home than about ten miles.   The trip across the Atlantic Ocean was wonderful…I spent every waking moment on deck soaking in the atmosphere of the sea air and the turquoise water churning at the bow of the ship.  I absolutely loved that journey, and while my fellow dependent wives languished in their small cabins or crowded “theaters” aboard ship, I stayed on deck as much as possible.  My tiny cabin was shared with two other women, and two two-year-olds in cribs.  Yikes!

My German never did get beyond some rudimentary grammar and basic Berlitz self-study.  We lived in a German apartment for one week, maybe two, then moved into U.S.Army quarters into a brand new apartment building in Butzbach, near Giessen.   Most of the people I came in contact with were Americans, except in the commissary (grocery store) and shop-keepers, most of whom spoke English.   My two closest friends were American wives from US southern states, one of whom was still quite incensed at General Sherman’s March to the Sea after the U.S. Civil War… not the best company for a Yankee gal like me.

We played a lot of Scrabble, Canasta, and Pinochle…especially when the troops/husbands were out on maneuvers and we wives were left to entertain ourselves.

I often remember with some regret that my year and a half in Germany was pretty much squandered, in that my interaction with the Germans pretty much involved buying things… haben sie haferflocken? (Do you have oatmeal?)  And ordering and paying for things like bread, rolls (still warm, hung in plastic bags on our doorknobs,) and beer.  (Yummy beer, in green bottles with the bale stoppers…delivered by the case to our apartment door.)

That was also my introduction to hostility…as the locals were not crazy about Americans in general, and snotty young-girl-wife Americans who showed up to re-claim their soldier-husbands in general.  When we got to the area  there were still burned out buildings and huge piles of rubble everywhere in the cities, children that did not want anything to do with us, old lady widows dressed in black…riding bicycles…who hated our guts.     The town near us was especially bombed-out, as according to local lore, some American fliers were killed by farmers armed with pitch-forks as they parachuted from their shot-down planes.  The story was that the allied planes on return flights from Frankfurt back to London routinely “saved a bomb for [the town].”    Very logical, and the town was really in shambles.

In March of 1957 my husband and I returned to the States, via the MATS, Military Air Transportation Service, because I was pregnant.  I was disappointed because I was really looking forward to returning to the States by ship.  The plane ride (I think my second flight ever) was long and boring–and we didn’t even have a window to look at the Atlantic Ocean.     We retrieved our car from the port in New Jersey, then drove home to Ohio, enroute to new military orders shipping us to Fort Hood, Texas.

Thus began the next phase of My Life…

coming up soon…GRADMAMA2011

Me and The War, reblog, Part 2 of Who am I to have an About Page?

About Me, Sometimes, Sometimes re-runs, When I was a kid, Writing and Blogging

[This post was the second installment of the life history of… well, Me. The first time it appeared was in 2015. For my VCBs: Very Cool Bloggers, this post will be a re-run, please bear with me if you’ve read it before, and please enjoy it if its new.]


In the first installment of this feature, Who Am I to have an About Page? https://mumbletymuse.com/so-who-am-I-to-have-an-About-Page-?/   I started out as a newcomer to the world on a Friday the 13th, and by the end of Part One I had been to California and back, eaten part of a persimmon and part of a gourd, and had finished Kindergarten.  Which pretty much sets the stage for the second part of my life story.

Part Two:        ME AND THE WAR

That would be the Second World War, WWII, The Big One– the catalyst for the rise to world dominance of the United States.  I was eleven when the war ended in 1945, and I must say that I was one patriotic little girl.  I was so proud of the accomplishments of my country, in which we had emerged mostly safe and sound (those of us who had not been killed during the war years, of course) and had the distinction of being THE leader of the Free World.

But let me skip the rhetoric and get on with MY part of the War, which began in 1941…along with the arrival of my baby sister when I was eight and a half years old; my brother was six.  It was just us three until near the end of the war in 1945, when another sister joined our merry band.

One thing I recall about grade school is that there was a Congresswoman who regularly was permitted to leave fliers advertising her prowess in the U.S. Congress on our school desks.  She would come in and talk to us about how important it was for our parents to vote for her. Despite having been told, on my very first day of first grade,  by the teacher to “go home and never come back again,” as I explained to my parents when they picked me up walking home from school about an hour after classes began,  I did indeed continue with my education.  I remember well the adventures of Dick and Jane, Baby, and Spot, the stars of our first level readers.

The main thing going on everywhere was THE WAR.   We went to the movie theaters, and were treated to black and white newsreels showing bombs dropping from airplanes, Hitler’s marching troops in huge showy choreographed formations, and in-coming shipments of USA- flag-covered coffins.  We recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, and read The Weekly Reader, a newspaper produced especially for school children at various levels. My grandfather taught me about television.  He had a floor-model radio, which had a large window area for tuning various stations on the radio, and he said that some day, after the war, we would be able to look at windows like that and see actual movies and real people talking and singing and the like.   I was properly impressed…this was undoubtedly the source of my great love of electronic stuff.

Then the newspapers, The Cleveland Press, The News, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer told us every day how many soldiers had been killed in battle, and kept us well informed about the terrible evil enemies of the United States on all areas of the world.   Toward the end of the war there was news about Hitler’s atrocities, and the Japanese cities evaporated by TWO atomic bombs.  The pictures were everywhere in magazines and newspapers. The newsreels at the movies were relentless in presenting the horrors of war, and these were incomprehensible to American kids, who had thankfully never had bombs dropped on them.

Movies themselves, presented on monster screens in huge movie theaters that always reminded me of palaces (not that I had ever been in a palace) also presented the great block-buster films of the 40s…complete with horror stories about the war. So this brings Me to the end of the Great War, and the beginning of the phenomenon known as THE COLD WAR.

The newspapers treated us to daily headlines screaming of annihilation and pending doom.  A particularly horrible series presented by the newspapers contained in part a huge bulls-eye, with segments indicating the extent of the death shadow that marked Cleveland…with its four NIKE missile sites forming at once a horrible defense capability of retaliation.  The center of the bulls-eye, of course, meant instant end to everything…out in the suburbs the threat lessened sequentially until by a distance of thirty miles out some percentage of life might survive.

BUT that survival would depend on bomb shelters, which might delay death by radiation by a couple of weeks. As children we were conversationally proficient about hydrogen bombs, pros and cons of including guns among bomb shelter supplies, and just how bad radiation poisoning was. So that was pretty much what one little girl knew about THE WAR… The next era of MY ABOUT PAGE    will be coming up soon:  THE 1950s

please stay tuned…

Measles and other vaccines

Commentary, When I was a kid

Measles? Really?

Back in the day, 1963 more or less, my more or less tranquil household came face to face with a childhood disease that, at the time, was common in the United States. Measles…along with Mumps and Chicken Pox, were not perhaps considered to be a really big deal. Most children encountered the diseases in school, and were almost immediately contagious and parents and teachers alike usually dealt with Measles almost as routine.

My first grader came down with Measles, broke out head to toe in the warm red rash and fever that were characteristic of the childhood disease. Actually considered more of a nuisance than a threat at the time, we settled down into the Measles routine: stay in bed, cover windows to prevent light coming in, drink plenty of liquids, and hope other children in the family did not contract the ailment—while facing the fact that they probably would, as the patient was highly contagious.

At the time we had two younger children, boys less than two years of age. With my already worn copy of Dr. Spock’s Children and Baby Care close at hand, Dr. Spock was the first line of defense against childhood perils as the epitome of encouraging and reassuring information. When “the doctor” recommended that the boys be fortified with gamma globulin injection as a precaution, although he assured me that the risk to them was small. (Note please: I just fact-checked that statement, to make sure that wasn’t part of my sometimes dramatic memory.)

My daughter, however, became very ill very fast. She had the attendant high fever, 106-degrees is the number that I remember, and showed all the symptoms of Measles, including hallucinations, which scared the living daylights out of me.
There was the “hard Measles,” with its severe symptoms of fever, rash, delirium, eyesight impairment….and “the three-day-Measles,” which was a different disease altogether apparently.

It so happened that daughter’s first grade class was scheduled to appear in a television segment, performing a skit or song at the local TV station. The performance had been long anticipated, and the children in the class diligently learned their lines, and practiced for the show. Daughter had been looking forward to the presentation, and was very disappointed that she would not be able to participate. We consulted with the doctor, who advised that there would probably be no damage to her young eyes from exposure to the TV set for a few minutes, and we went to elaborate lengths to wheel the TV and its stand into the sick room, and dim the light appropriately…but alas, the poor little girl was too ill to even glance at the television, nor was she even interested.

This little vignette from my past (I took everything very seriously back in the day) comes to mind whenever the subject of Measles comes up. Daughter was personally none the worse for her bout with the Measles. The boys did not get the disease then, and our two little girls who came along a couple of years later were protected by the relatively-new Measles vaccine.

Rewinding to about thirty years before, when I was a child myself, I recall vividly standing in line with all of my other classmates waiting our turn to get out “shots” from the school nurse. This experience was high drama, as we watched with dread as the kids at the front of the line actually got their injection, displaying varying degrees of panic, bravado, or silent terror.

No one had a choice back then…I’m talking 1940s…your kid got in the line and got the shot. Happily, the result was that Measles disease was nearly eradicated.

A quick check on the spelling of “eradicated” I happened upon this appropriate Wikipedia comment:

What diseases have vaccines eliminated? Vaccines have contributed to a significant reduction in many childhood infectious diseases, such as diphtheria, measles, and Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib). Some infectious diseases, such as polio and smallpox, have been eliminated in the United States due to effective vaccines.

New Title…update on post about assonance poems…examples from poets like Edgar Allen Poe (re-blogged from yourdictionary.com )

Books and Reading, inspiration, Poetry, This and That, When I was a kid, WORD PRESS

http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-assonance-poems.html

 

Yesterday’s post reminded me of how much I enjoyed the poetry classes I and about a thousand other bloggers participated in last year.   The classes were so popular they had to shut enrollment down…I think.    The moderators presented us with some really obscure, to me anyway, terms and forms of poetry.    I dimly remember poetry classes in school back in the dark ages, the days of my lightheadedness and depth of my soul combined to write really bad poems about lust and love and despair at ever experiencing either.

Having re-read my favorite nonsense poem about the anteater and the eel, my contribution to the assignment for the day, which was Assonance.    Reading the poem again I realized that I had no clue as to exactly what assonance was, so I googled it.  The link that came up is just marvelous…and made me SO jealous of the famous zealots that wrote and wrote their hearts out back in their day.

One word of guidance…poetry that rhymes and/or possesses a metric cadence just cries out to be read out loud, line by line, not mumbled silently and skimmed for meaning.

I belabor the obvious here, again, and state that I am not a poet.    I respect poetry, I do, and although I understand the agony of who are dead serious about writing and rhyming.   For me the main rule is that any piece of writing, poetry or novel, song or joke…needs to have meaning.

A bit of toe-tapping helps get in the mood.    Jumping rope always sets the pace too…   “Dan and Susie sittin’ in a tree, k.i.s.s.i.n.g….”    sorry, I wasn’t well enough coordinated to jump rope effectively.

http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-assonance-poems.html

[This is a good article, and fun to read…even for those who don’t give a fig about what assonance means.]

childhood memories of war, re-posted from September 2016

re-blogged posts, This and That, When I was a kid

This post originally was published here on SOMETIMES in September of 2016. I will re-post it today in keeping with a post by fellow blogger Ginsberg420, also re-blogged today.

SOMETIMES

Perhaps the most vivid memories of nursery tales were not of bunnies or bantering fairies…but of War and its aftermath.     We here in the United States did not suffer the horrors that children in other countries did, the bombings and air raids and worse.   But such accounts were very much vicariously present.    And directly following the Hot War followed the Cold War, with its insidious psychological terror.

I was eleven when World War II ended in 1945.    What I write here are my impressions as a child.

Here in the Cleveland, Ohio area we had three major daily newspapers in Cleveland,
in the 1940s-1950s.    Subtlety was not a virtue to our dueling newspapers, bent on gathering new and worse  predictions and statistics to entertain and scare the heck out of the readership.     Everyone read the papers…there was no television in the vast majority  of our homes, and except for newsreel productions in the movie…

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Snow Drifts, and The Night of the Tomato, revisited

This and That, When I was a kid, Writing and Blogging

Well, Spring is on the way, I heard!    We here in Northern Ohio escaped most of the big snow storm this past week, which is fine with me, but the news weather people were quite disappointed.     It is always so heartening the way they put on parkas and mittens and various snow gear and wade out to the nearest snow drift to pose for the 11 o’clock news segment.      There used to be an old joke about shoveling “partly cloudy” off the front walk on the morning after the prediction of sunshine and warming temperatures.

We never know what to expect here in Ohio in March, when the daffodils are raring to go, and indeed when ready the blooms just open, even there is snow up to their eyebrows.   We have photos someplace of snowdrifts with daffodil flowers laying right on top of the snow.

Back in the 1940s there was a great snow fall in Cleveland.   My Dad and the other men in the neighborhood waded through the waist-high snow (maybe it was thigh-high…but hey, I was a kid) to trudge along the middle of the road to the grocery store, which valiantly opened its doors to the brave men who made it through the deep snow to buy supplies for their families.

Kids all over town were ecstatic, since the school was closed.   Except me…who was sick.   I have written about this traumatic event in my young life before…ten years old and unable to go outside to play in what (as far as I can recall) was the most exciting event ever.      I still remember standing looking out the front window as my brother proceeded to demolish the pristine white snow drifts.    Even at this late date the disappointment is  palpable.     (I have  always been a dramatic kid.)

The television news crew was stranded at the TV studio for a long time, and the exhausted and dedicated News Men were so worn out after being on camera for days (well, many hours anyway) they removed their coats and ties, which was nearly unheard of on the TV in those days.    These selfless and loyal personalities stayed with their fans and watchers throughout the siege…helping the police department care for the needs of the citizens…who were desperate for milk and other life-sustaining items.

Several years later two of my girlfriends, and our boyfriends, were caught in another huge snow storm.   We came out of a movie theater, to find the storm raging…and nearby was a man and woman whose car had become stuck in a snow drift.    We—the boys anyway—helped the couple out of the drift, and they invited us to their house for sandwiches and a hot drink.      That was nice of them, as by this time we were all frozen and starving.

To my horror, the lady served us bacon-lettuce-tomatoes (BLTs), which was something of a remarkable gesture in the middle of winter to have fresh tomatoes and lettuce.    Now, lest anyone fails to understand why the BLTs would be such a bad thing to the point of being a Big Deal to Me.      To that point in time I had never eaten a tomato…I hated tomatoes, and avoided them at all costs.   But now…faced with a tomato sandwich…I HAD to eat it.    Refusing to partake of the couple’s generosity was not possible.

So that’s how I happened to eat a tomato for the first time in my life.    I think of that incident every time I see a BLT….but yes, I do eat tomatoes now, at least in sandwiches with bacon and lettuce.

cheese kuchen and jars of teaspoons

This and That, When I was a kid

My grandmother Lillian always kept a jar of teaspoons on the kitchen table, along with other appurtenances to   the daily serving of tea.   As a little kid I was allowed to drink tea only in a weakened version, with plenty of milk and sugar.     We usually had cookies of some sort…biscuits as my UK friends might say…and on occasion the most luscious cheesecake ever baked!    The cheesecake came from the bakery on the corner of the street, from which most of the bread we consumed  originated.  More accurately the delicacy was a cheese kuchen, baked inside a kuchen-like crust.   ooooh…

My great-grandmother had arrived from England when she was ten years old, along with her parents and siblings.  It was she, Ann, who had continued the custom of “Tea” as served by her own mother, Mary.    One of the special tea guests was a woman called “Aunt Frank” which was always a great source of amusement to me (and to my Dad, who had grown up in this household.)    Her name was Frances, and she was my grandmother’s sister-in-law, Uncle Will’s widow.

Ann lived to be 93…a remarkably advanced age in those days of the 1930s.   When I knew her she had already retired from her active church life, and the long history of women’s causes…especially the WCTU, Women’s Christian Temperance Union.    The WCTU was the famous Carrie Nation’s organization, which on occasion had experienced members with axes attacking the bars and terrorizing drinkers.

At the time I was three years old, so my memories are dim and certainly embroidered with endless tales related over the subsequent years by relatives.   So every time I think of Tea, or England, or yummy Cheese Kuchen…I think of Great Grandma Ann and Gram Lillian, and the glass jar with the tea spoons.