Helen, my friend at work, remarked how fun it was to grow up in the 50s.
She mentioned that she enjoyed making mud cakes. She would mixed up some rich Indiana soil with some water in a bowl and then pour it into a cake pan (probably an old tuna tin can). Once dry the beautiful mud cake would fall right out. She had lots of sisters to help her out with a tea party serving her cakes.
I mixed up my dirt with water and added some gravel I found in the yard. Our farm yard was big enough for the for the tractors and machinery to turn around. The yard was covered with pea size gravel to keep the dust down and to keep the yard less muddy when it rained. I took my stiffly beaten concoction and spooned out cookies along the fence line to dry. Like Helen I had pretend tea parties with my dolls at a little table using some small play dishes. Yes these were real dishes that broke if you dropped them and cut you if you touched the broken parts.
I had a couple of play tables. One was white metal trim with a green vinyl type table top. The chair folded out with green seats. They were miniatures to what the parents had for folding chairs. My cousin Julianne was a few years older. She had grown out of her little table. Julianne’s mother, Onita Gibson, always had the best taste and bought Julianne the very best. It was the cutest little thing made out of wood and painted a soft pink. The little matching wooden chairs were painted the same pink.
I had a small childs rocking chair made of maple with a darker red upholstry. I keep this chair for years and years. Once my children were too old to use it I gave it to a lady who I meet at an art fair in the 80’s. It was an art show over several days. She and her little girl were staying in their van. It was bitter cold and she had no money to buy a hotel room so I invited her to spend the night. I think she was from Colorado Springs. When her little girl sat in the chair it fit her just right. It needed recovered pretty badly by that time. This women knew how to re-upholster things so I gave it to her. She gave me one of her water colors, which I still have to this day. It is of an old pick-up in the woods. I love it.
We played softball in Goldsmith’s field next to our school. All the kids gathered in the field. We needed everyone so we could play work up. Not many of us had gloves. I didn’t like to be the pitcher not because I had trouble getting the ball close to the batter, but because the balls would come barreling toward you from the bat and with no glove they could really sting when you tried to catch them. I could hit the ball OK, but didn’t have a clue about strategy. Just hit the ball anywhere you could and run like hell before someone throws you out. We didn’t have much equipement except a couple of bats and a few balls. No hats, uniforms or other snazzy equipement for us.
Stan said the same thing about playing balls when he grew up in New York. It was called stick ball. They really had good ball savvy playing in the streets and the empty lots. Manuvering around the things in the lots it interesting compared to the smooth fields neatly marked off in parks today.
Children were innovative and knew how to entertain themselves with limited materials.
Pleasant Valley was my country school with grades 1 – 8. There were about 4 – 10 kids per grade on two floors in three rooms. It was special to be selected with a classmate to take out the flag and string it up the pole. We learned to fold it properly so it ended up in a triangle like they do when a soldier dies and they hand the flag to a mother or wife as they say Thanks to your son or husband for the service to your country.
We also took turns ringing the school bell high in the steeple with the big fat rope. Blackboards lined the rooms and we all stood around the boards with white chalk in our hands waiting for the teacher to read off arithmetic problems. Then we would scurry to be the first one finished with the problems with the right answer.
We sat around a large table with our reading books and took turns reading different paragraphs. I wasn’t very good at this reading out loud thing so I would count kids and paragraphs to determine which would be mine. Then practice reading to myself so when it was my turn I would be able to pronounce all the words. No wonder I didn’t learn what we were reading, just how to read my paragraph outloud. They must have been history books.
We had small playground. The big kids walked around the school house during recess, girls walking together with the boys huddled watching them. The little kids played on the swings, teter-tater and big old slide. We would swing the swings as high as we could pump, then jump out to see who could jump the farthest.
One swing set had a monkey bar. We liked to hang from our knees or standup and pump it faster and faster. One year the school put on a circus for the parents. My friend Lois Goldsmith and I were the trapese artists. Our moms had made us little bright blue cotton costumes with short flared skirts. They had embroderied our names with sequins and trimmed the skirts edge too. We were probably about 7 years old.
We would slick the slide by sitting on waxed paper as we came down. The slide was long and had a curve that would slow you down if you didn’t get a good move on. With the slide all slicked up you would be thrown about 5 or more feet at the bottom. The teachers were not so happy when they found out about the slicked slide. At the top of the slide we would sometimes grab the poles and slide on down. I spend the first few years with skinned knees from falling out of the swings or scuffing into the dirt from the slide. The teacher would bandaid me up after she dapped the spot with murcurochome. Ouch. Bactine was finially invented which didn’t hurt at all.