Our two story farm house was heated by two propane furnace burners; one in the kitchen and one in the back guest bedroom. At once time there must have been a furnace fired up by coal as there was a long skinny room off the utility room that at one time is were the coal was loaded. There was an opening about a yard square where a wooden door unlatched to the outside that was used to shovel the coal from the truck into the room.
Now that we didn’t need the room for coal when the furnace was replaced, this room was given to me as a play room. It had a rough wooden floor and walls with only a light hanging from a bulb in the middle of the room. It was about eight foot long by four feet wide. I never once thought about how dingy this room was, all covered with coal dust. I’m sure my Mom would have mopped it down before I moved in my toys.
I had an old rectangular oak china closet for my books and some dolls. The glass had long ago been removed and one door was partially off. This cabinent came from my Mom’s house where she grew up in Greeley at 529 5th Street. It seemed to mean a lot to her, so it meant a lot to me. I was happy to arrange my things on the dark stained oak shelves.
This cabinent moved from that farm house around the corner to Swanson’s basement in the 50’s when my Dad bought the old Frank Swanson farm from his Uncle Ben. It was never used at that place with the same affection as when I had it as a kid. One time I remember painting some project with aluminum spray paint in the basement. I needed to test the spray so I used the top left corner of that old cabient. The corners have some ornant carving typical of furniture from the 40’s.
My parents moved the cabinent to town when they grew too old to scale the steps in the Swanson farm house. When Mom moved to a retirement community in Lakewood, I brought the old cabinent home still with the almuninum paint on the corner. I considered stripping down the cabient, but opt’d instead for the shabby shiek look and painted it an off-white. I gave it to my daughter to hold her treasures some fifty years after I had used it as a child.
One of my favorite toys was a chalk board on an V shaped easel. It had pictures that I could view by rolling two knobs to scroll through the ideas. I took great care with my colored chalk as supplies came at a premium in the late forties early fifties. I spent hours trying to copy the pictures, drawing in the details and shading. This chalk board would filp down to make a flat surface like a desk. The board was green on that side. Later, my first grade teacher, Mrs Read, gave me come encouragement when I drew giraffes and colored in their spots on large construction paper with colorcrayons. We didn’t have Pre-Schoot or Kindergarden at that time.
I had a few dolls, but wasn’t much of a doll child. I like a boy doll I had named Cecil. He had a soft rubber body and kind of a hard head with a pensive smile. His hair painted on his round head. He wore a red checked shirt with blue overalls.
Another doll I had and still have in our attic is a saucy walker. She was really special as you could hold her shoulders and move her side-to-side to make her legs swing out to take a step. Her body was rock hard plastic with golden yellow synthetic hair. I think I called her Brenda. My mom must have liked her too as she made several little dresses and bonnets for her. The doll had rubber shoes with a Mary Jane strap that slipped on her riggid feet.
My sister Nancy, had an old baby doll with a composite head and a cotton stuffed cloth body. Nancy, being 10 years older than me, of course would not let me play with her doll.
We did this crazy thing on our beds. We had bumpy Martha Washington type bedspreads. Each morning we had to make our beds smooth as silk with the pillows tucked into the bedspread. Then we put a yarn octopus in the middle of the bed and spread out the braided legs. When you think about it the octopus was the simpliest, silly thing to put on a bed. Hours were spent making this thing. Yarn was cut into long strips. The middle wrapped around something round (wade of cotton) and tied off with a bow at the neck. Then the legs were divided into eight units and brained into octopus arms. A scrap of yarn tied off each leg. I remember black octopus’ but maybe we had other colors too.