Posted by:
anagrammy
(
)
Date: August 15, 2011 04:26PM
And it does...
I played jacks, hopscotch, jumped rope, dodgeball, tetherball, tree tag. I crocheted and taught myself how to sew. My best friend was pitied by everyone because her mother forced her to take accordian lessons.
Before hairspray was invented, there was lacquer. It came in a small glass bottle and you poured it into an open reservoir which was attached to a black rubber bulb. Then you formed your barrel curls, pincurled them in place and sprayed with lacquer.
I pincurled my hair every night from the time I was five, which was in 1951. I still have a small dent in my right tooth from opening bobby pins.
In the Los Angeles suburb where I lived, delivery trucks came down the street selling baked goods in long drawers with shiny tin bottoms. The ice cream man came with the tune I still remember, "TA-ta-ta-ta-tatata, ta-TA-ta-ta-taaaaah" The ice man came before we got a refrigerator. He would life out the huge almost transparent cube of ice and he always gave us kids an icycle to lick. We wandered around the neighborhood freely, barefoot on the warm sidewalks, speculating about the "witch" who lived in the shadowy overgrown house on the corner and running screaming the one time she opened the door (poor old soul!)
We were allowed to go into people's gardens and get something to eat if we asked first. The neighbor let us pick out own and then let us wash what we had in the hose. We ate the carrots or apples on the spot. My mother had a dichondra lawn which she was inordinately proud of. One day gophers came in and she went after them screaming and stabbing at them with a shovel. Blood spurted out of the grass and she screamed in victory GOT YOU JAP! I thought the gopher's name was Jap and had nightmares for months. I also had nightmares about airplanes shooting at the ground. I have no idea where that came from since I was born in 1944. Maybe I heard adults talking.
"Halo, everybody, Halo! Halo is the shampoo that glorifies your hair, so Halo everybody, Halo!" That was one of the first advertisements I ever saw on TV. When my dad brought it in, I thought it was a radio with glass so you could see the working parts. My mother told me there were little people inside the radio and she laughed and laughed thinking somehow I would believe that (I could see the heads were too big for the whole body to fit in the radio). It was a five inch screen and my Dad said we'd have to watch it from the front porch because it was so big. There was no word for "cartoons" then and so when one would come on, I would run to the porch and yell "Funny thing, funny thing" and my sister and her friends would run into the house to watch it. Three stations and a pattern of an Indian on a target. TV ended at ten or so at night and the pattern was on all night until 6:00 am.
Candyland hadn't been invented. We played Parcheesi, Pirate and Traveler, Monopoly, Checkers and Chess, and Chinese checkers. That was it, plus puzzles of course. Every family had a big puzzle out, all the time.
One time I went to the car lot with my parents who bought an Rambler station wagon, which we named "The Little Jewel." At the end of the row of cars were round playhouses, which I fell in love with. I asked my mom if we could get one and she said, "Those are bomb shelters but we're not getting one because I'd rather die than live in one of those."
Anagrammy
PS. I wore so many crenolines (sp?) starched slips, the principal in high school told me they made my legs look like toothpicks. I had a hickey on my neck, which she thought was a bruise from an attempted strangulation and she called the police, who told her what it was. The look on her face makes me laugh to this day. She was treating me like a domestic violence victim and her face shifted from worried concern to this look of absolute hatred and contempt which practically blistered the paint behind me.