1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: THE HAZARDS OF DATING

Tonight looked to be exciting. Neila had a date!! With any luck, she'd bring him back home and they would sit in the living room which was situated right next to the bedroom that Susan, Jan and I shared. We watched television with our parents until 10 p.m. when the news came on. Then we meandered one by one into our room, and put on our matching pink cotton shorty pajamas,  killing time until we heard the telltale slamming of two car doors.

"They're here!" Susan said, uncharacteristically interested.

"Mother and Daddy just turned off the tv and went to bed," I noted.

"I think I hear them," Jan added. "The front door just opened."

"Quick!" I said. "Shut the bedroom door." Something blonde flashed past me and hit the door with a quick slap, slamming it into the facing with finality.

Without consultation,  Susan and I ran simultaneously to the door to join Jan and each pressed an ear to the hard thick wood.

"I can't hear anything," Jan said in a stage whisper.

"Shhh," Susan put her finger to her lips and frowned at her.

I shrugged at Susan. "Nothing," I mouthed.

Just then we noticed Jan slidiing her head downward on the door. We didn't immediately understand why until we saw her grab the brown metal doorknob to stabilize herself so she could turn and peer through the keyhole. She squinted with her right eye and looked with her left, but she seemed to be having trouble getting anything in focus.

"Move over," I said, shoving her into the cedar chest beside the door.

I positioned my eye on the keyhole. "There they are. They're coming in the front door." I said with some excitement.

"Let me see, please," Susan said, edging me out of the way.

Jan pouted, sitting on the edge of the cedar chest. "I thought of it first," she said, sticking her lip out.

Susan was now sighted in on the green brocade couch, which sat directly opposite our bedroom door on the far wall of the living room, next to the front door.

She made motions with her long, delicate hands indicating that we should be quiet.

In just a few moments, though, she seemed to lose interest. "They're sitting on the couch. I don't think we should be doing this," she said. "It's not really very nice to Neila. She might get mad at us. Let's go to bed."

"Ok," Jan said too quickly.

"Wait, Jan," I said, trying to muster soldiers for a new plan I felt forming in my vacuous head.

"Let's jump from the chest of drawers to the bed,  then run to the cedar chest and open and shut the door while we do it.  We'll each start at a different place and cross in the middle."

The door would never stay shut for long by itself because the house had shifted and none of the doors fit perfectly in their frames.

The chest of drawers stood on the left side of the door,  with  the bed  situated lengthwise at a 90 degree angle to it;  the cedar chest was on the right side of the door.

"Ok," I instructed her, trying not to look at Susan's disapproving face. "You get on the cedar chest, and I'll get on the chest of drawers. When I tell you, pop the doorknob and swing the door toward me. You jump off the cedar chest and run across to the bed. I'll jump off the chest of drawers onto the bed, onto the floor, then catch the door and swing it closed,  run across the room and  jump on the cedar chest. Then we'll repeat it in reverse, with me popping the doorknob."

Susan made no secret of rolling her eyes.

"Get on the cedar chest," I told my minion, while I stepped nimbly from the bed onto the top of the chest of drawers.

"Ok," she said, turning and crawling up.

"You understand what to do?" I asked authoritatively.

"Uhuh," she said, looking slightly uncomfortable.

"Ok, go!" I said jumping with all my might onto the bed, then bouncing up off it onto the floor and running across toward the cedar chest, hitting the door which had swung open.  I hit the door so hard with my flat palms that they felt like they'd been stung by a hundred bees.

Once Jan was in place on the chest of drawers, I gave the command again, then popped the doorknob, sending the door flying open.  Jan was to slam it shut, but she was not fast enough in getting down to the floor, so the door stayed open, and we had to hide, both of us now cowering on the bed, watching the door shimmy slightly on its  hinges.

"Felisa?  Jan?"  We heard Neila's voice and looked sheepishly at each other.  "What are you doing?  You should be in bed."

We didn't answer, but hunkered down now, dreading what came next.

She entered the doorway, and looked toward us.  Susan had burrowed down in her bed and pretended to be asleep.

"Now you need to go to sleep.  You haven't shown  Bill that  you have very good manners, now, have you?"

We ducked our heads, unable to meet her gaze.

"Sorry," Jan said, meaning it.

"Sorry, too," I said, probably meaning it.

"Goodnight.  Bill is going home in a few minutes.  See you in the morning."

"Night," we said, barely looking at her.

"That was dumb of us," I said, realizing that most of it was my fault.

"I agree," Susan said, suddenly awake.

"Neila's not mad", Jan offered.

"Yeah, but I feel stupid." I said. "Bill probably thinks we're idiots.  And what if he never asks her out again because she has sisters who act like monkeys?"

"Well, I don't think she really wanted to go out with him again," Susan said, "so maybe we did her a favor."  

"We'll find out tomorrow," I imagine, I said resignedly, pulling the sheet and bedspread over my head.

"Can we jump off the chest tomorrow?  That was fun!" my former minion asked. 

"You'll have to ask Mother; and for goodness sake, don't tell her that we already did it!"

I sank into the bed, pulling the covers tightly around me,  hoping to lose my immaturity in them.
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1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: Waste, Waste, and more Waste

Getting rid of things we didn't need presented a problem in Purdon. We had no city services; we didn't even know what "city services" were. Our family and all the other families got rid of everything ourselves and provided our own disposal tasks.

We didn't need police because people either just killed each other, got over it, or the family intervened; in extreme cases, they took retaliation into their own hands, usually with an unpleasant outcome. Decent people knew the sheriff and deputy sheriffs for Navarro County, and they rushed out to Purdon on the highway in their squad cars when things got out of hand, which was rare.

We didn't seem to have many fires because people didn't throw their cigarette butts out car windows or just any old where, like on the street. They put them in ashtrays in the cars and homes and emptied the stale contents every few days. Events like when my brother and Phil threw the matches in the dry grass were infrequent, and since so many women were home in the daytime, these aberrant occurrences were often spotted early enough to be handled by the swift application of water from a garden hose.

Water quality was excellent for most people, coming either from underground wells or large metal cisterns that caught the pure rainwater that fell in the spring and fall assuring cool, refreshing water for the searing summers.

Of course no garbage services were offered either, so folks had to figure out what to do with the leftovers. We rarely used paperplates or any paper products besides toilet paper, which went into the septic tank and paper towels (which for some unknown reason we called towel paper). Canned vegetables provided the most problematic accrual of waste.

Everyone in town had a "burn barrel", a 50 gallon barrel that sat at the back of the yard. There we burned the "towel paper" and labels off vegetable, fruit, and soup cans. The whole can was tossed in the barrel, and though it wouldn't burn, developed a lovely ashy coating that if touched adhered to one's skin, creating a charcoal colored smear that required lots of scrubbing with soap and water to remove.

For some reason, the fire in that barrel and its sooty contents, was an endless source of fascination for most kids, and we six were no exception, though the older three kids had outgrown playing with the fire in the barrel by the time we younger three got started with it.

"Don't play with the fire in the barrel," my dad would warn, eyeing the flames licking the top of the barrel rim, as he left for work.

"Ok," the three of us said in unison, sticks in hand.

As soon as we heard his truck slow to cross the railroad tracks 15 yards from the house, we hurried to the barrel to see what we could make happen.

"Stick your stick in and see if you can set it on fire," I told Susan.

"Ok," she said unusually agreeably. In seconds, the flames lit the dry branch, and she made neat, tight circles over the barrel with her flaming torch. We watched, hypnotized.

"I'll light mine next," I suggested. She didn't say anything, so I took that as affirmative. It didn't take long for the stick to ignite. The summer heat had sucked it bone dry. I had snapped it easily off the lower part of the large oak next to the house. The others had picked theirs up off the ground.

I held my stick tentatively over the barrel with one hand, bending my knees to reach a stick for Jan that lay between us. "Here," I said with uncharacteristic kindness. "Want to set your stick on fire? We're doing a fire dance with our hands. See?"

"Um, yeah," she said, looking to Susan for reassurance. But Susan was too enamored of her twirling fiery stick and didn't give her the go ahead.
Jan never trusted me as much as she did our older sisters, and rightly so.

Jan's head was just even with the top of the barrel so she couldn't see the flames inside. I reached over and helpfully slid her stick toward the fire.

"Ouch," she said, accidentally touching the side of the rusted barrel, "that's hot," and she dropped her stick into the barrel. Her protest seemed to shake Susan out of a trance, and she suddenly let go of her own stick and watched it fall into the flames.

I held defiantly onto my burning branch even as Susan nodded toward me to let it go. When I didn't drop it, she reminded me with a voice filled with recrimination.

"Now let it go. We shouldn't be doing this anyway. Daddy told us not to, and Mother will be disappointed if she sees what we've done. Remember when you caught the rug and your hair on fire? You don't need to be playing with this. You could get hurt."

Reluctantly, I released my tight grip on the stick and let the rest of it fall into the barrel, the flames licking happily at its dry bark, turning it immediately into tiny glowing red embers.

Inside, we busied ourselves with our dolls while Mother mopped all the linoleum floors. I went into the living room to plink on the old upright and managed to irritate everyone but Mother who said it sounded lovely, and that she thought I had some talent.

Behind the piano, I noticed a small white item, so I retrieved a coat hanger, and stuck it back there, scraping it against the white form, my face pressed against the wall, until finally I pulled it to me. It was one of Daddy's cigarettes. I looked around furtively and picked it up. Mother had already moved to another room with her mop and bucket of water.

"Daaahling," I said, putting it to my lips. "What shall we do today? Everyone wants to swim, so let's go to the pool in the backyard. I can hardly wait to see what your swimsuit looks like. Is it red? You know I love red." I took an imaginary puff, blowing out with great emphasis, then holding the thin tube out between two fingers, my hand posed dramatically near my face, visualizing my conversation partner and her admiring gaze.

"I love red too, daaaahling" a voice said. It was Susan. "What is that in your hand?............Oh my gosh, put that down! How do you find these things?"

I dropped it from my draped hand immediately, reality speeding quickly into the room.

"Sorry," I said. "Don't tell Mother?"

She pursed her lips, considering. "Oh, okay. If you throw it away right now."

I did. And she didn't.

The tobacco tasted rank. Living for a while behind the piano probably didn't improve its taste. Smoking looked so sophisticated on television and the movies, and we loved "smoking" our candy cigarettes, which looked something like the real thing and which we bought in little authentic-looking cigarette packages. But after that brief taste of the true thing, smoking was never a real temptation again. The stale taste stayed in my memory bank, not something I wanted to repeat.

After supper that evening, Daddy said "I think I'll empty that barrel. It's getting too full. It should be cooled off by now. You didn't burn anything in it this afternoon, did you?"

"No," Mother said. "Let me put on some old clothes and I'll help you."

"Can we go?" Jan asked.

"Sure honey," but you need to stay in the front of the truck. It's really dirty there."

"I don't want to go," Susan said. "I'm going to stay here with Neila and study."

"Hey, Daddy," I said, remembering something I needed to tell him. "Do you remember the family we told you moved to town last week? The Reeds?"

"Yes, I remember you mentioning them, but I haven't seen them around town or met them yet."

"Yeah, they said they hadn't met you either. But I told them what you looked like."

"Oh, you did, did you?" My father was overweight, had always worn thick glasses, and was balding quickly, but he was a fastidious dresser and attentive to his appearance. My mother, on the other hand, was slim and pretty, but didn't spend much time "fixing up", preferring to spend her time doing things with the kids.

"Well what did you tell them I looked like?" he said, smiling, hoping for a good reference.

"I just told them you were short, fat, bald and wore glasses," I said sincerely.

When I saw the crestfallen look on his face as he said with uncharacteristic meekness "Oh," I added helpfully, "But I told them you were real friendly and nice and that you didn't smell bad when you sweated."

"Lib," he called. "Let's go."

The trip to the large ditch where everyone in Purdon and the surrounding area dumped their burn barrels was quick. It was only a mile or so down a gravel road. Most of the stuff dumped there was burned cans since everyone fed old food to their pets or wildlife, burned excess paper, and had appliances that were as old as their kids. You rarely saw an appliance in there. People repaired them or traded them in .

There was one swing set lying on its side, and Jan was standing up in the seat of the truck looking out the wide back window. Her eyes lit up when she saw it and she started pointing. I had crawled up in the back bed of the truck to get a better view of the action.

Mother and Daddy were up in the bed of the truck, wrestling the barrel to the back where they had let the tailgate down. Daddy got down on the ground at the edge of the tailgate and took hold of the bottom of the rusted barrel. He ran his hand across the bottom of the barrel. "No holes," he reported. "We can keep burning in it another six months or so."

Mother held the rim at the top of the barrel and together they eased it down to the ground. Then they "walked" and rolled it as far into the edge of the thousands of burned cans as they could.

"On three," my father said, counting slowly. When he said three, they tilted the barrel, emptying its black sooty cans into the heap of thousands of cans already deposited there.

"That looks ugly," I observed.

"Soil erosion control," Daddy said without a smile.

"I agree, it looks ugly. There's no place else to put it though," Mother answered me. "Everybody puts their burned cans in the same place so it only makes one messy place. Someone threw their swingset in there. They should have broken it down and used the pipe to make something else like your Daddy does," she said.

Jan was still focused on the spindly legs of the swingset sticking up like an upended praying mantis and was pointing and jumping up and down on the seat, like she had spotted something in the Sears toy department that we should buy.

"No!" I shouted, shaking my head forcefully.

"It's better than ours!" she yelled, pressing her lips against the thick glass, distorting them grotesquely.

"No! It's not!" I yelled louder. "It's an old one, and anyway we can't get it! There are probably snakes in under those cans!"

Mother and Daddy didn't say anything, but when I turned to see where they were, they were walking toward the cab of the truck, both looking at the ground, kicking stray cans toward the ditch. Mother was laughing; Daddy looked chagrined.

"Maybe we won't bring the girls next time," he said so low I thought he was talking to himself.



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1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: SEW-AGE

The fall air felt cool and crisp, filling our noses with the fresh scents of the chrysanthemums blooming in two small green plastic pots beside the back door. Jan and I were as excited as if we were heading for the State Fair in Dallas.

The white truck was already parked out back of the house and several men were jockeying large hoses into position behind the truck. They looked like hoses on the vacuum cleaner, only larger and longer. They took shovels from the truck interior and began digging in the hard gravel driveway.

After a few minutes, one of them got a pickaxe and attacked the hard ground, causing small chunks to fly up over their heads, shoot sideways, and occasionally hit them directly in the face, causing them to grimace and spit.

"That's hard, and dirty," I remarked to no one in particular, gazing out the screened door at the back of the house.

Our cousin Phil, who had come to stay the weekend, came down from the boys' bedroom upstairs, and stepped out of the stairwell that opened into the enclosed backporch where we stood.

"It's going to get harder and dirtier" he laughed, moving past us through the screened door and walking to a spot beyond where the men were digging. They didn't look at him-just kept working, chipping away at the packed gravel.

He leaned casually against a clothesline pole, observing them with an amused expression on his face.

Jan and I looked at each other, puzzled by his expression. We were waiting until someone besides the men were outside, but we wanted to go out. We didn't want to miss this, though we weren't sure what "this" was.

Susan, on the other hand, had said haughtily earlier "I want no part of the day's activities' I'm going to try to finish the book I'm reading, Charlotte's Web. It's so good. I have to return it to the library Monday anyway."

My dad had suggested to Mother that she take us elsewhere today while the men completed the work, but Mother thought it would be educational. We had all gone to see Bridge on the River Kwai last night at the drivein. "dahdah, dah dah dah dah dah dah; dahdah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah; dahdah; dah dah dah dah dah; dah dah dah dahdah dah dahdah dah dah."

The tune played incessantly in my head. I couldn't whistle, so I just sang it with the "dah, dah, dahs". Eventually, it got on my sisters' nerves the night before, and they told me rather rudely to stop "dah dahing". I just sang it quietly enough that they couldn't hear, but I really couldn't stop. They never seemed to understand that about me.

This morning, though, my obsessive singing was just background music that no one seemed to notice since the activity outside drowned it out. Shovels scraping loudly against the hard gravel, the vacuum motor on the truck surging, men grunting, sweating (though that didn't make any noise), the pinging of the pickaxe against the ground, and the men occasionally swearing, while Phil stood chuckling near the clothesline.

My dad was at work. He would not have allowed us to watch, hear the bad words the men were saying, or get near their work area. Mother was buried in clothing, sorting winter clothes in the large closet in their room, oblivious to the developing excitement outside.

One of the men yelled, "I think we've got it, boys.
Get the shovels and wedge them under the edge of the concrete lid."

All three of the men lined the flat edges of the shovels up in a straight row against something we couldn't see. Each placed one foot onto the top of the shovel blade and leaned hard on it, pressing down, their faces reddening with the effort. Two of them let out big puffs of air.

As we stared at the gravel driveway, it seemed to open up as the concrete lid was raised slowly, inch by inch, revealing the most disgusting green pool of vile slime I had ever seen. Still, we couldn't take our eyes off the event. Jan and I looked at each other, smiled awkwardly, then curled our top lips and flared our nostrils.

"Peeewww", I said. "That stinks!" I must have said it louder than I thought, for all three heads turned in unison in our direction, and the men grinned broadly.

Phil seemed more tickled by the minute, and he motioned for us to come outside. We shook our heads violently, my brown and her blonde ponytail swinging forcefully back and forth like horses swishing their tails to get rid of flies.

The men turned their attention to the concrete lid and managed to heave it off to the side by using a long metal bar for leverage. It looked like it could crush a child for sure. I didn't want to be there when they put it back on. Besides, what if it splashed the nasty slime on someone? I might throw up.

Phil motioned insistently to us, so eventually we pushed the door open ever so slowly and slithered out like snakes moving into the water. We passed at a very respectable distance from the green pond--now a new and unwelcome part of our back yard.

The sewage men were now focused on placing the pipes into the greenish- brown sludge, a color difference I had not wanted to note, but couldn't keep from seeing on my run past it.

We held our noses, running toward Phil, who still had a big grin on his face. As we reached him, he scooped Jan up with one big motion and took off running for the cesspool, tripping a little as he ran. He ran to the edge of the water, stopped abruptly, and swung Jan's tiny body out over the stinky brew, stopping my heart momentarily. It looked as if he would release his grip, but at the last second, he pulled her back, swung her around, and set her gingerly on the grass, laughing wildly.

At first, she looked like she would cry, but in only a few seconds, once she realized she was not hurt, she burst out laughing, then chased him around the yard, hitting him in the back while he whooped and chortleld, running in large circles, scarcely trying to elude her.

The men manning the large vacuum hoses looked on in amusement, seemingly unaware of the smell that now permeated the yard.

When we quietly asked later why they seemed to be immune to the odor, Phil whispered, "Their nose hairs have all been burned off. They can't smell."

He kept threatening to throw a match into the green water which he said would blow up, sending sewage all over Purdon. This made us uneasy each time he said it, but seemed to make him laugh crazily, his whole body shaking with the thought of it. "That'll be a big hit with the neighbors," he crowed. "No pun intended."

One summer, he and my brother Stephen had run about in the very dry grass of the large vacant lot between the neighbor's house and ours, striking matches and throwing them in the air behind them yelling, "We're firebugs, we're firebugs."

The fact that they set the grass on fire was upsetting enough, but add to that the specter of a 200 gallon butane tank, capable of blowing the entire town to smithereens (my mother's word), sitting on the edge of the lot, and one can see why, after putting out the fire, Mother set fire to Stephen and Phil's rear ends with a hairbrush.

"She doesn't even spank her own kids," Phil complained later to his mother. "But she spanked me."

"Well she did today, and you both deserved it," Aunt Beulah replied. "End of discussion."

Other than occasionallly moving the hoses, the men had little to do as the stuff was sucked into the tank of their truck, so they sat on the grass or leaned against the back of the tank truck. The green goo was barely visible now after several hours of their vacuuming, sucking, and moving the hoses from place to place. The whole operation was winding down, and we were ready to do something else.

"Hey, what are we going to do the rest of the day?" I whined.

"Um, play in the water with the hose?" Jan suggested helpfully.

"Got any matches?" Phil asked evilly, darting suddenly toward the house. After a few second delay, both of us raced after him, yelling at the top of our lungs, as the sewage men with their burned out noses laughed and stood up slowly to finish the job.

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