A SHORT TRIP BACKWARDS IN TIME

I am thinking this photo was taken while we were still in elementary school - probably 6th grade (1946-47) - but its setting was at an area-wide PTA meeting held at Hamilton Junior High School. The photo itself has been in my possession since then, but seeing it again this morning made me laugh.

In the fifth grade a new Girl Scout troop (Troop 28) was formed at Whittier Elementary School in Long Beach. Mrs. Frances Allen, mother of Dorothy, became the scout leader, a job she held officially until we all graduated from Poly High School in June of 1953...and unofficially through many years of reunions until she died some years ago. "MizAllen" as we called her was like a mother bear with her bear cubs. She nurtured us until we were old enough to set out on our own, and each of us attributes some of our success in life to her loving care.

She was bold and brave. I look at this picture and can hear her telling us to make sure we didn't hold the flags in front of our faces. Rosalie Lorenzen is holding the flag on the right. Her flag cleared not only her face but also that of Frances Benjamin. I, then Barbara Dobbins, am holding the American Flag and it cleared both my face and that of Carol Smith. As an obedient child I did what she asked, but to the detriment of the little Cub Scout standing on my right. I can imagine his mother was pretty darn put out when she got her copy of this picture.

I don't remember the names of the Cub Scouts, except for Chuckie Newmyer, who is holding the American Flag for his group. He went all the way through school with the four of us girls, and to my knowledge he is still alive and kicking somewhere in California. Fran, Ro and I are still Californians, and Carol is in Sierra Vista, Arizona.

I love this picture -- not only because it brings back such good memories of my friends and our scouting days but because it reminds me of a joke that pops into my mind whenever I see it. It goes like this:

Marianne decides to go to the beach to show off her new bikini bathing suit. She invites a new friend to go with her, and as they strip down to their bathing suits at the beach, the new friend points at Marianne's navel and says, "What on earth happened to your belly-button? It's huge!" Marianne calmly replies, "When I was in Girl Scouts I always was the one who carried the flag in the parades."

CHRISTMAS - VERY ODDS & ENDS

In our apartment complex (which sits on lots of acreage with lawns, bushes and trees), we luckily don’t have many outside critters to deal with. We get a few possums, a few feral cats, the ubiquitous attic/tree rats, but no squirrels or rabbits. In the summer we often get ants trying to find a place to cool off and who make their way inside our apartment – through an electrical outlet, an AC/Heating vent, around a window sill or up the bathroom drain. They are creative critters, totally unwelcome and extremely hard to stifle. We get them in the winter too but usually only when it rains.

It is raining.

This morning I came out of the bedroom and saw Squeaky looking up at the living room AC vent. That was at 5:30 a.m. She is still sitting there and it’s now 9 o’clock. She is not a stupid cat, but I would be a stupid person to think she doesn’t know what she is doing. She knows we are going to have, sooner or later, an influx of wet ants. I DO NOT WANT ANTS DURING THE CHRISTMAS SEASON. However, the rain prediction is “rain through Sunday.” So when they come I hope they use the vent and not via our dish and glass cupboard like they did last year. That was NOT a good Christmas present!

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When I was staying at Kerry’s house in LA while she was having surgery, her girls were in the process of celebrating Hanukkah. When I arrived in LA the family was at their other grandma’s house eating brisket and latkes and other traditional Hanukkah foods. When the family arrived back home where I awaited, the little girls were laden with Hanukkah gifts.

In school Justine’s class has been working on origami for their art sessions, and Grams had given her several kits containing really lovely papers for making origami figures – along with instructions. Justine just turned 8 in November. She has a very analytical mind, and before the girls could get their gifts put away, Justine had created the most wonderful array of tiny dimensional stars. She didn’t bother to read the instructions; she simply looked at the diagrams and whipped them out like a production line. I looked at those instructions and crossed my fingers that she wouldn’t ask me to make one! One kit makes 100 stars – and she got two kits! She’s well on her way to doing the “thousand crane” bit, I’m sure. (I think she’ll probably be good at higher math, too!).


That reminded me of some stars that I was given by a boyfriend’s mother back in 1952. Dick Fifield was my first real boyfriend and we went steady my whole senior year in high school. He had two older married sisters and their families living nearby. His mom and dad were like second parents to me, as mine were to Dick. But his family had traditions and mine didn’t, so for the most part that is where my memories of just about the best Christmas I ever experienced came from. I was welcomed into their family to bake cookies, make fudge, wrap presents, decorate trees, go caroling – all the things my family did not do. Don’t think my own family did not celebrate Christmas; we did, and it was always abundant – but really no traditions ran up to it, and once the wrapping papers were torn off the gifts in a mad frenzy of delight, it was finished. Over. Done With. Nothing to do but put the presents away and vacuum the floor. Not even a Christmas Eve or Christmas Day dinner. The adults did get egg nog, we kids got nog-less egg nog and that was it. So it isn’t unusual that I would remember the Christmas of 1952 with such fondness.

But there was a little more than that to it. As a present, Dick’s mother gave me 10 folded colored paper stars that she had made in secret. They were probably 2 inches in circumference and were three dimensional. They were dipped in wax and quickly sprinkled with glitter. A gold thread was attached for hanging them on the tree. I loved them. I think probably she was hoping that they would hang on the first tree that Dick and I would have if/when we married. He had gotten quite serious quickly but since I was going away to college after graduation I was fairly reserved about committing to anything. I did “love” Dick, but as it happened our relationship did end after I went to college as I feared.

I didn’t think of the possible significance of those stars back in 1952. But over the years and after becoming a mother-in-law many times, I understand how easy it is to love the boyfriends and girlfriends that your own children will consider as they grow into adulthood and be sad when they disappear out of your life.

All that was 60 years ago. Some of the stars have broken down, others disappeared. But here I am all these years later and I still have 5 of them. Of everything I have on my tree, those are my most priceless ornaments. All of you who are “of an age” will understand when I say that it is hard to accept that little things like these stars, things that are so imbued with warm and fuzzy memories of your own growing up, will not likely hang on your children’s (or grandchildren’s) tree after you’re gone. Margaret Fifield’s stars were not art pieces, nor exactly origami as I understand it; They were just a paper craft and are of no value to anyone other than me. But they hold a year’s worth of teen-age love in their folds and at least a ream worth of warm memories of that very special Fifield family of Long Beach who I will never forget.



***

And on a gross note, but because it is Christmas and even the grossest creatures get their due, for some strange reason whenever it rains every earthworm in Mira Loma crawls onto my front porch to escape being drowned. It’s a fruitless crawl because they die quite quickly. Something makes them stick very tightly to the cement so at any time during the rain and after, there are dead earthworms affixed to my porch. They are really difficult to get off. Because we are now in about day four of rain with at least five more to go, my porch is now LOADED and likely to get worse. I told Jer last night that when the rain is finished, I am going to call our Maintenance Department and implore them to bring over a big cement sanding machine and clear my porch of desiccated earthworms. They had better do it, too, because this morning I looked down on the carpet and there lay a dried worm that had traveled into the house on Jerry’s shoe this morning when he retrieved the newspaper.

I am going to spare you a picture of our porch. You all know what a worm looks like. Probably not a Christmas worm but I’ll guess you’ll even pass on that.

WHITTIER ELEMENTARY SCHOOL GLEE CLUB - 1945

The year was 1945. The town was Long Beach, California. The occasion was the John Greenleaf Whittier Elementary School Glee Club having its picture taken just before the school children came out to sit on the asphalt while we gave our annual Christmas Program. I was 10 years old.

Little Chuckie Newmyer, one of the smart kids, stood solemn and official in his role as Narrator of this little Christmas concert. I have always had a soft spot in my heart for “Chuckie” because his mother and my mother were friends and pregnant with us at the same time in 1935. Sometime after we were born one or both families moved away, but our mothers discovered each other again when we moved into the Whittier school district in 1945. I don’t think Chuckie ever knew that in my baby book there is a notation that his mother gave me a baby dress when I was born.

But moving back to this early Christmas program we needed a Joseph and Mary and baby Jesus. A doll was used as a stand-in for baby Jesus. Joseph was played by Joseph Fayant, a tall fellow with dark hair who probably looked more mature than most of the kids and truly made a good Joseph. Mary was portrayed by Loretta Carlson, who had a sweet face and a widow’s peak, which gave her a heart-shaped visage just perfect for the role.

I can still identify close to half of these kids in the choir. This is amazing, I think, because some days I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast! But about twelve of the girls in this picture were in a newly-formed Girl Scout Troop 28 and we stayed active until we graduated High School in 1953 and then have had regular reunions and personal contact through the years. But other than that, most of the kids from Whittier Elementary went on to Alexander Hamilton Junior High School and then graduated from Long Beach Poly, and having them as classmates for nine years surely has helped their names being imprinted in my mind.

I suspect that the narrative was read from the Gospels and that Chuckie did himself proud in his delivery. I do not specifically remember what songs we sang, but it shouldn’t be too hard to surmise what they were. I also doubt that they were sung with any parts, as we didn’t have a formal choir at the school; I’m sure we all knew the traditional Christmas songs and one of the teachers probably offered to wave her arms at us to try to keep us on the beat. I’m also sure she used a tiny pitch pipe to give us our beginning note, because rolling a piano or even a little portable pump organ onto the asphalt was beyond the call of duty. It was a capella for us.

It was a good program. The weather cooperated and our parents all came and stood behind the students seated on the ground. My only sadness was that my new boyfriend, Charles Clifner, was not in the choir. I asked him a couple of years ago why he wasn’t in the picture and he said he was many things but a singer he was not!

In those days it was perfectly ok to mix religion and education. No one fussed. It was just not thought to be a big deal, and hearing Chuckie read the gospel did not raise any church/state conflicts.

When I look at this picture I can’t help but think about how different Christmases were back then. However, maybe Christmas just wasn’t so different but Society was. Kinder. Safer. More polite. More considerate. Slower, for sure. We still were quarantined if we got measles. We entertained ourselves on the playground with jacks, hopscotch and monkey bars, merry-go-rounds and rings. We walked to and from school with little fear of being kidnapped. Girls wore dresses to school. Children looked like children, not like mini-teenagers. We secreted “Sen-Sen” in folded-up sheets of Kleenex and couldn’t wait for recess to share those powerful tiny little black licorice squares. In spite of the depression and the second world war that affected us, we mostly had a wonderful childhood.

Christmas is a time for remembering “the reason for the season” and it is also time for looking backwards at Christmases past. I was blessed with good family, good friends, a good school, good teachers and teaching, and a good town in which to grow up. I have Christmas pictures taken at an earlier stage of my life, but looking at those doesn't really bring any specific recollections. But the Whittier Elementary School Glee Club photo is full of remembrances and recollections – and makes an awfully good trip down memory lane in December of 2010 – sixty-five years later.

PUPPY LOVE AND AN AIRPLANE

I’ve been on a mission to get some files cleaned out. I’ve saved certain things for a very long time and it’s time to get rid of them. I am well aware that the minute something gets thrown away, fate will intervene and you’ll need it. Nevertheless, I’m on a much needed roll!

Yesterday I came upon a batch of old ephemera I acquired after my mother’s death in 1982. She’d saved pages from an old mimeographed elementary school student newspaper dated 1943 and 1944 but only the pages with my stories on them. The original pages are disintegrating into a pile of confetti in the bottom of the file cabinet, but at least in 1982 I had the foresight to make a photocopy of them. In the intervening years, because they were tucked so far back in the file cabinet drawer I’d quite forgotten about them.

The school was Frances E. Willard Elementary in Long Beach, California. I entered it toward the end of first grade and stayed there through fourth grade. I loved school and I still have vivid memories of my days at Willard.

While I was looking at the little newspaper, my eye stopped on a story about an airport.


When I read that I had a real flashback. After we got the airport up and running, we each made an airplane. Now I came from a family of females and building a little airplane just wasn’t in my experience. I remember being handed a chunk of balsa wood and some sandpaper; this was not to be a model airplane from a kit. We were to sand and chisel that block of wood until it looked exactly like the one our teacher (or perhaps her husband) made as an example. If all went well, it was eventually going to be a silver airplane. I had my doubts.

But when we started work on it, a cute little kid named Jerry Laposa came to my side and helped me through the process. I can remember him showing me how to use the sandpaper for shaping the fuselage. In thinking back on it I couldn’t remember exactly what kind of an airplane we were making. I thought maybe because we were in the middle of World War II we made a bomber. But then I saw another story on that same page written by one of my classmates, Russell Payne, and it said that we were making “clippers.”

Ahhhhh, I remember! A clipper. The wings on top. And then I remembered having to dig out a certain square of balsa wood on the top so the wings would lie flat across the fuselage like the wings of real clippers. And then I remembered Jerry Laposa helping me with a little chisel, too.

From that point on, I began getting a PowerPoint-like recollection of my time at Willard, and little Jerry was in all of them. I remember working with him on the Victory Garden. When we were studying Pueblo Indians I was the mother of the family, Blue Bird, and Jerry Laposa was White Eagle, the father. Later we studied a unit on the Post Office, including v-mail letters, and Jerry was the postmaster and I the patron.

By third grade Jerry and I considered ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend. There was no handholding or smooching, but there was an inner knowledge that we were an item! By fourth grade Jerry Laposa and I were exchanging Christmas Gifts – he gave me a little vial of Eau de Cologne and I gave him a small faux-leather wallet. Our parents were enablers, driving me to deliver the gift to Jerry and his father bringing Jerry to my house, gift in hand. He appears in all my birthday party pictures, though I do not recall attending his. We never talked on the phone or saw each other outside of school except for those parties we were invited too. Definitely we exchanged Valentine’s day cards, and of course I made sure he got the best card out of the box of little cards my mother bought to be given to my classmates.

Times were different then, but puppy love was already in the air.

In the summer after my 4th grade year the war ended, my father bought a business and we moved across town to 1620 Gardenia, the first house my family ever owned. If I felt bad about leaving Jerry, I don’t remember. I was excited to be going to a new school in the fall, going into 5th grade, and I had high hopes for lots of new friends.

It is amazing what memories can be pulled out of a file cabinet. Things that had been stored in my own memory out of sight for 65 years today were pulled out just as easily as taking something out of a file drawer.