Already the title of this dates me. Yes, I remember the Cold War, Dallas, TX on November 22, 1963, hoola hoops and pop beads, Howdy Doody, James Dean, Mary Tyler Moore when she was young, and fifteen cent hamburgers. It's not a crime to be old. Or to remember.
I grew up in a house filled with chaos, disorganization, and loneliness, which makes no sense since there were at least six people milling around the place at all times. But this was the sixties. There were no TV psychology shows, Ann Landers was just getting started (but we didn't get the Chicago paper,) and, culturally, parents had a lot of latitude in their own personal styles of punishing their children because what a man or woman did in their own home in those days was pretty much sacred short of killing someone.
That being said, I escaped whenever I could, which was frequently as I was a clever kid. I was the first to offer to walk to the corner grocery or take a pair of shoes to be reheeled at the cobbler or pick up a prescription at the doctor's office. They were all only a few blocks away from our house. My older sister who was fairly unimaginative and preferred to giggle with her friends about which basketball player at their school was cuter was no competition for the errands gig. It was all mine. Neither my sister nor my parents knew I had a stash of glass soda bottles under a loose sidewalk square on Haas Street that afforded me a candy bar whenever I felt the need for one. (Anyone remember returnable soda bottles for two cents each?)
I knew every street for several miles in any direction from our house, so on the way back from the grocery store I might take a detour and see how the Smith's house painting was going, or play with the Hershmans' dog, or stop to stare at the front bay window of the big O'Neil house and the magnificent baby grand piano that so graciously stood there. I might stop at the little old lady's house. I never knew her name. She lived in a falling down little place near the Catholic school and she grew flowers. I never saw the inside of her house, but the outside was cascading mounds of lilies, roses, ivies, and more, all wonderful to a kid whose own yard had only vegetables, except for a few wild flowers my grandmother planted back in the days of Al Capone.
There were regular little escapes during the week, but for some reason, Saturdays no one seemed to care if I disappeared as long as I was back by supper time. From the moment I woke up I was filled with an excitement that even now is hard to describe. I was going downtown. Just the word had a magical ring to it.
For clarification, I must explain that at the time, our fair town boasted a population of about twelve thousand people (according to the Almanac for 1956) and it looked like a town of twelve thousand people. There were the usual little cafes, drugstores, dress shops and haberdasheries. Because we were the county seat, we had a wonderful limestone court house in the center of town. In itself, the court house was an adventure. Even on Saturday, I could walk in as though I were a lawyer or a taxpayer, and wander about the cool marble halls or climb the vast spiral staircases to the upper floors. In the basement were the washrooms, but they were nothing like I'd ever seen before. In the ladies room there were three old wooden dressers each with a huge mirror above, and across from the dressers were long wooden church pews and a few wooden rocking chairs. Fifteen years later when my children were toddlers, I would stop by this very same ladies room and let them run around, climb on the pews, and shout with glee to hear their echos in the vast space.
So on an average Saturday morning, I would strike out for town about eight-thirty, stopping by my arsennal of soda bottles under the loose piece of sidewalk on Haas Street to take enough bottles to the corner store (also on Haas Street) to allow me a bit of snacking in town.
Then on to the library, my mecca, the home of the holy grail for me: unlimited books and magazines. By twelve I had outgrown the children's department. I had read every book of interest to me, and at the downstairs librarian's suggestion, I made my way upstairs to the adult section. Mrs. McCarron, one of the upstairs librarians, was also my Sunday School teacher and she kindly explained the Dewey Decimal System to me and the index card drawers. The summer I was twelve I discovered Charles Dickens. Later that winter it was Lloyd C. Douglas and Thomas B. Costain. On to Emily Dickenson and T. S. Elliot, the war poets, and Grace Livingston Hill.
I often stayed at the library til hunger drove me to check out my armful of books and head to the Rexall across the street where I could sit in a booth with a hotdog and a green river feeling like a queen as I thumbed through my library books. Best of all, no one yelled at me or told me to stop reading and do something useful.
The Rexall had many delights besides food. It boasted the best novelty gag counter in town. Red pepper chewing gum, handshake buzzers, itching powder, rubber soap bars, plastic ants, x-ray glasses and more tantalized the imagination of a kid who loved to pull pranks. My dad never remembered from April 1 to April 1 that the soap on the bathroom sink was rubber and that was why there was no lather. My sisters all flinched when I offered them a piece of gum remembering stinging tongues from red pepper or aching fingers from the kind that had a moustrap spring. Plastic ants always got a rise out of my mother who was an antophobe.
The makeup counter was a constant source of wonder to me. Lipsticks, rouge, powder, eyebrow brushes, eyeliner, and other delights intended to transform ugly ducklings to swans made me wonder what I would look like if I had some myself. Alas, at that age I believed I would never know since my parents didn't believe in face painting. They never noticed that sometimes I darkened my eyebrows with crayon and used my Prang water colors to make my lips look red.
One thing the Rexall had that I could enjoy for free was the people who stood in line for prescriptions. I would sit in one of the row of brown leather and chrome seats looking at the faces of those waiting for their own elixir, and I would try to guess what disease each had. Occaisionally I would see a neighbor or a teacher or someone I recognized from passing them on the street. Once I saw my dad, and I skittered off before he saw me.
But no trip down town would be complete without stopping at Harvey's Dime Store, the beginniing and ending of shopping for me. Three floors of everything I needed or wanted to buy or even look at. The main floor had a candy shop, houseplants, sewing notions and bolts of fabric, jewelry and greeting cards, hair care products and shoe polish, silk scarves and gloves, yarn and thread, household notions, pins and needles, pencils and writing paper, and paper back books on revolving racks.
You could take an elevator to the basement or you could walk down the wide stairs to toys and games, model planes and cars, china dishes and glass serving pieces, bathroom supplies, rugs and towels, kitchen utinsels and pans, plumbing supplies, tools, electrical supplies, oilcloth by the yard on huge rolls, contact paper and paint, curtains and draperies, public washrooms and a mechanical horse that jerked you around for a minute or so for ten cents.
The third floor had ladies', mens' and children's clothing, crafts, dressing rooms, and the lunch room. At twelve, I didn't have enough money or courage to eat alone at Harvey's lunchroom, but by the time I was in jr. high I had both and discovered the joy of vegetable soup and coconut cream pie made by little Mennonite ladies with no fear of whole cream or lard.
Late afternoon saw me making my way home, full of greasy hot dog and happily burping green river burps, knowing that my town and I had had another great Saturday together, and knowing that no matter how toxic my life might be during the coming week, Saturday was always on the calendar and would be every week for the rest of my life.
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