When your grandmother is a seamstress, your mother takes your measurements and sends them off to here a few months before birthday, Christmas and Easter. Then surprise, a new dress arrives, for both yourself and your little sister!
------------------
Old cars driving on crowded city street - for Sepia Saturday this week.
Here I stand proudly on my 8th birthday in a new outfit (red and blue plaids) made by my dear grandmother back in San Antonio TX. My little sister has the same plaid I think. We're in front of a beautiful Studebaker on the street of our first apartment (5530 Cates Ave) in St. Louis MO. Yes, I remember not only the address but probably the phone number and another license plate!
When, in 1975, I attempted to show my own sons (then at age 8 and 11) the old apartment building, it had burned down and was an empty lot. You really can't go back. (We drove our camper from Tampa throughout the summer of '75 as far as Wisconsin and Montana to Arizona and back.)
Back to the 1950 photo... besides the AAA emblem on the license tag, I'm not sure if it was still from Texas, or then Missouri. No amount of stretching, changing contrast etc. would let these old eyes figure it out. But the dark colors do remind me of 50s Missouri tag colors.
The main emotion I have? Why on MY birthday did my sister also get a new dress? What about turning 8? Wasn't that something special?
OK, maybe that’s petty. After all my family moved away from Houston, I was without any friends, about to start going to a new school, and my parents were looking for work to support us. I also remember that mid August it was so cold we tried lighting a fire in the fireplace in the new apartment…with disastrous results. Either we didn’t open the damper, or the chimney had been closed off above us. Many coughs and wearing all our sweaters later…
We also had to wait to get our furniture, as it had been put in storage when we arrived and so we stayed in furnished places until we found this apartment in walking distance of the school we would be attending (private, for Christian Science kids.)
I think we had some WW II surplus army cots to sleep on.
Boy life was so different then.
No air conditioning either, and hanging out clothes (washed in basement 2 floors below) was in an ugly back yard. (I was too short to do that.) Mom tried to plant some zinnias, but the ground was pretty awful. No hanging out clothes in the winter, because everyone heated with coal (including us.) Lots of dirty coal dust floated down on everything! Clothes were hung in the basement to dry.
And then that winter we got to walk to school in snow. Nobody plowed the sidewalks! And often they had more snow because the plows went by on the streets! Well, we had at least one day when school was closed...maybe more! We had galoshes for our feet, not that great when snow was more than 8 inches deep! But my dad got us a sled, and we found Art Hill in Forest Park, which was great long sliding down...but then someone had to pull the sled (and my 4 year old sister back up the hill - Daddy of course!)
I did have a good life, all in all. I survived childhood illnesses without any medicine...being prayed over only. My parents stayed together and I eventually figured out their way of silent communication was a form of love.
And my sister and I got a good education.
