Williamsville, NY, 1953

So what was it like, growing up in the 1950’s?

Obviously, when I was born, we were living in Buffalo, but I have no memory of that place nor of the little house at 327 Webster Street in Palo Alto where we lived during my second year (and which, according to Mom, was so out-of-plumb that a round item dropped in the kitchen would predictably roll to the same corner of the room.)

The first house I remember well was the house on Union Road where we lived in Williamsville, New York while Pop was working at Cornell Aeronautical laboratory. It was a small place, three bedrooms and one bath upstairs and a living / dining room downstairs in a sort of an L configuration that wrapped around the kitchen in back. The ‘master’ bedroom was over the garage and the bathroom over the kitchen. The house also had a basement, but I have no real memories of it other than that one Christmas, Papa put the Christmas tree there, so I believe the area was very thoroughly "off limits!"

I did not go to nursery school, but there was plenty to do at home.

We had a yard was surrounded by a white board fence   There were flower beds around the house and the fence, but most of the rest of our yard was grass and there was a swing set and a jungle gym. In the summer, we had a wading pool that could be filled up with water and that got warm in the sun.

Nancy in wading pool, 1954

There were crab apple trees that produced pretty blossoms but very disappointing fruit. There also was a real apple tree in one of the back corners of the yard; all year, little green apples would grow on it and in the fall, it was fun to pick them up and try to find ones without worms. In the fall when it got cold, walking on the grass after a frost made an interesting crunching sound as the frost cracked on the grass. When I looked behind me, I could see my footprints following me from the house to the swing set and I could make walking patterns that lasted until the frost melted at noon.

On one side of our house, there was empty field.  A Polish family lived next door on the other side. Mechanical clothes dryers were very uncommon; when I played on the swing set, I could see their clothes flapping on their laundry line and drying in the breeze.  They had little boy and I was excited to be invited to his birthday party. I think we were expecting a kid’s party with paper hats and balloons, but it turned out to be a huge family celebration with all the neighbors and many friends! The party was at night in their basement. It was very hot and crowded with lots of grownups smoking, drinking and laughing. There was polka music and some people were dancing.  Even though it was loud and strange, I remember being very disappointed when we had to go home because I had never seen people dance like that before and I thought it was thrilling!  

After the party, I sometimes wondered if the pants twisting on their clothesline had learned to dance from the people or if the people had learned to dance from the clothes. In grade school creative writing class, I wrote a poem about it:

Up, down, up down,
The clothes are drying all over town.
Look, look, the pin let go,
My skirt is dancing the do-si-do.

Between our house and that of the Poles, there was a ditch where the culvert went under the road. In the spring it was full of water and I caught pollywogs that I was allowed to put in a jar and take into the house so I could watch them turn into frogs. Unhappily, as I was in the bathroom giving them more water, I dropped the jar. YIKES!  Pollywogs on the loose! The bathroom was typical for the 1940’s – white plumbing fixtures and a floor made of one-inch hexagonal tiles in black and white. Mommy helped me find them, but wiggly black pollywogs on a black and white floor are not easy to see, and ultimately, we were one pollywog short. We never found him and for many years, I wondered where that last pollywog went.