Williamsville, NY, 1954

The year I turned three, we got a new baby brother (Roy) and a NEW CAR. The brother was was sort of a blob of noisy pink protoplasm and I didn’t think he'd amount to much, but the car was terrific! 

It was a Plymouth station wagon and it was a beautiful dark blue. The dashboard was the same pretty blue metal that the outside was.  The glove compartment was in the middle of the dashboard so that the driver and the passenger could both get to it and it had a wonderful Plymouth insignia on it with a silver button right in the middle that you could click to open it.

The Plymouth had vinyl bench seats and the back one did something tricky where it could be folded flat to make the back portion of the car one large play area. It had a heater that really worked and that was controlled by a slider that was labeled ‘Hi’ and ‘Lo’. Radios and air conditioning were expensive and frivolous luxuries, so the Plymouth had neither of those, but it wasn’t really any trouble to crank the windows down and let the outside air flow in. Besides, if your legs started sticking to the vinyl seat on the 'sun' side of the car, you could just slide over to the other side of the car because seatbelts had not yet been invented!

On the floor, there were beautiful black rubber floor mats that were smooth and shiny. Even years later, when the car was tired and the mats scuffed and old, there was a secret place you could see when the seat was folded up where the mat was still shiny and beautiful, just like it had been when it was new.

We did some wonderful things in that car!

Drive-in movies.  I loved them!  At time, it was possible to buy a lot of great things from military surplus stores (remember, that this is only a few years after the end of WWII) so we had some army blankets (green and scratchy) and a couple of army sleeping bags (green and soft.) Papa folded the seat down in the Plymouth to make a good big space and Mom lined it with the army surplus bags. At the drive-in, Papa would pull up to the little stanchion, crank down the driver’s side window, carefully lift down the speaker and hook it over the top edge of the window and crank it back up to hold it in place. Sometimes we got a container of popcorn to share and sometimes we brought something with us.  When it got dark, the movie would start, but usually after the cartoon, Roy and I would be asleep, comfortably snoozing on the sleeping bags in the back. I was never clear exactly what happened at the end of the movie except that mysteriously when I woke up the next morning, I’d be in my own bed.

“Going for a drive” was a weekend treat. In the fall, the trees changed and it was so pretty. We would drive to a place outside of town that had cider and apples for sale. Getting out of the car and going into the apple stand was a wonderful combination of three feelings: cold, underfoot crunch and the smell of apples. We’d buy a gallon or two of cider to take home, but it was really just an excuse for a bit of a roam. Our refrigerator was not large enough to hold a gallon jug of cider, but we had a cabinet in the garage where cider could be kept cold (by the autumn, the garage was very cold!). The cabinet had started life as some sort of good sturdy wooden packing box.   Papa converted it to a cabinet by standing it on end, attaching the top with hinges and adding shelves. Mom painted it and voila! A handy garage cabinet for storing things that there didn’t fit in the kitchen! That box moved with us to Santa Barbara and did duty as a garage storage cabinet for many years.

Bridge parties was a popular adult entertainment. The parents would have the Iddings, the Chapmans and other friends over for riotous evenings of cards. There were cute themed score sheets and little matching paper cups for salted nuts. Auntie Elaine Iddings tells me that one year, she and Uncle Harry went to that same cider mill and got several gallons of cider that she was planning to serve at a bridge party several weeks later. To keep it cool, she put it in their attic. A day or so before the party, she noticed a large stain in the ceiling and an odd smell. When she went to check on the cause, it turned that the attic was not as cool as she’d thought and the cider, which was definitely NOT pasteurized, had fermented and exploded its way out of the bottles, making a horrible mess!

The kitchen, by today’s standards, was Spartan. There was a sink which was under a window that looked out to the back yard. There was a tiled drain board and a rack for the dishes so they could dry in an orderly fashion after being washed. We had a four-burner stove and a refrigerator that was variously called an “ice box” (although, of course, it was not one) or a “fridge” (even though ours was actually a Kelvinator, not a Frigidaire.)

We shopped at Loblaws grocery and when we bought fruits and vegetables there, they provided free paper bags in several sizes for the convenience of the shoppers. UPC Barcodes were not put on items until 1974 and automated grocery scanning was not widely implemented for many years after that. So in 1954, the grocery checker looked inside each paper bag, put it on a scale, weighed it and then keyed the weight and the price per pound of the item (which they memorized or had on a typed list to look up) while calling it out so that the shopper could check them for accuracy ("cabbage, pound-and-a-half at 6 cents; coffee, one pound at 37 cents" and so forth.) There were two ‘hydrator’ drawers in the bottom of the fridge for veggies, but we usually had more than would fit there. So Mom had to buy some large plastic bags to use to store extra lettuce and vegetables on one of the lower shelves. Every week, these were washed out and dried so they could be used for the next week’s food.

The fridge had a little compartment up top where you could put ice cream to keep it solid and some neat little aluminum trays for making ice cubes. Ice cubes were fun. To make them, you filled the tray with water, put in a sort of gizmo with a handle and blades into it and froze the whole shebang. When you wanted ice, you removed the tray from the fridge, ran it very briefly upside down under the water from the sink and then pulled the handle on the gizmo. If you did it all right, there would be a magnificent cracking sound and twelve ice cubes (and a bunch of little random ice slivers) would fragment and pop free. Magic! If you wanted more ice than twelve cubes, you could drive downtown to the ice company and buy a big block of ice to bring home and break up with an ice pick and a hammer.

We could get ice cream at the store, but home-made ice cream was a special summer treat -- strawberry or peach made in an old hand-cranked ice cream freezer. Mom would make the mix, insert the dasher and put it in the center metal canister. Papa would take it outside, put it in the green churning bucket, attach the handle and add layers of broken ice and salt around it. Everyone turned the handle until it got too hard to turn, which meant that the ice cream was done. The canister was carefully opened to keep from getting salt into the ice cream and the dasher came out. While the canister had to be repacked in more ice and salt so the ice cream would harden up, there was the dasher, all ready for licking. It was a sad day when Roy got old enough that I had to share with him!

Buffalo was hot in the summer and houses were not air conditioned, which meant that the windows were open so that the evening breezes could blow through. On Saturdays, when the grass had been cut, it smelled particularly wonderful. We had a picnic table in the back yard that Papa made. It was right underneath my bedroom window and lying in bed on those warm summer nights, I could fall asleep listening to the comfortable chirps of the crickets and the grownups talking and laughing at the table under my window.

Every week, on Saturday, I got my allowance. It was a whole nickel! Given that gas cost 19 cents per gallon, this was actually a large sum. I saved, my nickels and sometimes when we went to Loblaws for groceries, we would stop at a small variety store where there were many things that could be bought by someone with my means. Many of these items in the store were marked "Made in Japan", a virtual synonym for "poor quality". During the war, most of Japan's factories had been destroyed and the country, as a result, exported consumer goods that were made by hand and of shoddy materials. It was, in fact, rumored that the clever (and desperate) Japanese had renamed one of their towns "Usa" so they could mark product made there "Made in Usa" and fool stupid American consumers! Nonetheless, I particularly lusted after a beautiful yellow Japanese parasol that featured paintings of pink flowers that could only be seen when the parasol was opened. It was expensive -- priced at seven nickels, an almost unimaginable sum.  I came close to wearing that parasol out with my eyes because every week, I'd look at it in the window and count how many more nickels were needed.  Saving up for it seemed to take forever and it was a very happy day when that beautiful yellow parasol became mine.

Both my parents believed in encouraging creativity.  Even when we did not have much money, there was enough for crayons and paint and I was encouraged to draw, write and to make things.  My parents were very creative too!  Many things were shipped in wooden boxes.  The crate from a washing machine became a playhouse for me:

Note the writing on the outside "Automatic Washer"

One day, Papa brought a particularly heavy wooden box home from work. It was a good sturdy thing that had been used to ship a weather balloon in and was four feet or so square and three feet deep. He cut the middle boards to make a window on each side and Mom painted it brown. It could be just about anything! We used for more than 10 years on one end as a playhouse, turned it on its side for a cave, rolled it over for a table –- the uses were endless.

At some time, the parents had been given the munificent gift of $100 and used it to buy a table saw from Sears and Roebuck. With this, they designed and made much of our furniture. Most of the furniture in Williamsville was made of pine and then varnished to a lovely golden color. In the living room, there was a cabinet that Papa had built to hold the record player and a radio. On Saturday afternoons, we tuned into the Metropolitan Opera on the air and listened to a live broadcast. We also had records of opera and jazz. These were 12-inch shellac platters that spun at 78 RPM and which provided four to five minutes of music each. Most of the records were black, but Papa had played his clarinet in the Stanford band and we had one record of the band that was a beautiful Stanford red.

The record player was a mechanical marvel that had a tall skinny spindle on which you could stack half dozen records and was wonderful to watch in action.

First it would drop a record into the turntable, and then the player arm would pick itself up, glide above the record and put itself down at the edge where the music part started. When the music was finished, the arm would cruise into the center of the record, pick itself up, put itself safely out of the way and the player would drop the next record from the stack. Then the arm would pick itself up, move out over the record and put itself down again.

Even with great attention to cleanliness, over time, as a result of being dropped onto a moving surface, the record surfaces got scratched, but the sound was monaural anyhow, so the noise problems from scratches were generally not very noticeable unless the scratches were so bad that the stylus jumped back and repeated the track over and over.

My parents had designed and made the furniture in my bedroom as well. It was made from pine and painted in bright primary colors but with the edges of the boards varnished and glowing golden. There was a blue desk – just the right size – and a blue bookcase with places for small and large books. There was a red cabinet with sliding doors and three shelves in side and, best of all, there was a yellow one that had a phonograph and a speaker mounted it in plus a section for keeping records. I had several records of my own, too! One had the ‘March of the Toys’ and another, even better, featured Burl Ives singing two folk songs about hunting. One side had "Three Jolly Huntsman" and the other “Let’s Go Hunting” I couldn’t read yet, so Mom drew a little picture of a rat on the label of “Let’s Go Hunting” side so I’d know which song was on that side.  I listened to those songs over and over and was well-pleased with them.