Santa Barbara, Fall, 1959

On my first day of third grade, it was immediately clear that continuing to be different in respect of being left handed was going to be extremely inconvenient.  The desks were different from those of the first and second graders and much better adapted to right-handers.   Worse yet, third grade was the first year that cursive writing was taught and the solution I'd adopted for printing, where I turned the paper sideways and wrote left handed and vertically didn't seem a practical way to write cursive.  At that time, I could print about as well with my right hand as with my left and I remember deciding that day that I would just have to write right-handed from then on.  I did learn to do so and got pretty good at it but it never felt quite "right" to me.  It is a real blessing to me that today I do almost all my writing on a keyboard!

Third grade was the first year that we were allowed to go to the school library, pick a book once a week and take it back to the classroom for free reading.   A Book-Mobile from the public library parked at the shopping center at the bottom of the hill once a week and we were allowed to check out three books a week, so between the two libraries, I was in literary heaven.   I don't think I've ever felt so intellectually wealthy!

The school had a science fiction section that included books by Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke.    I loved those stories of flying through outer space to strange worlds, meeting aliens and dealing with robots.  

I might not have been quite so enthusiastic about the last if I'd known then how much of my adult professional life would feature dialogs like this:

Husband, coming home:  Hi honey, how's the day been?
Me: GRRRRRRR!
Husband:  What happened?
Me:  Wasted darned near the whole day fighting off an attack robot sent  by some stupid jerk in Indonesia to try and trash one of my websites...

My love of the genre has not diminished with age and I still enjoy even the older books, but my outlook on robots has changed quite a lot!

When Pop and Mom went out for the evening, we got a special treat: TV dinners!  TV dinners were pre-packaged meals that came in a little aluminum tray that was warmed in the oven (microwave ovens were a thing of the future.) After heating for a half an hour, the food was done.  Out it came, the foil over the top removed and there was a delicious meal, all ready to eat.  The product came in a half a dozen different configurations:  chicken pot pie in gravy, fried chicken with potatoes and gravy, beef pot pie with gravy, Salisbury steak (hamburger) under gravy and Mexican-style (enchiladas in a red gravy).  The aluminum foil trays imparted a distinctive metallic flavor to the peaches and the refried beans didn't really taste very different from the mashed potatoes, but each of us got to pick out our own favorite at the store and we thought they were terrific. 

Having anything pre-prepared was very unusual.  Mom cooked breakfast and dinner every day.  She experimented with new recipes from Sunset Magazine and made things that no other mom on the street would have considered: soufflé, gazpacho and chocolate truffles.

All of us helped out getting dinner ready: washing vegetables, making salads and slicing things, even from a very young age.   We have a movie of me, perhaps four years old, carving on a Halloween pumpkin with great-Nanna's 12-inch Wusthof carving knife.  Helping with dinner and breakfast was mandatory (not fun), but we could also make cookies and cakes on our own time in the afternoon or on weekends (very fun!). At least as long as we cleaned up.  While I never got as much into baking as the twins did in their teenage years, even in grade school, I was allowed to enjoy making things in the kitchen.   This was unique on our street and, as a result, our kitchen was very popular!  Undoubtedly as a result of this, all four of learned to cook well.  I still enjoy cooking, married into a family of excellent cooks and have two kids who enjoy the art. My sisters both cook very well and my brother Roy's Heuvos Rancheros are legendary.

Elizabeth, age 3, helping with bread

The cafeteria was run by three ladies, two of whom had come from Germany.  They were more than a little frightening:  one of the German ladies had a hooked nose like Baba Yaga and another had a mustache.   They wore hairnets, white dresses, white shoes like the school nurse and seemed impossibly old.    

All the cooking was done from scratch, even the baked goods.  The school got bulk food from the Federal Farm Surplus program and nothing came fresh or frozen.  Flour, potatoes, rice, dried milk and beans came in 100 pound sacks, pasta in 25-pound boxes, butter and cheese in 10 pound blocks and everything else -- even the hamburger -- came in giant cans.  There was canned fruit: apples, cherries and a mysterious dark glop labeled "Mixed Berries."   There were canned tomatoes, canned carrots, canned beans, canned peas (ick), canned beets (double ick) and canned spinach (ick to the tenth power and then some). 

Mom brought us up to be very well mannered and that saying "That smells delicious" and "What can I do to help?" was the appropriate thing to do when entering a kitchen even if the menu featured something as loathsome as canned spinach.   So on my very first day, even though the biggest, baddest-looking cook of them all was waiting to greet the new recruits, I knew just what to do:  I piped up and asked the ritual questions.  

The lady said "Vell, can you cook?", meaning it, I think, as a joke.   I told her that I could wash, use a knife or stir and which would she like me to do?   Apparently, I was the only kid who had ever said anything like that, so she let me.   I must have passed because on my volunteer day during the remaining four years at school, I was allowed to go half an hour earlier than the other students, put on a hairnet and actually help with the cooking. 

I loved the huge quantities of food, the big machines (there was a commercial dough mixer about the size of a cement mixer which I was not allowed to use) and all fancy ovens (which I did get to help load and unload.)   An OSHA inspector would probably have had a heart attack about it, but no such agency existed at the time.  In the process, I learned a lot about commercial cooking, knowledge that has stood me in very good stead all my life.