Black and White Thursday Memories

I am sharing a youtube recording here which I will be surprised to hear if anyone remembers from the past … like way back a long time ago past!

Love Me to Pieces!

As I was doing dishes, more bits and pieces came to me as I thought about the happenings in the  house I think of as the airport house. Our neighborhood was so close to the Tulsa Airport, McDonnel Douglas and Spartan Aircraft before the Tulsa International Airport came to be. Those planes flew loud and low overhead, but we did get used to it.

Here we are now a family of five living in the airport house on Virgin Place! 

(Mom was still giving us those Toni Perms!)

My sister and I adjusted really well in this neighborhood, school and new church. There were plenty of kids on our street to play with and I remember them all! Kay and her sister, Leola down the street, Darlene and her sister Linda, Wava Joy and little brother Walter. (A funny memory comes to mind about Kay and Leola. They both were somewhat chubby and I was a beanpole. They must have resented that because Leola informed me one day that her mom had assured them that one day they would be slim and I might be "fat"! Well, that wasn't a very nice thing to say, was it?) The house to our right across the street was also a beauty shop and the family had a teenage daughter and two boys, Harold and James. The daughter was older than us and the only memory I have of her was how she looked and that she gave me a hand-me-down dress once that I loved to wear. It had darts and when I wore it, it almost looked as though I had begun to develop!! Their Mom, Mrs. Owens, was a hairdresser and when I asked begged her, she styled my hair in a French twist! 

Here I'm wearing the hand-me-down dress. That is our dog, Whiz, a champion boxer raised by my Uncle Raymond and given to us after he had passed the age for show, I guess! (The dog, not Uncle Raymond!) I have no idea!

As for Harold and James, they played house and grocery store with us and we played softball, kickball and other such games with them. What fun we had and with all the other kids on the street.

My best friend and her brother lived in the house behind us and I loved Carol and her brother Jimmy so much. It was very sad when they moved to another town because Carol and I had shared so many secrets, went to school and church together, and in the same Brownie Troop. I remember her sweet parents and the hot chocolate and cookies her mother, Delores, served to us after Christmas caroling. It broke my heart a couple of years later to learn from her mom that Carol and her Dad were killed when the plane he was testing went down. I have thought about her so many times over the years and know I will see her again one day because of the decision made one night at a revival we both attended.

I mentioned last week the records my Granny gave to us … Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Tennessee Ernie Ford and others. When I was in the 5th or 6th grade, (it doesn't matter at this stage of life), the song Love Me to Pieces inspired me to enter the talent show for the fall school carnival. I practiced and practiced miming this song and putting together my little motions to go with my performance. Lol! My mother baked a cake for the cake walk, and gave my sister and me each a dollar to spend at the carnival. Well, gee, the talent show took up all my time and after all the applause had died down, I went out only to find that my sister had spent both our dollars!!! Shame, shame!!!

Now this is kind of a sad picture. From Christmas, 1959, we are wearing the sidewalk roller skates we got for Christmas. Daddy, Momma, you got it all wrong. Our sidewalk was way too short and you couldn't even get a good start on those skates. So Daddy and Uncle Sonny drove us to our school where we could skate on sidewalks to our heart's content!** But it was just so darn cold and we are wearing dresses, no less!!! All I really ever wanted for Christmas was a pair of skates to wear on Saturdays at the roller rink. (Too expensive for somebody whose feet never seemed to stop growing.) The picture I had of myself was to skate around the rink in my own skates with pom poms and wearing a cute little short skirt. It was a dream that didn't come true until I was 17, my feet had stopped growing, and my best friend took pity on me! I know my sister will roll her eyes and shake her head when she sees this story once again! When we moved to our new house, we had a concrete drive and a garage so we could skate a little bit. Funny thing we found out later was that after we had gone to school, Momma would strap on those skates and skate on the driveway. I wonder what the neighbors thought! 

Trying to hold on to a squirmy baby brother.

Summers were filled with fun time … softball, backyard showers with the hose, playing outdoor games such as Red Rover, Crack the Whip and others! I ripped the skirts off more than one dress and ruined several pair of shoes from playing so rough. We didn't belong to leagues such as kids do today, but we did have an "our side of the tracks team" and "their side of the tracks softball team." We challenged them to a play-off and beat them really good. My memory of that is not so much the game, but the victory and the prize. One of the other team's dads had been there to umpire and after the game was over, we all shook hands and he reached down into his pocket and pulled out dimes to give to everyone! I was so impressed that he had enough dimes to spare! (Say Brother, Can You Spare a Dime!!!) haha!! And it is a mystery to me what we would have done had we lost because I don't remember having an adult with us to award any prize!

How many times did we come before our parents with a friend in tow to see if they might spend the night or that we might sleep over at their house? Having that friend at our side practically ensured the answer "yes!"

School, winter, Christmases, summer … good times. The memories made in this little house are sweet to me, as well as the friends we had, the school we attended and our church. It was a difficult transition when my parents decided to build a house on the north side of town, which meant new school, new people, new church. For my baby brother, the change came at a time when he was still a toddler and my sister was still in elementary school, but I was going into junior high and at 12 years old, I made up my mind not to like anything about our new surroundings. I wondered many times how different life would have been had they not moved, but honestly, it was for the best! Besides that, they had no choice inasmuch as the new international airport would displace our neighborhood! And, it turned out, as it always does, I know God worked all these things together in that move and everything else in my life for good.


**At this point in the little tale of roller skating at the school, I stop to ponder the fact that my very over-protective parents actually thought it was okay to leave my sister and me at the school to skate for a while and then come back later to get us! Unbelievable as I was 11 and Roberta was 9 years old. Never, never in this day would we consider such a thing.