In The Old Days

     There are people who believe the old days were the best. Since I am now 75, I look back at growing up in the 1950s and remember not everything was rosy in those days. Some aspects were positive, especially since it was a relatively peaceful time in the world, but there were still difficulties, especially for women.      

     My mother and father were married in 1947. My brother was born in 1948. A year and ten days later, I was born. My mother had Rh negative blood. My blood was Rh positive, so I’m lucky I’m here. Nowadays, there is an injection (RhoGAM) available to women who are Rh negative so that their antibodies do not attack the Rh positive baby in their womb. My mother gave birth to another little girl in 1952, but that baby died only a few days afterward. 

Polio was a terrible scourge at the time. At the age of three, I was suddenly unable to walk. My parents took me to the hospital where I was put into isolation, since the doctors thought I might have polio. Being in a large empty room, in a crib, is one of my first memories. Fortunately, whatever I had vanished with the aid of antibiotics. 

Mom gave birth to another girl in 1954. She was healthy. 

My brother and I started school and proceeded to be sick much of the time with measles, chicken pox, and other diseases. Fortunately, the polio vaccine became available and we were spared from getting that horrible disease.

Mom and Dad bought a very unfinished house. It was what they could afford on a journalist’s salary. It needed interior walls, insulation, and sheetrock to make it livable. Dad took my brother with him on weekends for assistance. My brother was seven, but he could hand Dad nails and such. We moved into the house in 1955. 

Mom became pregnant again. This time she started bleeding and the doctor feared she would lose the baby due to a miscarriage. My mother spent the rest of that pregnancy sitting down with her feet elevated. It was at that time my mom taught me to embroider and crochet. Mom was an artist and she liked being busy. She decided on a taking a mail order course to become an interior decorator. She finished the course. My youngest sister was born in 1958. 

By that time, I was eight years old and my poor mother was worn out. I was old enough to reach the knobs on the stove, to hang out the laundry on the line to dry, to change my sister’s diapers, and do a myriad of other household chores. 

Meanwhile, my maternal grandfather came for a visit and encouraged my father to dig out a basement under the house. That project lasted for many years. Obviously, my father still had a full time job at the newspaper, but on weekends he used a pick ax to dig through the solid clay under the house. Often, my brother helped Dad by taking wheelbarrows full of clay out of the basement and dumping it on the hill. I helped by bringing Dad large mugs of coffee. Sometimes, I played with the clay as did my sisters.

This division of labor worked quite well. Now and then my brother and I would get some time off to go on adventures. We considered our younger sisters “the kids.” My brother built a small go cart, which we called a buggy, from leftover nails, old baby carriage wheels, odd pieces of scrap lumber, and a rope. Most often, I was the engine, which I deemed quite unfair. My brother decided the solution was for both of us to ride our buggy down Cinder Hill, an unpaved street with a steep incline that went right to the edge of the bay. 

As we started to zip down the hill, a car came up the hill towards us. My brother made a sharp turn to the right. I was thrown into the gravel at the side and my brother landed underneath the buggy. We were scratched up but nothing was broken. However, that was the last time we went down Cinder Hill.

Did you grow up in the 1950s? What were some of your youthful experiences?