Tabla de contenidos para October 2022 en Good Old Days

Another summer has flown by. While growing up, that meant it was time to settle into fall and the new school year. Time to get reacquainted with school chums, make new friends, prepare for lessons and look ahead to Halloween. The adventures we had during summer break would still bring smiles to our faces and giggles with our friends when we rehashed them, till we had new adventures in fall. In this issue, we share stories of shenanigans, school days and more. We know school is an adventure all its own, and learning anything new can be as well. That’s why you’ll find not only fun school memories but also tales about learning how to drive, sew and cook. I enjoyed reading the stories about cooking with mothers and grandmothers,…

Happy birthday tooo yooou! In the summer of 1965, I was the oldest of four boys living in rural southern Ohio. On Aug. 8, I turned 6 years old. Happy birthday tooo yooou! We lived on Main St. in Stoutsville, a tiny village 30 miles south of Columbus. Happy birthday, dear Jaaah-aaahn! My hometown had no stoplight, but it did have an IGA grocery store, one restaurant and a bank downtown where the railroad tracks crossed Main Street. Happy birthday tooo yooou! As the closing notes rolled across the kitchen table, Dad brought in a huge box. Living that Norman Rockwell existence, the bicycle I got for my 6th birthday was a classic. It was painted bright yellow, and it had been purchased from the Ace Hardware in nearby Circleville.…

Spending the weekend with my grandparents in 1950 was not a treat. They didn’t even own a television, and their farm was in the middle of nowhere in Kansas. All you could see for miles was corn or wheat. Grandpa hardly ever spoke at all, and although Grandma chattered a lot, she spoke about her garden and sewing and making a new dress or apron. Their dog didn’t fetch, and their cats were “barn cats” and didn’t want to be petted. I was stuck with them for the weekend because my parents were helping my aunt and uncle move to another town, and I would only be in the way. I was 8 years old and I was sure I was going to die from boredom. I’d brought some Little…

Ina was my favorite aunt, my dad’s maiden sister. She was one of four children born to Maria and Gust, two adventurous people who left Finland to settle in a small community in the northeast corner of Ohio—Ashtabula. As did many of Finnish descent, Aunt Ina grew up determined and stubborn. She also showed a lot of perseverance and dedication, working over 42 years in the banking industry, rising from teller to cashier and eventually to manager. That was something for those days—a woman manager. Sure, that’s not rare for women today, but that was not the case in her generation. She did all that and was still able to take care of her ailing parents. I have many fond memories of going to see Aunt Ina in the 1950s.…

It was February 1961 or 1962, when I was 11 or 12. I was outside playing with George. He also lived in Ellport, Pa. It was cold with about a foot of fresh snow. We went “over the hill” and down to the creek, which is where I spent most of my time. We were sliding on our butts down the hill and soon discovered animal tracks in the snow near the creek bank. We thought they were raccoon tracks and started to follow them. They wove in and out through the brush and dead weeds, following the frozen shore. The creek was frozen over except for a 5- or 6-foot-wide path of clear water in its center. We followed the tracks for about 20 minutes and they disappeared under…

When I look through the window of my life, the summer of 1945 regrettably comes to mind. A mixture of varied and somewhat unwise decisions were put in play that summer. If I remember correctly, there were four of us, all elementary school-age boys. We stayed together like bark on a tree the entire summer. Let me give you a little background. The park board of the city of Davenport, Iowa, provided an excellent itinerary of programs for the entire summer. In sports activities, there were horseshoes, softball, tennis, Ping-Pong, basketball and swimming. A medley of crafts were available such as jewelry making, ceramics, watercolors, modeling with clay and woodworking. I remember making a birdhouse. A wading pool with a giant shower was always inviting. We also experienced plenty of…

Paper was in short supply at James Rhodes School in 1944. The World War II shortages caused each one of us to receive just one lined sheet of paper a week, but our teacher showed us how to make the most of it. On Monday we folded the paper in half and used the top half for our classwork. We used the bottom half on Tuesday, and then turned it over for Wednesday and Thursday. Since the paper was used up by then, we had music on Friday. Every once in a while, we would get a sheet of manila paper for an art project. These projects usually included a lesson of some sort, like the way we learned to use a ruler by measuring the logs in the cabin…

Ridgeway #2 stood atop a hill some distance from our farm home in North Dakota. It was a little one-room school attended by the children of four farm families. In any given year, about 12 to 14 children attended classes there. I received my first three years (1941–1944) of formal education there, and I dearly loved that school. One teacher taught the pupils in all eight grades. Desks were on runners. When a class was called, pupils in that class left their desks and went to the front of the room, where they sat on the backless “recitation bench.” Subjects taught were reading, penmanship, arithmetic, language (grammar and composition), geography, history, health and nature study. Penmanship was practiced daily, and children took pride in writing beautifully. Manuscript writing (printing) was…

One of the things I remember most about my dad is that he was a Norwegian through and through. There was a lot of Scandinavian blood where I grew up in central North Dakota in the 1950s. My dad was the first generation of his family born in the United States. Both his mother and father were first-generation immigrants from Norway, and he grew up eating all of the foods of his Norwegian heritage. Among the foods he grew up with was lutefisk. Anyone who doesn’t know about it will think I am making this up. Lutefisk is dried codfish or ling that has been soaked in a lye solution for several days to rehydrate it. It is then rinsed with cold water to remove the lye, and then it…

The rap on our trailer house door startled me. My new husband, Bob, had just left for work and I was washing the breakfast dishes. Peering out the window, I saw my mother-in-law. Quickly, I opened the door and she stepped up into our minuscule living room. We visited briefly, and then she said, “Cot and I wanted to invite you two over for supper Friday night if you don’t already have plans.” “Over” was the 25 feet or so to their back door, since we had proudly parked our 27-foot home in their backyard in Lubbock, Texas, in early June 1957, when we got married. “I’ll check with Bob tonight and let you know.” I hesitated for a moment. “Can I help you in the kitchen?” “Sure you can,”…

Hip-hip-hooray! You’re going the wrong way! Hip-hip-hooray! Go back the other way! And when you get back home again, everybody swing, As we go marching through Georgia. That is a square dance call I remember from many decades’ past. I must have been in junior high school when an experienced dance couple who were callers offered to teach square dancing on Sunday afternoons at my school. As usual, the girls wore dresses or skirts, and the boys wore slacks. The leaders wore western wear. In a weekly series of classes, little by little, we walked through increasingly complicated patterns that were afterward set to clapping and music, and I loved it. My memory places these energetic lessons on warm sunny days, perhaps in the fall. If weather had threatened outdoors,…

1. Mr. Sandman ________________________________ 2. Sincerely ________________________________ 3. The Ballad of Davy Crockett ________________________________ 4. Rock Around the Clock ________________________________ 5. Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing ________________________________ 6. Sixteen Tons ________________________________ 7. Hearts of Stone ________________________________ 8. The Yellow Rose of Texas ________________________________ A. Bill Hayes B. The Fontane Sisters C. Mitch Miller D. The Four Aces E. The McGuire Sisters F. Tennessee Ernie Ford G. Bill Haley & His Comets H. The Chordettes Answers: 1-H; 2-E; 3-A; 4-G; 5-D; 6-F; 7-B; 8-C…

You know that voice. It’s that voice on the television informing us, the audience, that we are about to travel to another dimension that is “not only of sight and sound, but of the mind”…“your next stop—the Twilight Zone.” The presence at the beginning and the end of each episode was Rod Serling, the creator/writer/producer who gave us the wildly imaginative anthology series The Twilight Zone. Born on Christmas Day 1924, Rod Serling was considered the class clown in school. He began to find his calling when his seventh-grade teacher, Helen Foley, suggested he engage in publicspeaking opportunities as an outlet for his energies. He joined the debate team and began writing for the school newspaper. The morning after he graduated from high school in 1942, Serling signed up for…

As a child I spent hundreds of joyful hours cuddled in my mother’s lap, learning my ABCs, nursery rhymes, poems, and math concepts. “Hidden jewels,” said my mother (she knew I most certainly was one), “need to be found early and polished often or they won’t sparkle.” Whenever I asked why it was important for me to sparkle, my mother laughed and said, “As a teacher my motto is ‘Hidden in every child is a jeweled treasure just waiting to sparkle.’” My mother, born Edith Jewell Swartz, started teaching and polishing hidden jewels at the age of 18 in September 1930, when she signed a contract to teach in a one-room school on the Kansas prairie. “Get ready!” my mother said as she looked the school board president in the…

In 1949, I was starting the first grade. In Kansas, most of the kids went barefoot all summer, and we had one pair of shoes for school. Some kids had Sunday shoes they wore to church and birthday parties, but my family was poor, so I only had one pair of shoes for school plus some worn-out shoes that were castoffs from an older cousin. I had my heart set on a beautiful pair of patent leather Mary Jane shoes with a thin strap. I wanted anklets with lace on them too. I imagined I might even learn to tap dance while I walked to school every day, and then I would amaze the other kids at recess. Getting new shoes was a big occasion. Mother and I would walk…

Have you ever wondered who the writers and photographers in Good Old Days magazine are? They’re people just like you who enjoy reading and sharing sweet memories of the past. You can be part of this magazine too! Send us your heartfelt true stories along with photos that add colorful support to your tale from yesteryear. We enjoy reading all of them, even though we don’t have space to use them all. Your story has the best chance of publication if it fits the seasonal and editorial themes we need, is interesting and well written, and highlights a specific experience that will strike a chord with readers who were growing up between 1935 and 1970. Stories 500–1,000 words in length are preferred. We accept shorter stories for our Bits &…

In 1951, we lived in San Francisco, on Golden Gate Avenue. The street was just a block long, and it was on a small hill. I was 5 years old at the time, and to me, this hill looked enormous. The upper half was steeper than the lower half. For Christmas that year, Dad and Mom got me a new Murray tricycle. It sported a two-tone paint job, dark blue with white accents. This trike was big too, and I was just barely big enough to ride it. The first time I rode it on the sidewalk, I found out it was pretty fast for a trike. Yes, I think I’m going to like this. Even at that young and tender age, I had a real serious need for speed.…

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective genius, Sherlock Holmes, came to NBC radio in 1930 and starred Richard Gordon. By 1939, Basil Rathbone was heard on radio as Holmes with Nigel Bruce as Doctor Watson. The duo were simultaneously starring in a popular series of Sherlock Holmes feature films for 20th Century Fox and later for Universal. By the end of the feature run in the mid-1940s, Rathbone was eager to separate himself from the radio show to avoid being typecast, and even though the show’s sponsor, Petri Wine, offered him generous pay to continue, he decided to move on. Tom Conway took over with Nigel Bruce continuing as Watson. In this pairing, Bruce received top billing. Tom Conway and Nigel Bruce were replaced in 1947 by John Stanley and Alfred…

What better way to learn how to cook than by intently watching your mother as she prepares various foods? I could not have learned nearly as much from any recipe book. I grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s on a small farm in northeastern Colorado. I remember sitting at the kitchen table and watching Mom make pie dough. She used some lard that she had rendered from our home-butchered hog. She rolled out the dough quickly, and the pie was soon baking in the oven. Little did I know at the time that lard was the ingredient that made the crust so flaky. Whenever Mom was cooking something, I could sample, you can bet I did some taste testing. When she was preparing her raisin dressing, it was my…

Our family lived on the South Plains of West Texas near the small town of Brownfield. My grandfather, J.R. Davis (I called him Pampa), owned a section of farmland that was mostly planted in cotton. Maize was a secondary crop. He always planted a “truck patch” of vegetables and corn near the irrigation well. When I was a young girl, I officially sat between Daddy (Hershel Davis) and Pampa on the front seat whenever we drove around the farm or to town. In early spring, our family would begin the ritual of driving down the turnrows of the fields to look at how the crop was growing. The narrow turnrow allowed the farmer to turn the tractor around and plant another four rows of seed. The turnrows effectively separated the…