Older Than Dirt

A friend sent me this Older Than Dirt Quiz in an email. I’ve already blogged about some of these (see Geezer Test entry on Nov. 16), but here goes! Count all the ones that you remember, not the ones you were told about. Ratings at the bottom.

1. Candy cigarettes
I remember these well. They didn’t taste very good—kind of like Necco Wafers (which I didn’t much like either), but it was fun to play “grown-up” and pretend to puff them. They were 5¢ a box. You can still get them online, but they’re more expensive now.

2. Coffee shops with tableside juke boxes
I remember some restaurants—the precursors to fast food joints—that had them. Gill’s on Williamson Road in Roanoke was one. I don’t remember any “coffee shops” when I was a kid, though. Coffee shops appeared when I was already an adult, unless you count “coffee houses” that appeared during my teens—but those usually featured live folk music.

3. Home milk delivery in glass bottles
When I was a kid, the milkman always left us a bottle or two of milk, but I can’t remember if ours came from Clover Creamery or Garst Brothers Dairy. I remember the cardboard tops that had to be removed and how real cream was at the top of the milk. To distribute the cream, you had to shake the bottle—before you messed with the cardboard top.

4. Party lines on the telephone
We had one, back in the day when we had five-digit phone numbers. All the phones had rotary dials, so we really did dial a number—after we’d waited for the other person to get off the line.

5. Newsreels before the movie
. . . and at least one cartoon with the movie and maybe a serial, too. I remember seeing President Truman in a newsreel at one of the theaters in downtown Roanoke.

6. TV test patterns that came on at night after the last show and were there until TV shows started again in the morning. (There were only 3 channels—if you were fortunate)
I mentioned this on the “Geezer Test” about entry. I can remember when we only had one channel—Channel 10, WSLS.

7. Peashooters
Yep. Every kid had a peashooter at one time or another. A wide paper straw could be used for one in a pinch. And spitballs were more readily available than peas. But kids also had slingshots. Most were homemade. Slingshots had a longer range than peashooters and could do more damage.

8. Howdy Doody
This is the first show I remember watching. Before we had a TV, I went two houses up the hill to watch what must have been the only TV on our section of Floraland Drive at the time. Soon we got our own set. I can remember discussing the show with friends in my class at Huff Lane School.

9. 45 RPM records
Heck, I remember 78 RPM records. 45s came along about the time I was in the 6th or 7th grade. I remember having to get those little plastic thingies to put in the 45s so they’d fit the record player’s spindle.

10. Hi-fi's
High fidelity. That’s what you wanted in your high-end record playing system. I can remember during the 70s that a hi-fi was a major piece of living room furniture.

11. Metal ice trays with lever
I still have some. Haven’t used them for years, though.

12. Blue flashbulbs
Yep. Used some of those—in the second camera I had when I was a kid. Finally could take pictures indoors! What a technological milestone! The blue was an improvement over the plain ones.

13. Cork popguns
I remember them, but didn’t have one. I had some fancy cap pistols though.

14. Studebakers
Not only can I remember Studebakers, I've actually ridden in one. They looked so sporty—at least compared to a lot of other cars in the early 50s.

15. Wash tub wringers
This was how Mama did our laundry ever since I can remember—all through my childhood and college years she used the same wringer washing machine. In the 70s, though, she switched to an automatic washer.

If you remembered 0-3=You're still young.
If you remembered 3-6=You are getting older.
If you remembered 7-10=Don't tell your age.
If you remembered 11-15=You're older than dirt!

Looks like I’m older than dirt.

~

The Help, the 60s, & RPI

I've just finished reading The Help, the best-selling and lavishly praised debut novel by Kathryn Stockett. After my friend Sally Roseveare couldn't put the book down, I figured I'd better read it. I'm glad I did. The Help, set in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, is absolutely wonderful.

After I read The Help, I couldn't help thinking about my own experiences in the 60s. Unlike the white women in The Help, my family didn't have a maid. My first experience with black maids was at  Richmond Professional Institute (now VCU). I lived in Founders Hall, a Victorian-era mansion turned dormitory, on the corner of Franklin and Shafer—the edge of Richmond's Fan District.

From my sophomore through senior year, I lived in the part of the dorm called second front. Our maid on second front was Adeline Brooks, a big woman who looked after her girls. She was good not to tell on us to the housemother if we had anything in our rooms we weren't supposed to have. When I read The Help, I pictured Aibileen looking exactly like Adeline.

During my junior year (1965-66), my roommate Polly had a hard time getting up for her morning class. I didn't want her to flunk out and—on my way out to my own morning class—asked Adeline, who was sweeping the hallway, to make sure Polly got up. Adeline took her job seriously. She'd poke Polly with the end of her broom, entreating, "Miz Polly, Miz Polly, Miz Becky say you got to get up." Polly wasn't too thrilled, but at least she didn't flunk the class.

In my senior year, Adeline was transferred to a boys' dorm. We missed her and I reckon she missed us. If she happened to see one of her girls on the sidewalk, she'd run to us and give us a big hug.

As Bob Dylan sang a couple of years earlier, "The Times, They Are A-Changin'." And they changed in Richmond, too, but we were too sheltered to notice much. We knew there was a war in Viet Nam, but only those girls with boyfriends in the army kept up with it. We knew there was a civil rights movement, but we didn't keep up with it, either. Most of us didn't get a newspaper, and—except for the Kennedy assassination coverage—we rarely watched the  television in one of the dorm's three parlors. Our radios stayed tuned to music stations—usually WLEE. There was only one phone on second front, and the fourteen girls on second front had to share it with the girls on second center.

The dorms—and the RPI undergraduate programs—were segregated until my last two years. Then they integrated without a hitch. RPI was pretty liberal as Virginia colleges went.

However, when a black girl, Beatrice Wynn, was voted Harvest Ball Queen, it made headlines. As I remember, the Richmond paper sensationalized it a bit, but many students barely noticed.

After all these years, I can still see what second front looked like. My room was painted green, and had one dresser, two small wooden desks with chairs, a small sink, a closet, one window that overlooked the entrance to the basement cafeteria, and two twin beds with no headboards. I had the bed closest to the door. We shared a bathroom with the room next door. The old-fashioned tub was small. There was no air conditioning, and the radiator pipes rattled loudly when the heat cut on. Once we had a mild earthquake, but everyone thought it was just the the radiators.

Here are a couple of Founders Hall pages from the RPI yearbooks from 65-66 and 66-67:

Notice that the housemother, Mrs. Manning (top left, above) was smoking. A lot of the girls smoked too. But notice how prim the girls in the bottom picture were sitting, but how casual they were in their rooms. We always wore dresses or skirts to class or on campus. Any art students who had painting studio had to cover their jeans with trenchcoats.

I'm actually in one of these pictures—I'm the one in the foreground with a towel. Here's a close-up (Notice the caption!):

The road to beauty was indeed rough. We put on makeup before we went out. We wore stockings (This was before panty hose!). We rolled our hair up every night and slept with the uncomfortable rollers in our hair.  Notice how many have rolled-up hair in this late-night Christmas party in December 1965:

And here's a shot in someone's room. The people below are (from right top down) Mary White, Gus Thompson, Mary Hu Bridges, Marena Grant, and Polly White. Paulette McCall is on the left.

Now I'm in my mid-60s. Hard to believe my college days were 45 years ago. Times have indeed changed.

And books like The Help remind us just how much.

~
The RPI yearbooks from 1930 until 1960s can be read online at The Internet Archive.

My First New Car

Warning: Nostalgia post follows—a long and rambling nostalgia post. But there's a cat.

As of a few weeks ago, Pontiacs won't be made anymore. That's a shame. They made great cars. One of my favorite cars—a 1967 Firebird—was made by Pontiac.

Actually, the 67 Firebird was a 67-and-a-half, because it came out a bit late to be a true 67. My yellow Firebird was the first car I ever bought new, and it replaced the 61 Ford Falcon that I'd been driving during my last two years of college.

My new Firebird in my mother's driveway on Floraland Drive in Roanoke.

The first time I saw a Firebird, I coveted it. In early May 1967, right after I signed my first teaching contract with York County Schools (to teach at Poquoson High School during 67-68), I ordered my new Firebird—canary yellow with a black interior. My daddy's cousin, Guy Brown, who worked at the Pontiac dealership on Williamson Road in Roanoke, sold it to me for $3,550. My payments were slightly over $50 a month, but I figured I could swing it because I'd get a whopping $5,500 per year from York County, which was one of the highest-paying school systems to which I'd applied. (My take-home pay was $355 per month. You'll notice 1967 was a year marked by 3s and 5s.)

Anyhow, I had the car a couple of weeks before I graduated from Richmond Professional Institute (which became VCU). Dorm students weren't supposed to have cars, but I'd kept the old Falcon on the streets of Richmond for two years without getting caught, and so the Firebird lived on the streets for a month, too. (Yeah, I checked on it a couple times a day.)

I put some miles on that Firebird. It took me to Newport News, where I lived in the Dutch Village Apartments (and where I met my husband at the swimming pool). It took me to Poquoson every weekday for work and to William & Mary during June and July 1968 for a graduate class in modern fiction.

That August, the Firebird took me to Charleston, SC, where hubby had been transferred, and it took me from North Charleston (where we lived in the Royal Palms Apartments) down the Ashley Highway to the Citadel where I went to grad school. The Firebird wasn't air-conditioned, so I drove with the windows down during the sweltering South Carolina summers.

When I got a job at St. Andrews Junior High for the 69-70 school year, it took me to work. During one of the hurricanes, someone ran into the back of it and left a small dent on the left side under the bumper. We never bothered to get it fixed.

The Firebird didn't take me to Massachusetts were we lived for a few months in late 1970, but it was back on the road when we moved back to Newport News. In 1972 we moved to Roanoke, so it took me to work at James Madison Junior High. When the odometer passed a hundred thousand, I bought a new 1977 Pinto (a truly dreadful car). But the Firebird stayed on the road off and on until 1980 when it went to live in my mother's garage. Once, a guy passing by saw it and offered $4,500 for it. We decided not to sell.

When we moved to Franklin County, the Firebird came along, albeit on a flatbed. It lived in the equipment shed next to the horses' run-in shelter for over a decade (Twiggy had her kittens under it), and it became coated with Franklin County red dirt.

When hubby cleaned out the shed a few weeks ago, he pulled it out. Since he needed the flatbed to move hay, the Firebird was unloaded on the lawn. The last couple of rains have washed most of the dust off.

With the dust washed off, you can see where it's starting to rust.

The Firebird is showing its age. It's an antique now.

So, I guess, am I.

~

Update: We sold the car to a guy down the road. He collects cars and restores them. Here's the Post: https://peevishpen.blogspot.com/2015/09/1967-firebird.html