MAE JULIAN
Days of Spunk, Courage, and Perseverance
Dear Readers,
I took my grandchildren to the playground the other day, and as I was sitting on some railing watching them play on all those “safe” toys, I began to reminisce about my own childhood! We were a hearty lot in Waynedale. I don’t know if such a self-sufficient band of kids exists anymore. We were out the door in the summer and only came back to eat. We had no locks on our doors, and windows were kept open at night to catch the breeze. We were adventurers of the highest order. We would wake up on a summer’s day and our imaginations would take us forward. We had an old chicken coop, and to tell you how small I was, I could hide in one of the nests. It was a square, one of many, where the old “settin’ hens” laid their eggs. My brothers were quite inventive and had imaginations as great as mine. They built a big bag swing made out of burlap, filled it with sand, and hung it from the rafters of the chicken coop. We would climb the chicken house to the rafters, walk out on a plank, and straddle the bag swing. Then, with a shout from everyone, launch ourselves into space. The bag swing became so popular that kids from Waynedale Grade School would come home with us in the winter, during lunch break, to ride the thing. Of course the one who could push off and swing so far his feet hit the top was the most admired.
We had an empty lot next to our house, with garden spiders as big as your hand. In that territory, owned by no one we ever saw, we played out our adventures. Paths were made, and traps set (holes we dug, covered with grass) to protect from invaders!
Doctors? Not unless you were dying!! My dad and mom took care of us. The only time I ever remember going to old Doc Summers, was after I had walked on the side of my foot for over a year because of the pain of a seed wart. After Doc burned it off with a hot needle sticking it in again and again, I was able to walk straight for the first time, but I also couldn’t talk for a while due to the strained vocal cords of screaming.
My brother, John, broke his arm. This was quite apparent from the angulation of his dangling arm, and his inability to move it without great pain. My dad sat him on the kitchen table, straightened the arm, and put him in a splint, and homemade sling. John was always able to swing a bat as well as the next guy after it healed. The only hospital stay any of us had, was when my brother John had polio and Bob had kidney trauma from a bike accident, and had to have surgery. Nothing was taken too seriously, and the body was relied upon to heal itself! None of us seven kids ever went to a dentist the whole time we were growing up, and none of us had cavities. Mom made us drink milk for every meal. And it wasn’t that anemic blue stuff, either; it was whole milk that came in bottles that the milkman delivered!
My brother, Bob, got a lower tooth knocked out, and Dad assessed the situation and reckoned that when the other teeth shifted you wouldn’t be likely to see where the other had been knocked out. In time this was true.
You know, looking back, perhaps it was amazing that we’ve survived as long as we have. We are all healthy and carry with us the common sense ideas that our parents instilled in us. I am, as you know, an R.N. and for the thirteen years that I worked in the Emergency Room, I was repeatedly looking up to heaven to say, Dad, you won’t believe what walked in today. Mosquito bites, bruised knees, sore throats, and any little nonsense thing that if they had waited a few days would have taken care of itself. I am a woman after my father. I don’t go to doctors, and I don’t go to hospitals. If you want to look death in the eye, just get yourself plugged into the medical system. It will leave you wishing you had parents like the other Waynedale kids, and mine!
We had no seat belts, air bags, or helmets. When we were teens we piled as many in the car as we could and the ones who didn’t fit got put in the trunk and we all went to the drive- in movie, splitting what we had to pay at the box office, unless it was being manned by one of our friends, in which case, we didn’t pay at all. Now, don’t everyone start screaming at me again, like some of my readers did when I told the story of how, when my dad died, we rigged up the US MAIL Drop Box—-I haven’t heard the last of that yet. The last I heard was that my whole family should be prosecuted. Good Lord.
Our baby cribs were brightly painted with lead paint. None of us are brain damaged, well…not in the usual way! Some of my brothers might be. The solution was that our mother didn’t let us chew the rails off the cribs. Moms were there.
No childproof lids existed on medicine bottles. If you were dumb enough to drink that toxic stuff, then you learned not to do it again…right after you got done puking, and your mom whacking your butt.
And how many of you “old timers” remember drinking water from a hose? Ever taste better water???
My brother, Bill, made a soap box derby at about the age of ten. Who helped him? His friends and other brothers. Adults had their own world and they didn’t interfere too much with ours, unless it was REALLY important. And REALLY important meant life threatening!
And stickery bushes???? We had the granddaddy of all stickery bushes right at the bottom of the porch steps to the left. I think that any of us in our sleep could tear out of the house, down the steps and miss the stickery bushes. We knew where they were, and we avoided them. My dad didn’t dig them up. He liked them and so did my mother. We learned to cope!
No matter what we ate in calories, carbohydrates, fats, or any other of the big “no-no’s” of today, none of us were, or are, fat. What a bunch of baloney all these restrictions are. What a paranoid world we have become.
For Little League or Cheerleading try outs, not everyone made the team. We taught ourselves to deal with disappointment.
Nobody ever sued anybody, either. You had to take responsibility for yourself. If we were about to fall off the incredible merry- go- round that kids pumped to full speed, we learned to lay flat until the kids jumped off and the merry-go-round was slow enough that you could crawl out and dust yourself off. No one ever got beheaded.
The generation I was in produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem solvers I’ve ever seen. We had freedom; we experienced early failure and success. We handled responsibility as early as age four.
We learned how to deal with every crisis, and no one backed away from helping each other. I pondered these things as I watched my grandchildren playing on all that safe equipment and I yearned for a stickery bush just to teach them what to avoid.
Happy Childhood Memories to all who lived in the 40’s and 50’s cuz you all know what I mean!
Sincerely,
Mae
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