NUMBERS

My little brother learned to count when he was very young, and always loved numbers. When he was around 2 years old, he would sit on the front porch and just count--up to the thousands sometimes.

One time we had guests and my mom served a bowl of grapes. After a while, Arny told one of the guests, "You just ate 35 grapes". My mother was proud at how well he could count, but had to explain to him that people don't like it if you tell them exactly how much they have just eaten.

When we played Hide-and-Seek, if Arny was "it" he would count so fast that the other players had almost no time to hide. Since he was so good at counting, we sort of believed that he was really thinking all the numbers when he said "1,2,....100" so fast that you couldn't hear them. He says now that he believed it himself.

When Arny was 3 years old, my Aunt told him that if he learned to tell time she would get him a watch for his birthday. He got the watch for his 4th birthday. I didn't learn to tell time until I was 7.

When we were a little older, I got a pair of stilts. I set a neighborhood record by walking 10,000 steps. (That is the same as 100 steps 100 times without stopping). Arny was the official counter. Pretty soon a boy from down the block walked 10,001 steps, Arny counting again. I never got the record back.
Casa Loma. Picture courtesy of Arny, 2006.


When I was 9 years old, I knew about a very big number, infinity (sometimes written ∞). It is a number that is so big you can't count to it, and bigger than any number you can count to. That summer we visited Toronto, in Canada. We went to a big castle called Casa Loma. The guide told us about how very rich people used to live in the castle and had gold faucets and other fancy things. When I went home, my friend and I invented some people (make-believe) called "The Infinitaires". They had an infinite amount of money so could have any fancy thing they wanted. We drew pictures of their castle and all the things in it.

Here is a counting rhyme that I remember:
1,2,3, O'Leary.
4,5,6, O'Leary.
7,8,9, O'Leary.
10, O'Leary, postman.

Every time you say a number, you bounce a ball on the ground. Every time you say "O'Leary" or "postman", you bounce the ball and put your leg over it.

Here's another one:
1 potato, 2 potato, 3 potato, 4
5 potato, 6 potato, 7 potato, more.

This is used to choose a person for some chore or role. You point to a new person as you say "potato" each time, and when you point while saying "more" that person is "it".

BOOKS

Miriam wondered what books I liked when I was a little girl. When I was quite small, we had Little Golden Books.
Here is a little bit about them from the Random House website:

"When Little Golden Books launched in 1942 at 25 cents each, they changed publishing history. For the first time, children's books were high quality and low-priced. They were available to almost all children, not just a privileged few. Little Golden Books were designed to be sturdy (a new concept), delightfully illustrated, and to be sold not only in bookstores, but department stores and other chains (another new concept)"

I remember liking The Taxi that Hurried, The Poky Little Puppy, and The Happy Family.
In The Happy Family, there were a mother and father and a couple of children. There was a pie cooling on the window sill. I've never had a window sill big enough for a pie, but I think it would be fun to have one.

I also remember some books by Munro Leaf. I think he wrote about how to behave politely. I also remember a wonderful story called "Elsie Piddock Skips in her Sleep". It's about a little girl who is wonderful at jumping rope. Both these are still to be found (see Amazon.com).

I enjoyed The Bobbsey Twins, though they may be too old fashioned now. One of my favorite books was Cornelli, Her Childhood by Johanna Spyrie. It was an old book when I first read it. It's about a little girl who goes to live with her aunts and has a hard time until they get to know each other better.

Mrs. Pigglewiggle books were always lots of fun. Mrs. Pigglewiggle knew how to get children to behave. I remember a story about a boy who wouldn't wash his ears, so Mrs. Pigglewiggle planted carrot seeds in the dirt in his ears. When they started to sprout, he learned that he needed to keep his ears clean! The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew is another book I read. I don't remember a lot about it, but I remember that it was good reading.

FOOD I LIKED

One of my favorite foods when I was a little girl was pie. My mother was a good baker. She made pie dough from scratch. I still use her recipe. This pie is cooling on my counter today.

Sometimes we would go to Grafton, Illinois on a ferry boat to pick peaches and apples for the pies. I think the picture below is of the Grafton ferry boat. It may be a more recent ferry, not the old paddle wheel boat.
We would buy a bushel of peaches or apples. We would come home and my father would peel the apples or peaches, my mother would slice them up, roll out the crust and make the pies. We would all eat them. Yummy!! My father could peel with a knife, not a peeler, and he could peel an entire piece of fruit in one long strip.

Sometimes Mommy would make "slurp sauce". We called it that because it tasted so good we would all slurp it up. She would slice apples, peaches, plums, and nectarines and cook them all together with some sugar and a slice of lemon.

I also liked blintzes a lot. That's why I still make them myself. At Purim mommy made hamantashen, from the same recipe I still use. They were my favorite cookie, and no matter how many she made, I never got enough.

Another favorite was potato pancakes (latkes) or potato kugel (pudding). We didn't get it very often, because if you don't have a food-processor it is a lot of work to grate the potatos, and hard to do without grating your finger a bit. So those were special treats. Now I make them more often, because it is easy when you have the food-processor.

I also liked bread. There was a bakery called Pratzel's near our house. My dad would get up early in the morning and bring home good bread for breakfast. If I went with him, I would get my "commission"--that is, I would get to eat the heel of the bread on the way home. I loved the buttercrust bread, the challah (braided egg bread), the bagels, and especially the apple coffee cake, which was sticky and sweet and wonderful. I haven't been to Pratzel's in a long time, but I just googled it and found their website. I'll go the next time I'm in St. Louis.

Pratzel's link

I always liked chocolate. One year we got chocolate eggs at Easter. I ate mine up very quickly. My sister ate hers slowly, so I had to watch her enjoying it after mine was gone. That was hard! She saved the beautiful shiny purple/pink box the egg came in and used it for her crayons.

Sometimes we would get a chocolate bar. My mother didn't want us to eat too much. My dad didn't like sweets. If we got a Hershey bar, it would have 10 squares. Mommy would eat one, and give 3 to each of us 3 kids. If we got Nestle's, we each got 3 squares and she didn't get any. I guess sometimes we got a whole chocolate bar to ourselves, but not very often.

I'm sure there were other foods I liked and will write more some other time.

Ferry boat picture courtesy of fotobydave on Flickr.

MOVING

When I was almost 5 years old, my family moved to a house in University City. The housing shortage in the St. Louis area after World War II was easing. In addition, a regulation was changed so that school teachers in the city of St. Louis were no longer forced to live in the city. My father taught in St. Louis, so now he was able to buy a house in the suburbs.

Here is a picture of the University City city hall, courtesy of pr9000 on Flickr.




Our new house was a few blocks from the city hall. It had a lot of rooms. The front door led to the reception hall, which was just a room where you could take off your coat and say hello. There was a window seat in the reception hall. You could sit on it, or you could open up the bench and put things into it. Sometimes we kept our record player and a couple of chairs in the reception hall. There were a living room, that had a fireplace, a dining room, kitchen, and two sunrooms. One was very tiny and was my father's study. The other one was bigger, and was our playroom. The kitchen was big and had a pantry. The toilet was in a little room all by itself, and the sink was outside in a little hallway. All the rooms had hot-water (not steam) radiators with marble tops.
Upstairs there were three bedrooms that were pretty big, and one tiny one. When we first moved in, my parents had a boarder. That is, there was an extra person who lived with us. He got the big bedroom and paid rent to help my parents pay for the big house. Our boarder was a teacher friend of my father, who never had a house of his own. He always boarded with other people. So the first year, my sister, then 8 years old, and I shared the third biggest bedroom, and my brother, who was just a little baby, had the tiny bedroom. After one year, our boarder went to live somewhere else, so my parents got the biggest room, my sister and I the next biggest, and my brother the third biggest bedroom. The tiny one was now a spare room. We had a sewing machine in it, and a little extra bed. The bathroom upstairs also had the toilet in a separate tiny room by itself, with the sink and bathtub/shower in a bigger room.
There was also a basement. The most interesting thing about it was that there was a fireplace, but it wasn't a real one. It had green and orange light-bulbs in it instead of a place for a fire. Also, there were poles that held the basement ceiling up, and I like to hold on to them and spin around and around. Our washing machine was in the basement, but it did NOT have a wringer. It was a modern, 1950 model.



Our family in our new house, about 1951.

ON CLEMENS

I was born in St. Louis in 1945. We lived at 5820 Clemens. If I look for that address now in Google maps, it doesn't exist. There is a 5800 Clemens, which includes the site, but all the apartments have been torn down. A new housing development is supposed to be built, but it isn't there yet.
I already had a big sister when I came home to that apartment. We lived on the third floor, in a one-bedroom, walk-up apartment. There was no air-conditioning. When it is hot in St. Louis, it is really hot. If it got too bad, my parents would, like a lot of other people, take the family and go to Forest Park to lie on the grass to cool off and try to sleep.
(Last week --in 2006-- we were in California during a heat wave. Like St. Louis in the 1940s, lots of people in the Bay Area do not have air-conditioning. So in San Jose, people were going to the parks to try to sleep. Fortunately for them, it doesn't get really hot very often there.)
My parents had their beds in the living room, and there was also a couch in there. I can remember jumping from one bed to the next bed and then onto the couch and then to the floor. I can also remember the time I banged my chin on the end of the bed. I still have a little scar on my chin.
When I was 4 1/2 my little brother was born. Then there were three of us sharing the bedroom. The apartment was REALLY crowded. We weren't allowed to make too much noise, because there was a neighbor on the second floor beneath us who worked at night and slept during the day. At least, I think that was a true story. Maybe Mommy made it up to keep us a little bit quiet. Sometimes we would play on the roof of a lower part of the apartment building. It was covered with tar and pretty icky.
I can remember that my mother sometimes washed clothes in the bathtub if she couldn't get down to the basement. In the basement there was a wringer washer which Mommy warned us was dangerous if we got too close. We were careful to stay away from it. Here is a picture of a wringer washer, though probably older than the one we had downstairs.

(Picture courtesy of kiddharma on Flickr)




The apartment was just a few blocks from a grocery store called Moll's. I remember that they had lemon-layer cake which was very delicious, but that was only for a special treat. We used to walk over, me in my stroller, my mother pushing, my sister holding on to the handle. I can remember mommy telling me not to drag my feet on the ground when I was riding in the stroller, because shoes were expensive and I was wearing them out.
Me in my Taylor Tot, 1947, with my sister.
Thank you, Mae.