| Straight From My Heart: Olden days of summer |
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Does anyone remember when we were young and the older generation would say, “In the olden days, this is what we did in the summer.” Every generation tries to compare the way they grew up and what their children do for summer fun. My mother Florence was a story teller and told us stories about her youth. She and her brother Joe played cowboys and Indians and Joe named mom, “Mosquito Moquito” and she never got to be the cowboy because she was a girl.
Another story she told was when they saw a tornado coming towards the farm, they would help gather the chickens and rooster to a safe place. They couldn’t catch the rooster and kept telling him, “You’re going to be sorry.” My mother and her brother went down to the cellar and waited until the wind stopped; and when they came outside they found the rooster limping around without feathers. They scolded the rooster, bandaged him up and he limped around and became their pet.
I was born in the same house on 10th Street in Denver that my grandmother Lucy Torres first moved to in 1929. Even though the house was tiny, in my mother’s eyes, it was a castle. She scrubbed and cleaned the house until it sparkled. In the summer, she planted pansies and petunias in the tiny fenced yard. Besides the flowers, mom set aside a small dirt pile. She would say to me and my brothers, “This is your special place to get dirty.”
Then mom would get down in the dirt and show us how to be passionate about playing in the dirt. The tools she gave us were spoons, forks, clothes pins and match boxes. She placed a small round mirror in the dirt, called it a lake and helped us build a town around it.
The two story house was warmed by a wood and coal stove in the kitchen. We had an outdoor toilet connected to the house. It wasn’t until the early 50s that mom hired someone to cut a hole in the porch to the toilet so we didn’t have to go outside anymore. We never had a bathtub and every Saturday night, we would all take baths in a round tub in the kitchen. At that time, my two cousins, Frieda and Julie were living with us because their mother had died. They were teenagers and I remember when Frieda would be taking a bath she would be saying over and over, “don’t come in here”. My mother would tack a sheet over the door from the kitchen to the living room while the rest of us waited our turn. It was the early 50s and we had just gotten a TV and thought we were living high watching Cid Caesar and the Hit Parade while we were waiting.
Growing up, summer time was always a blast. The kids in the neighborhood played hide-and-go seek; kick the can; post-office; we swam every day at Lincoln Park; we played marbles and jacks; hop-scotch and soft ball. We had our own outdoor skating rink in front of the Methodist Church on the corner of Colfax and 9th St. We roller skated every evening until the sun went down. Everything we did in the summer was free. I don’t know how many children of today’s world play these free games, but I do know that there is a lot more money involved in today’s world keeping kids busy and active.
A friend of mine from Francis Heights, Dreena Padilla grew up in Elyria and told me she and her brothers played in the dirt just like me and my brothers. Dreena says, they built roads and towns and her brothers even had little cars.
When I outgrew the dirt pile, I spent summers at my Uncle Bennie’s house on Gilpin Street. Cousin Marty was my age, Theresa was older and Janice was younger. Theresa planted a “Victory Garden” in the vacant lot next to his house. She grew tomatoes and chile and squash and corn. Theresa won an award for her “Victory Garden” and was honored at the Auditorium. After the corn was picked, we cut down the corn stalks and build houses with them. We put our dolls in the corn houses and made dinner out of red brick powder, dirt and water. We baked our mud pies in the sun and pretended to eat them. At night, the older cousins would tell us spooky stories like, “Bloody Bones,” and make us scream.
Today’s youth live in the information society and everything is computerized. I love my computer and think it is awesome to have any information I want at my finger-tips. But are the youth of today missing the simple fun we had in the past without TV and computers.
Alison Henderson, a 17-year-old high school senior at Eagle Crest High School, said, “I am disappointed in today’s world of impersonal communication.” She says that cell phones and iPods, texting and computer games take the human element out of communication. “The high tech world is changing the way people think – it shortens our attention span and there is just too much information coming at us too fast to make anything meaningful.”
I asked Alison what she does for fun. Alison’s world is volunteering at a local hospital for credits towards her honor’s program at school. She also does community service that is required for her to graduate with honors. She likes hiking and often hikes with a friend. This summer, she visited the Art Museum and Body Worlds. She likes the Denver Symphony and loves movies.
A friend of mine since childhood, Frances García, reminded me recently that my mother took all the kids in the neighborhood, once a week on an excursion. We were in walking distance to everything from Auraria so we walked to the State Capitol, the Mint, the Library, Sunken Gardens, during the daytime and in the evenings, she would take us to Lincoln Park to watch softball games. A special summer treat is when mom took us and our friends to City Park on a bus with a picnic lunch and bat and ball. We would spend the whole day visiting the zoo, playing baseball and eating bologna sandwiches. The only cost as I recall was the bus fare.
One summer, when I was a grandmother, I decided I would take my grandchildren to City Park like my mom did with us. I invited five of my grandchildren, I packed a picnic, took a bat and ball, some blankets and off we went in my car. We toured the Zoo, the kids played at the playground and were too tired to play ball so we ate our picnic lunch and headed back to the car. The car was locked and I realized I left the keys and my purse in the trunk. We found a policeman and he called for a locksmith. When we got home, the first thing the kids said was, “Gramma locked the keys in the car.”
Straight From My Heart ~ Magdalena Gallegos
Magdalena Gallegos is a writer, playwright, historian, and publisher (Southwest Magazine).
© 2010 The Weekly Issue/El Semanario, Inc.
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