Growing Up
Since our children have all grown up and flown the coup, I've decided that most of the things that I have to blog about would be totally boring, so I'm going to add stories about growing up in the 1940'2 and 50's. Things were a whole lot different then than they are now. Kathy
FRIENDS
Growing up, my best friend was Karol Woods. We knew each other from about age 2. Her dad was also worked at a dairy and then later worked at a dairy plant. Our friends all centered around the dairy business in the first years we lived in Oregon. When Dad bought some land from the Gilhams, a few years later, the Woods also bought some land from them and lived just up the road from us. We played together and fought at times, but our mothers were smart enough to keep out of our squables as we always made up by the next day. We were friends all though grade school and then when we moved back from Klamath Falls, we ran around together again. Her nick name was Tootie, and mine was Skettie. She was always taller than me except for about 6 months when we were 12 years old. We still keep in touch.
Another dairy family was the Hughes. There was a creek on their land that Virgil Hughes dammed up with sand bags so he had a pond to pump water out to irrigate his pasture. We kids felt that it would make a good swimming hole. Larry Hughes and his friends did most of the work cleaning out the berry briers and such. We had a lot of fun there and Larry taught me how to swim in that swimming hole.
We went camping a lot with the Hughes family. We didn’t have camping gear such as tents and sleeping bags. We just used our quilts and made bed rolls. Instead of a Coleman lantern, we used #10 cans with sand in them and poured white gas onto the sand and lit them like torches. We kids would go off to the sand dunes or the woods and play after breakfast and come in when we got hungry and go off and play until supper time. Then we would go off and play some more until bed time. When we were in the mountains, Larry would screech at the cougars at night and they would screech back. I just knew one would come into our camp one night, but they never did. We would also swing on the vine maples like we were playing Tarzan. At the coast we played games on the side of the sand dunes and explored a lot. Some how we never got lost or seriously hurt.
When Mom and Ruth Hughes started working as cooks at Willakenzie grade school, they met a teacher named Mildred Smith and became good friends with her and her husband Al. They had two boys. Bob was my age and Mike was a couple years older. They started going camping with us. That made 2 more kids to join in the fun.
It seemed like every weekend the parents got together and played cards or put together jigsaw puzzles. When we kids were older, we would play "kick the can", "hide and seek" or "annie over" outside. Our house was the best to play "annie over". You have two teams, one at the front of the house and one in the back. A member of the team throws the ball over the house and yells "annie over". If the ball doesn’t go over the house, he yells "pigtail". When the ball goes over someone tries to catch it before it hits the ground. If he catches the ball, the team splits up and runs around to the other side of the house, and the person with the ball tries to hit someone on the other team with the ball. If that person get hit with the ball, they have to join that team. The game is played until one team has all the players or the parents decide to go home.
Larry, me, Jackie, and Barbara at the Oregon coast
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