Charleston Had It All # 58
Boys Will Be Boys and Girls will be “Tomboys”
By Mildred Reeves Burnett
Little girls (tomboys) weren’t beyond being like little boys, up on their knees, shooting marbles, winning or losing. Ball bearings called “steelies” were sometimes used for taws.
Fanny Bell Gwaltney Mound, who once lived on South Third Street, said her mother had a 3 x 5 rug with a sort of round pattern on it. During bad weather and in wintertime, she and her sister Edna Ruth would shoot marbles from the rug pattern. 1 Sometimes Betty Thompson, Betty Lou Jones, or Bill Hough shot marbles with them since they lived nearby.
They jumped off garages, climbed trees, and ran over to neighbor Mrs. Alma Barrett’s to walk on barrels, which were turned on their sides in her back lot for that purpose.
Boys have always played baseball and football. Kickball was played too, but spinning tops and working yo yo’s up and down came and went. Boys also played Mumble-Peg with pocket knives. Boys and girls had a lot of fun roller-skating together in the streets either day or night.
Playing Jacks, dress up, school, cutting out paper dolls from an old catalog or bought at the dime store, kept little girls occupied. Boys glued together model airplanes, traded comic books, played with little toy soldiers and cars, and anything else they could dream up.
Buddy Marshall, David Lair, Jackie Pat Ellis, Jack Waggener, Buddy Jackson, C. B. Carver, Buddy Whipple, all lived within a block, except for Jackie Pat. One spring day in the mid-thirties, when the boys were in about the fifth and sixth grade, they put their kite string together and tied it to a homemade kite.
They also tied a narrow strip of light-weight cloth together they’d cut from a ragged sheet or other light weight rag for the kite tail The only thing bought was the kite string, which was strong.
In the alley, behind Lair’s dwelling, one boy ran with the kite, turning it loose for the breeze to catch and lift in flight with its tail flittering behind. Another boy unwound the kite twine as the kite floated upward.
The kite drifted higher in the air than they’d ever seen one fly before. The boys watched it drift higher and higher in the bright blue sky, until it was out of sight. To their dismay the kite freed itself where the string was knotted together. 2
Kites were made with thin tissue paper, brown grocery sacks, or newspaper with a kindling frame, and even frame of dried giant ragweed stalks.
A simple two-stick kite: Make a cross with two narrow sticks of desired length. Tie string to all four points in order to hold paper. Cut paper the shape of kite frame allowing about an inch to crease and fold over frame edge. Glue paper covering the string on outside edge of the kite. Tie kite string to center of the two sticks. That string is used to fly the kite and unreel by the kite flyer as needed. For tail, cut light-weight fabric, about an inch wide strip, and length according to wind velocity. Tie tail to bottom of kite. 3
A three stick kite (coffin or hexagonal) requires a string bridle. It is more difficult to make, but is preferred by Norbert Halter who has made many, many of them over many years for his and the neighborhood children.
Kites were flown on numerous vacant lots for years untold.
In summertime everyone was out in the yard or sitting on the porch, and some swung in their front porch swing. Children didn’t play far from home, doors weren’t locked, and no one was ever bothered, Buddy Marshall recalled.
Buddy was right. We didn’t take the keys out of our cars either, and we walked and ran most everywhere we went.
We young girls would stoop down in the yard gathering clover. Then we’d sit on the grass and knot together clover chains to loop over our heads for necklaces. We also delighted in designing hollyhock dolls. Some little girls made corn shuck dolls.
Not only did our friend, Lena Hoover, my sister Frances and I climb hay way up in the hay barn, we crawled after my brother Byron, and his friends, Dan Osborne, Bill Jones, Jack Thompson, Bobby Dotson; whomever may be along, through pitch-dark hay tunnels made by them among the many bales of alfalfa stacked there.
The boys built secret rooms off the tunnels where we always found them snickering in their hiding. On crawling out of the tunnels, we’d be itchy and scratchy with hay in our hair and clothes, and scent of fresh cut alfalfa still lingering in our noses.
I’ve learned other kids in town and the country tunneled through hay in barns and had corncob fights too.
There were house parties where boys and girls first danced together to Hit Parade songs of late forties and early fifties played on a phonograph, such as The Old Lamp Lighter, The White Cliffs of Dover, Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive (war songs), Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, and the list goes on. Hand-cranked phonographs of earlier times were obsolete by now.
Radios brought us music, comedy, mystery, drama, et cetra, enriching our lives.
My girl friends and I began staying the night with one another when we were in about the sixth grade 1944. Hayrides and wiener roasts on the levee, along with boys from our class, took place following years.
On a summer night, when the fellows began driving, a bunch of us would cram in a couple of cars and hightail it to Belmont next to the Mississippi River. Following a wiener roast, we’d scurry down the ferry ramp and ride the ferry, sloshing across the river to Columbus, Kentucky and back. We took many delightful trips to Belmont.
Copying girls who came before us, we had bunking parties starting in early high school. Girls following us did the same.
When my friends, Edna Ruth and Fanny Bell Gwaltney, Carla Jo and Jennye Whitehead, Betty Thompson and Betty Jackson, Elizabeth “Libby” Hales, Peggy Wright, Helen Maynard, Carol Sue Wilson, and Betty Lou Jones, came to my house, we’d sleep all over the upstairs. At times we dragged the feather beds out on the front porch to talk and giggle and finally sleep.
From those youthful slumber parties came traditions of meeting together throughout many years to come. Of the group a few years before us graduating 1945,’46 were Martha Jo Boyd, Daisy Cornwall, Betty Beasley, Patty Burke, Becky Brown, Sue Russell, Leta Simpson, and Mary Ella Drake, who met from California to Kentucky.
From years 1950,’51, we call our group the ITAS, who are Edna Ruth, Fanny Bell, Bettys: Thompson and Jackson, Mildred, Carla Jo, and Libby. We have met from sea to shining sea.
The JJJ’s follow us a few years—1955. They are Marjorie Ficklin, Janet Sue Burke, Greta Warren, Shirley Hess, Dorothy Ann Goodin, Nancy Callahan, Anna Marie Duff, Peggy Drake, “Honey” Graham, Sandy Sylvester, and Linda Kellett. They’ve traveled from Texas to Wisconsin to Florida.
The last two groups still meet. We have lost a few friends along the way.
I regret that I cannot tell of everyone’s youthful years, but hopefully one is reminded. If I were writing an encyclopedia, I could tell it all.
1 Note: Quite large woolen area rugs with design in rich colors and throw rugs were of that era. Wall to wall carpet had not yet arrived.
2 Info—Buddy Marshall, telephone interview, January 2007
3 Kite instructions by Norbert Halter, personal interview Feb. 5, 2007.
To Be Continued |