Childhood misadventures (and memories of Dr. Price)

MRI’s, CT scans, x-rays and angiograms – the older we get, the more those terms become familiar to us. But when was the last time you had an old-fashioned fluoroscope?

I was four or five the last time I had one. Chewing on things like little rubber dolls and fingernails was an “unattractive habit,” according to mama. She tried to discourage me from putting non-food items into my mouth, but how else can a little kid tell what things are made of, if you don’t taste them?

Many interesting things invited a bite or a taste, like the tangy popsicle stick after the frozen orange flavor was gone, or the salty-sweet coated paper lining the Cracker Jacks box, or the chewy wax bottle once the syrupy contents were sucked dry.

But I have to agree, the nickle shouldn’t have been one of those things. That metallic flavor was very different from anything sweet or salty, you couldn’t suck any further taste out of it, and it was entirely too easy to swallow accidentally. Which is what I did, much to the dismay of my mother.

I had to tell her; after all, I wanted my nickle back. A nickle would buy something good, like a tootsie roll or two, and I didn’t come by too many nickles in those days.

Mama’s reaction was a bit extreme, I thought. “Oh my Lord, what did you swallow?!” Bundled into the car in a flash, down to Dr. Price’s exam room we went. From there I was rushed over to a strange room at McLeod Infirmary, conveniently located next door to the doctor’s office.

Lying still on that hard table was scary, especially when all the lights were off. And then came the stern admonishment from normally jovial Dr. Price: Go home, lie in the bed and read comic books, don’t play outside, don’t run or jump or do anything fun for several days, and things will “work themselves out.” And of course they did, in due time.

I quit trying to use my taste buds to determine the make-up of inedible objects for a while after that.

Several years and bouts of sore throats later, Dr. Price made a pronouncement to me with a smile as he prepared a penicillin shot: “Next time you’re in here with tonsillitis, we’re going to yank those tonsils right out.”

That was the last time I was in there with tonsillitis! Believe me, whenever I got a sore throat after that I never let on to anybody. I may have snuck into the bathroom and gargled with salt water a few times, taken an aspirin or two, but no horrible tonsil-yanking for me. I wasn’t sure how they went about it but it didn’t sound too pleasant. I didn’t intend to find out.

I made it from grammar school to junior high without too many misadventures, until the amazing ambulance ride from school to the hospital one afternoon. Sometimes with a head cold I’d get a tickle in the back of my throat, caused by a swollen soft palate. I’d learned that if a tickle evolved into a cough, I could easily stop it with a few sprinkles of table salt. Accordingly my pockets usually held one or two little salt packs (like you get with french fries), and just a bit of salt licked off the palm of my hand would do the trick.

This particular day I was all out of salt when the tickle started. Soon a cough developed, and after a couple of minutes I couldn’t stop coughing. I tried to tell the teacher I needed some salt but she thought I was nuts. Cough, cough, salt, please get me some salt, cough, cough! Instead she got me a cup of cold water, which just made things worse.

Worried by then, she did what any responsible teacher would do: she sent for the ambulance. Now, in those days, there was no EMS – the ambulances looked a lot like hearses. I was a real star, coughing my head off while the attendants in white uniforms laid me out on a stretcher and loaded me in the back of that long white car.

My fellow students watched and waved as off we went to McLeod Infirmary, probably thinking they’d never see me again.

Of course by the time we pulled up to the emergency entrance at McLeod, the cough had run its course. I guess I’d sweated enough from all that coughing that licking my damp salty palms was enough to stop it. There at the hospital door was my anxious mother, who soon understood my problem. A simple cough triggered by a simple tickle, the whole thing avoidable with a simple application of table salt.

No matter, I was there, Dr. Price was there, and I had to be checked out for the sake of the school officials. After a brief listen to my lungs, a look down my throat and a “tch, tch, tonsils still there, hmmm?” I was declared fit to go home. My star status was dimmed somewhat when I turned up at school the next day none the worse for wear, several salt packets stowed in my pocket.

Well, today I seldom have sore throats or coughs that can’t be stopped with a sprinkle of salt. But I do still have my tonsils, thanks to Dr. Julian Price’s penicillin shots – or his “yank-’em-right-out” promise, depending on your point of view!

Girlie Show at the Fair

Wall of Death, Two-Headed Monsters and the Girlie Show – The Fair’s in Town! I loved the fair as a kid, all the smells, the feels, the sights and the sounds, from greasy grilled onions on a hot dog to baby pigs and cows, sawdust to mud puddles, bright neon lights to hawkers hawking wares: “Get Your Weight Guessed Right Here,” “Get Your Foot Long Dogs Right Here,” “Get Your Fortune Told Right Here!”

In the very early 1950′s I was thrilled at the possibility of riding the big wheel – not the Big Wheel my children peddled in later years – the really big wheel. The Ferris Wheel. Every year I”d beg to go on that ride but every year either my parents or the ticket taker would crush my hopes with “Maybe next year, you’re a little too short.”

Finally the year of my dreams came when I was eight or so and I got to go on that wonderful contraption. With some strange kid I’d never met in the seat beside me, we rode up, up and away. We thought the headlights on Highway 76 looked like strings of glowing pearls in the night as cars lined up to turn into the fairgrounds. The wheel paused occasionally to let people on or off and once we sat at the tip-top for a few moments. We gripped the hand-bar for dear life as the car jerked to a stop, but we could see everything for miles and miles and I wished the ride would last forever.

It didn’t, of course, so we made the circle of the fairway and my brother Harold and I rode everything we could. The Bullet looked too scary even for me but there was plenty of other stuff to do, rings to toss over Coke bottles and coins to skip across plates hoping to win a prize. We ate sticky cotton candy and corn dogs on a stick, then tried our hand at shooting the little assembly line of moving ducks. Lacking enough muscle power in our skinny little arms, we watched teenage athletes throwing power pitches to dunk guys in a vat of chilly water. That was a blast.

We passed by the multicolored Fortune Teller’s Tent, tripped through the House of Mirrors and Fun House and ended up with the Tunnel of Love. When spooky vampires jumped out of the walls or Frankenstein’s monster dropped suddenly from the ceiling, teenage girls squealed in fear and inched closer to their boyfriends. (After a few years I understood all that a bit better.)

Right outside the fairway was Hit the Bell with the big sledge hammer. No winners there. A few yards over, the weight-guesser was so good at it that I wondered if a scale was hidden under the dirt somewhere. For supper we headed to a civic club booth for hamburgers, fries and Pepsis, then meandered through the Exhibition Buildings to look at all the blue-ribbon winners. Pumpkins. Pumpkin pies. Quilts. Tractors. Chicks. Hogs.

Every year Mama played Bingo at least one night. Harold and I wandered around the Exhibition Buildings with Daddy while she tried for a table lamp or a portable radio. She always brought something home but I’m sure she paid full value for it. “B-9 is the number,” I can still hear that voice ringing out.

By the late 1950′s my teenage friends and I disdained the Ferris Wheel for the Tilt-A-Whirl and Round-Up, then made our way to The Wall of Death, the Two-Headed Monsters and the Girlie Show! The Wall of Death is still around, motorcycles zooming around a circular wooden wall or even inside a ball-shaped metal cage. (I watched that online one day, complete with sound effects. Still impressive!)

The two-headed monsters were disappointing, just cloudy pickle jars with unfortunate dead lizards floating in formaldehyde. What next? The boys talked us into it, and we made a beeline for the Girlie Show.

I was about 16 years old and my date 17, but the bored ticket-taker acted like he thought we were grownups and let us in. We huddled like criminals in the dimly-lit tent but when the show started there wasn’t much to see. A plump lady wearing lots of greasepaint, pink feathers, silver sequins and high-heel slippers did a modified burlesque number, flung her feather boa into the “crowd” (all five of us), then ducked behind a curtain and tossed out what was supposedly the rest of her costume.

That ended the Girlie Show, all five or six minutes of it. Of course, if we had actually been adults the performance may have gone a little differently.

When my children were small they loved the fair as much as I did. One year my daughter won a nearly life-size purple gorilla, bigger than she was. She happily lugged him home where he lived among her teddy bears for many years. One day he got left outdoors in damp weather and developed a bad case of dirt-and-mold smell. Too big for the washer, he resided in the outside storage room until it became obvious that his lumpy stuffing and purple fake fur were beyond redemption. We held a sad burial service for him in the back garden.

These days I don’t have the energy to tromp around the fairway and my stomach doesn’t dare try the rides. But I wouldn’t mind touring the blue-ribbon winners or enjoying a foot-long hot dog slathered with grilled onions. I don’t think they have Girlie Shows at the fair any more, do they?

Wash day

Sitting at my computer I can hear my automatic washer working away down the hall. Now and then I go move clothes from washer to dryer or dryer to laundry basket, and later on I’ll fold tee shirts and towels while watching television. Laundry is an annoying interruption in my week day, but if I save it all till Saturday I can’t do something else I’d rather do outside the house.

My grandmother Mimi did laundry outside the house, come to think of it… her wringer washer was housed in a shed attached to the smokehouse, a long extension cord running from the back porch to supply power.

I liked to help her with the wash, especially sheets. First she’d pump enough water to fill the round tub using the hand pump in the middle of the back yard. Having the washer on wheels helped; Mimi could roll it to the pump for filling. Then she’d add detergent, wind the sheets loosely around the dasher, close the top and plug the machine in.

The washer tended to dance around the yard, the movement of the dasher turning the whole machine if the wheels weren’t chocked. That was funny, watching the washer do the hula in Mimi’s back yard.

After they were washed the sheets were run through the wringer. That was the part I liked, until the day my fingers got tangled up in a sheet and pulled right into the rollers! I yelled like crazy and Mimi came running. She hit the release bar, the rollers separated and my wet, achy fingers were freed. Thankfully the thickness of the sheet had kept them from getting mashed too bad.

Shaking the feeling back into my hand I begged Mimi to let me continue, and after gently bending my fingers back and forth a few times, she did. This time I was careful to fold up a corner of the sheet and feed just the edge into the rollers. No more flat fingers.

The wrung-out sheets fell in nice swirls into a galvanized tub full of clean rinse water. I had to keep an eagle eye on those sheets — if one missed the tub it would fall into the dirt and have to be re-washed. I made sure they didn’t miss their target. Then I’d punch the sheets down with a broom handle, swirl them around to rinse out the soap and get them ready for the wringer again.

After re-rinsing and re-wringing, the machine was unplugged and the gray water drained into a low spot in the yard. Mud puddles for later play! The washer was rolled back to the shed and it was time to hang out the sheets. A sack full of clothes pins hung from one end of the clothesline.

I thought wash day was a lot of fun myself. Mimi thought it was a lot of work — but not nearly as much work as when she was a young girl, she said, when she had to boil all the dirty clothes plus make the soap to wash them with. Make your own soap? How neat, I thought, but I wasn’t really interested in the rest of the story back then.

Tim’s mother Ora Lee had vivid memories of wash day as a child. It was a day-long weekly event. A long shelf attached to their smokehouse held several galvanized wash tubs and a black cast-iron wash pot sat over in the yard, surrounded by firewood ready to be lit. And of course, clean clothes required soap — homemade lye soap.

Several times a year they made the lye soap. Fat trimmed from meat, meat skins and “leavings” were saved until there was enough for the job. On soap-making day the fat was poured into the wash pot and a healthy helping of Red Devil lye added.

The wood was lit under the pot, the mixture stirred as it heated, the lye melted the fat and eventually the glop became soap. After cooling overnight the lye soap was cut into blocks and stored in the smokehouse.

Each wash day, the same cast-iron pot was filled with water drawn from the well, a fire lit underneath and the dirty clothes brought from the house. Lights were separated from darks and a washboard used with lye soap and water to scrub out any stains.

Light colored clothes went into the boiling pot first. A good dash of lye was added for extra cleaning power and the clothes punched down with an axe handle, over and over. When clean enough to rinse they were hauled out and dumped into the first tub of clean water, then the next batch went into the wash pot. After several dumping-dunking steps in the rinse tubs, each batch was wrung out by hand.

Clothing was dipped into a flour-water starch bath, then everything hung on the clothesline to dry. Of course, the dry laundry still had to be taken down, folded up and/or ironed.

Ora Lee recalls having to stand on a chair to reach the tabletop that served as her ironing board. Her iron was hollow, filled and re-filled with corn-cob coals from the fireplace every hour or so. During tobacco season she’d take the iron to the tobacco barn and fill it with coals from there.

The next time I gripe about having to do laundry again, maybe I ought to be grateful I don’t have to make the soap and boil the dirty clothes, or even have a wringer washer doing the hula in my back yard!