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!

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?

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!

Is it laziness to want to avoid the malls and big store crowds? Maybe so, but I no longer go from store to store looking for the right gift, or right size, or right color of anything. I let my fingers do the walking — not through the yellow pages, but through my computer keyboard.

There are lots of great buys on the internet these days, and from some of the same stores as at the mall. Except online they always have my favorite color, blue (blue jeans, blue shirts, blue towels, whatever).

In the late 1960′s I’d never heard of a credit card but most stores had layaway plans. For a few dollars down you could reserve holiday presents till a week or so before Christmas, when you hauled your goodies home and hid them under the bed or up in the attic.

Along the way you had to make regular payments, of course, or whatever you’d laid away would vanish back onto the store shelves. All in all it was very helpful to young couples with youngsters who expected Santa to bring the latest Mattel toys.

One year to help out with Christmas costs I took an extra part-time job. The Monday after Thanksgiving I left my regular secretarial work at quitting time and headed out to become a cashier at Treasure City on Highway 301 North. Today we take Wal-Mart and Lowes for granted but in those days Treasure City was unique. Like today’s big-box stores it featured every imaginable kind of department, plus a super snack bar.

“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” played over the loudspeaker. Extra toys, bicycles and Christmas trees were everywhere, and so were the customers, driving in from all over the Pee Dee to take advantage of holiday specials.

To get the job as a money-handler I had to pass a lie-detector test. Unfortunately I flunked the test. The machine called me a liar on the date, the day of the week, my name, address, eye color, everything — but they hired me anyway. I guess they figured if I really lied about anything it would show up as the truth, so in a way they could still figure out the results.

I discovered a love of hot dogs at Treasure City. Every supper break found me at the snack bar munching on the best hot dog I’ve ever tasted. It had the normal weiner, bun, catsup and mustard, but they added heaping helpings of cole slaw, pickle relish, chopped onions and chili. Yummmm! A few breath mints for desert obliterated onion breath; after all, it’s not a real hot dog without onions!

That first afternoon I arrived a few minutes early, donned my blue smock and took over my register. By the end of the shift my feet were tired, my fingers were tired and my brain was tired. And I still had to total up all those dollar bills, fives and tens, plus coins. Cash and checks had to balance with the internal register tape, or else. Or else I had to make up the deficit, that is. It was okay if I wound up with a few cents over but never okay if I came up a few cents under.

One evening my register rang up about $75.00 short. It wasn’t exactly $75.00, it was something odd, like $74.37. Panic-stricken, I went back through every bill of every denomination, re-counted every check, totaled every nickel and dime.

I had resigned myself to having a short paycheck when suddenly a light bulb went on in my head. A man had purchased items in sporting goods, then brought some bluejeans to my check-out. He plunked everything down on the counter and began fumbling in his pocket. I had already rung up his fishing tackle and shotgun shells by the time he pulled out his receipt.

I should have voided the transaction and started over but with a long noisy line behind him, I simply subtracted that amount from his total and made a mental note to fix it later. My supervisor was very understanding; I wasn’t the first newbie to make that awful mistake.

It was nearly closing time one evening when a tired young woman with two cranky children pushed her loaded shopping cart my way. It contained a few toys but mostly warm winter clothes for the kids. I rung everything up and bagged the doll baby, fire truck, jackets and pants. When she handed me her check I flipped through a “bad check” list to be sure her name wasn’t on it — but it was.

She could tell from my expression that I couldn’t accept her check before I ever said the words “I’m sorry.” She silently grabbed the kids’ hands and walked toward the exit with tears running down her face. As her little girl asked “What about our stuff, mama?” my heart went out to her. I said a little prayer for her and the children as I cancelled the transaction and turned to the next customer.

That was my first and last season as a part-time holiday cashier at Treasure City. As my own children exclaimed over their new toys and winter clothes that Christmas morning, I thought again about that young mother and said another prayer.

Whenever I drive down 301 North and pass Treasure City, I still do.

My mother accompanied me that very first day, knowing I was academically ready for the work but not sure I would find the right room on my own.  She was too familiar with my innate curiosity and snoopiness, I guess.

The academic aromas at McKenzie were interesting.  I could stand in the front middle hallway and smell the odors of hardwood floors and fresh bread baking in the school kitchen.  School lunchrooms had working kitchens back then and hot meals were prepared right there on site.  There was the hint of turpentine too, probably left over from cleaning paintbrushes.  Everything gleamed with new paint!

The classroom blackboards were really black, and no chalk dust yet coated the board or erasers.  Two sides of my first grade room had blackboards.  Mounted to the wall above them were large printed and cursive ABC’s and numbers.  I already knew how to write those but my handwriting didn’t come close to resembling those flowing curves and arrow-straight lines.

Colorful posters about Dick and Jane hung on part of the third wall, in between doors to a small cloakroom where we hung sweaters, jackets and coats in cold weather.

Our room overlooked the semicircular curve of Gregg Avenue as it turned into Cheves Street, and the fourth wall was a bank of tempting wide windows with venetian blinds kept raised halfway up.  There was always something neat to see out there…

Miss Leftwich was a young teacher but she seemed so sophisticated, so intelligent and wise, and to top it off so beautiful that I don’t remember any of our class ever misbehaving (much) in her room.  She and her classroom were ours for the whole day, the whole year.  We could settle down and make ourselves at home, knowing that stuff stashed in the desk stayed there, no worries about papers and pencils having to be carted home and back the next day.

After she called the roll that first day, she rearranged us to desks she preferred for each one.  Wigglers in front, perhaps?  Or alphabetical?  I’m not sure, but I felt fortunate to have my desk be mid-row next to the windows.

Our first assignment was probably to demonstrate how well we could write our letters and numbers.  Fat yellow pencils were distributed along with coarse ruled paper, darker blue lines interspersed with lighter blue lines so we’d get the heights of the d’s and depths of the g’s right.

Some of us former kindergarteners had this pencil-gripping part down pat.  The rest were treated to a few extra minutes of personal attention as Miss Leftwich positioned their pencils and guided their fingers in making an A.  Then at the blackboard with smooth sticks of new chalk, she used large strokes to show the proper way to make a capital A.

Soon the black turned to a dusty gray as she filled one section with triangles and crossbars to create A’s, the next section with 1′s and 3′s jammed together for the B’s.  I made a neat row of A’s and B’s, then stared out of the window and imagined adventure stories in my mind for a while. “Daydreams too much” appeared on my report cards on a regular basis.

At story time Miss Leftwich handed out Dick and Jane books, read a sentence aloud and pointed out how individual letters made up words.  We had embarked on learning to read, my favorite of all subjects ever in school.  Already a reader, I flipped ahead to see how the story came out — it had a happy ending, I was glad to find.

Recess came too soon to suit me.  Around the schoolyard to the back, girls and boys were separated for playtime.  I’d rather stay inside to read or explore but that wasn’t allowed.  Who knows what boys did at recess, but for the girls jump ropes were brought out and new songs taught to go with various routines.  Double ropes were provided for the older, more nimble girls.  Not a good rope-jumper, I joined the hopscotch contingent.

While the front and sides of the building were planted in sturdy green grass, the playground was mostly dirt with small trees and bushes against the back fence, a few oaks providing shade plus handy twigs for drawing implements.

Tiring of other activities, stomping on acorns to hear them crack and feel them crunch supplemented our exercise.  We were entertained no end by counting how many acorns we could stomp before the bell rang.  “One potato, two potato, three potato STOMP,” we’d sing as we stomped our way around the oak tree.

The lunchroom was a low-ceilinged room where each class sat together around a rectangular table.  Miss Leftwich had us bow our heads.  We respectfully repeated “God is great, God is good, now we thank Him for our food” and tucked into our lunch.

No hot dogs, no hamburgers, no tacos: we enjoyed real rice and gravy, meat loaf and garden peas, dinner roll and whole milk.  Dessert might be cubes of red or green jello, squares of yellow cake with chocolate icing or halves of canned peaches.  The room was noisy but lunch time was short.

Recess had worked up a good appetite so there wasn’t a lot of chatting.  But with our mouths full we could still make plenty of noise with feet and shoes, jiggling our chairs and “accidentally” kicking our neighbors.  Clanking our dishes while jabbing our elbows at each other added to the clatter.  If demerits had been handed out to first graders we’d have run up quite a record, but Miss Leftwich kept us more or less in line with a stern look and a raised eyebrow.

Then it was back to the classroom for naptime, believe it or not.  We were instructed to put our heads down on our desks and shut our eyes for a few minutes while Miss Leftwich did paperwork.  “Pssst.”  “Shhhh.”   “Psssssssst.”  “Shhhhhh!”  If anyone actually fell asleep it was a miracle.

We didn’t pass notes since we didn’t know how yet, but the boys flicked folded-up squares of paper at each other like miniature missiles.  The girls just giggled at the boys.  “Eyes shut!”  In ten minutes or so Miss Leftwich would declare naptime over and we’d move on to our next adventure in learning.

I don’t remember all that we learned in first grade, but we surely loved Miss Leftwich.  Toward the end of that first year we were devastated to be told we’d have a new teacher next fall.  Oh, no!  No, No, No!

We were convinced our broken hearts proved persuasive, for indeed Miss Leftwich was promoted to the second grade, right along with us.  That next year she expanded our education with memorizing one plus one equals two and two plus two equals four, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, singing Row, Row, Row Your Boat, improving our handwriting and reading more wonderful stories about good old Dick and Jane.

Saturday when the movie was over and it was too early to go home, you went dime-store window shopping. And if sometimes you had to go present shopping, naturally you had to make the rounds to be sure you got the best thing.

One Saturday in early June, I declared my desire to pick out daddy’s Father’s Day present all by myself without mama tagging along looking at every blooming thing in the store. With a smile and shake of the head, she gave me some extra cash for my trip downtown.

After the latest Hopalong Cassidy movie at the Carolina Theater, I went shopping. I turned left on Dargan toward Evans Street, crossed at the light and turned in to Kresses Five and Ten Cents Store. I really loved Kresses. The dark wood floor had a substantial sound when you walked on it, and there was usually something interesting smelling in the air, as well as a nice echoey sound when people talked.

One plate-glass window in the front featured a lady dummy with painted-on hair, wearing a short-sleeve summer dress. Another window had a little kid dummy wearing a sunsuit and carrying a sand pail. Stores were big on dummies. Most of them had heads in the dime stores. Some of the department store dummies were missing their heads, I never knew why…

At Kresses and Woolworth’s there were lots of waist-high counters arranged in a rectangle with a saleslady and her cash register in the middle.

Shallow bins with wooden dividers were arranged around the counter tops. One might contain embroidered hankies, the next one after-shave lotion. After you perused the stuff in the bins and decided on something, the saleslady rang you up and gave back your purchase in a thin paper bag. Then you went on down the aisle to another counter and another saleslady.

Down the right-hand wall in Kresses were racks of ladies undies, nighties and hand-bags, all different colors and sizes. Down the left side of the store was a lunch counter with a big sign picturing an oval-shaped chopped steak and mashed potatoes covered with shiny brown gravy, garden peas, a dinner roll and a glass of iced tea for a “Reasonable Price.”

I didn’t eat there. Daddy wouldn’t have considered any price reasonable if it wasn’t Sunday after church, and Kresses wasn’t open on Sundays.

At the back of the store there were flat tables low to the floor piled with bolts of cloth. Pyramid- shaped shelves held sewing scissors, spools of thread and dress patterns. If you turned right and headed toward Dargan Street, you found the housewares and toy sections with pots and pans, hammers and nails, and every kind of toy imaginable from Red Ryder cap guns to cry-baby dolls.

After Thanksgiving, the Dargan Street windows would gurgle with bubble lights on decorated Christmas trees, Lionel trains running around in circles underneath the trees.

This summer day, I merely glanced at the ladies and kids’ stuff as I browsed through the store, examining Old Spice cologne and cotton handerkerchiefs, billfolds and pocket knives, making careful note of prices as I went.

I considered a little leatherette travel kit with toothbrush, dental floss and toothpaste, but they wanted too much money for that and daddy didn’t travel much anyway. That saleslady gave me a closed-mouth smile like she didn’t believe I actually had any money to spend. I smiled back as I left her counter.

McLellan’s was on the other side of the street so I looked both ways before crossing in the middle of the block. McLellan’s had something the other stores didn’t — long counters and cash registers lined up like cattle stalls near the front door.

You loaded whatever you wanted in a buggy, unloaded the buggy onto the counter and paid for everything right there in one spot. It cut down on hiring so many salesladies, I guess, but McLellan’s didn’t last long. Maybe Florence wasn’t ready for that much self-service.

I didn’t find anything good for daddy in McLellan’s. Walking on down the street, I stopped and pressed my face to the window at several shops to see inside a little better. Painted neckties, Bulova watches and wing-tip shoes were all out of my price range.

Woolworth’s (at the corner of Evans and Irby) had some things Kresses and McLellan’s didn’t have, like floor lamps and big paintings of seascapes. At the back of the store, two ladies discussed pickle recipes over a shelf of glass jars.

Woolworth’s wasn’t as much fun as Kresses but it had pretty neat stuff on sale sometimes. Sure enough, oxblood shoe polish was on sale, but Daddy didn’t wear oxblood-colored shoes. I was running out of options.

Then an aisle display of “Restore Your Patent Leather Shine” black liquid polish and “Long-Lasting Woven Shoelaces” caught my eye. As she bagged up my selections, the nice saleslady said they were sure to please my dad, and I was pleased and relieved to come up with something good for Father’s Day on my very own.

I even had enough coins left over for a cherry coke at the corner drug store on the way home. Not a bad shopping trip for a kid in downtown Florence, in the 1950′s.

McCown-Smith sold a lot of blue and white enamel basins and cast aluminum cook pots, but they seemed to specialize in linens. You know, cotton sheets and chenille bedspreads. They also featured crocheted antimacassars, tatted doilies, lace-edged dresser scarves, and embroidered table runners.

My grandmother Mimi took me shopping for those in McCown-Smith one time. I’d never heard the word “antimacassar” before that day — but most folks had one on the back of every armchair and couch. Those were the days of Wildroot Cream Oil hair tonic, and when a fellow leaned back some of his Wildroot would come off, and naturally you needed an antimacassar to keep it off the sofa.

Of course, these things would wear out fast with weekly washing, so you’d have to take another trip to Mc-Cown Smith. And of course your knickknacks couldn’t sit on a naked table-top, they needed a lace doily. Likewise your hairbrush and bare wood needed a dresser scarf in between them. McCown-Smith sold them all.

Across East Evans Street was Belk’s Department Store. You could go in a big glass swinging door on Evans Street, march in a straight line back to the shoe department and come out on Dargan, then circle back up the sidewalk to re-enter on Evans. It drove the salesladies batty but it seemed like fun at the time.

Riding Belk’s elevator was an adventure, if you could convince the attendant you weren’t just horsing around. Running up the staircase was faster anyhow. By the time the attendant closed the door, worked the lift, and on arrival jerked the car up and down several times trying to get the elevator floor level, you could have been up and down the staircase two or three times.

Belk’s second floor Ladies Ready-to-Wear seemed hushed and dignified. I liked to sashay between the long, silky evening dresses or run my fingers back and forth on wool coat fur collars, but the clerks lingered at your elbow, sweetly suspicious if a parent wasn’t in sight. “May I help you find your mother, honey?”

I really preferred downstairs Belk’s, anyway. Perfume, bedroom slippers or earbobs, just about any gift item you could want was displayed atop glass cases. Dusting powder or leather wallets, everything had such a neat smell. Belk’s smelled almost as good as the Donut Dinette over on Palmetto Street.

In the middle of the 100 block of West Evans was an amazing store – J. C. Penney. I was fascinated by the cables running through the air from ground-floor countertops to second-floor business offices. Little round containers zipped along those cables carrying money and sales slips, who knows what all. Mechanical ding-ding sounds accompanied the containers up those cables.

Today we think nothing of putting our deposits into a vacuum tube at the drive-through and watching it zoom up, over and into the bank building. I guess Penney’s had the idea first, at least here in Florence.

On down West Evans, if you crossed the street and turned right on Irby you came to the big Sears Roebuck and Company. Another two-main entrance store (front and back), it offered lots more for a kid to investigate. Clothing took up the front, ladies and girls on the left, men and boys on the right. Cosmetics, jewelry, and shoes occupied the middle.

Serious stuff like electric cook stoves and wringer washers were way in the back. There were lots of tools and tires and men shoppers back there. Girls found that department dull and boring; we didn’t do much browsing back there.

Hats were a must in the 1950′s and every department store had a millinery section. Big round mirrors were provided with stools to sit on while ladies tried on the latest fashion. Aunt Myrtle, a millinery specialist most of her life, believed in hats! My mother had floppy straw ones with feathers for Sunday go-to-meeting, pill-box types for funerals, and silk-flower caps for weddings.

Sears frowned on little girls trying hats on for fun, but switching hats around on the fake heads was amusing when the saleslady was elsewhere.

Over in the unmentionables department, long fake legs showed off nylon stockings. No shoes. No torsos either, just legs and hose. There wasn’t any such thing as pantyhose then, just stockings. Ladies wore garters around their thighs to keep them up, or a girdle if they needed extra help holding their tummy in.

Fake hands at an adjoining counter wore short “Dress Gloves for Any Occasion,” white or tan for summer, navy blue or black for winter. I wondered if the skin tone went all the way down to the fingers and if the hand had any fingernails, but I never got up the nerve to peel off a glove and see.

Watchful sales clerks kept a close eye out when kids went browsing in the department stores (some called it snooping). “Don’t run, don’t touch, and if you break it, you bought it” sort of cramped our style, but browsing was still good entertainment. Even grownups liked to do it in the pre-TV 1950′s downtown Florence.

Now, I was pretty good at Scrabble. After all, I was my class spelling champ, I studied words right along with math and geography. As long as my opponents were other kids I did just fine. But if Mama got into the game, she’d have to spot us so many points – she subscribed to crossword puzzle books!

Mama could use a handful of z’s and q’s and u’s to make the most outlandish combinations and we’d cry foul. “Look it up,” she’d say with a smile, totaling up her score. “Look it up.” Flipping through the pages of our oversize dictionary, we’d do our best to prove her wrong. Naturally she’d turn out to be right.

Card games like gin rummy were more fun and more likely to result in a random winner. Depending on who was in charge, some variety of poker (played for toothpicks, not for money, of course) might be allowed.

During summer vacation one year Uncle Mike had taken it upon himself to teach me the elements of a good poker hand and poker face, much to the dismay of my non-gambling grandparents. We used seed corn or bottle caps instead of cash, and after a summer of practice I could beat him occasionally. If I accumulated enough kernels of corn, he’d treat me to a Dr. Pepper or Red Rock Cola.

My brother and Mama learned how to play chess one year but my patience for such a high-brow endeavor in those days was entirely too low. Sit and stare at the chess board for a long time, don’t talk, just stare. Finally pick up a bishop or a knight, pretend to set him down in one square but don’t take your fingers off yet. Move him somewhere else, hover over a different square while your eyes rove back and forth, and finally plop him down in another place entirely.

Uh uh, too boring for words. I found something to do with faster action, like solitaire. If we didn’t feel like a full-fledged board or card game, we settled for simple pencil and paper games like tic-tac-toe or hangman.

No matter what combination of family and friends were in the house, there was always something interesting, educational or just plain fun to occupy our time in the evenings.

Before the advent of television in our living room, the table-top radio was usually on in the evenings. In between board games we listened to Jack Benny, Bob Hope or Burns and Allen, perhaps The Shadow (Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? The Shadow Knows!) or Boston Blackie.

All these old programs are still available on CD today. I actually bought some Jack Benny, complete with full-length Lucky Strike commercials. Nostalgia galore!)

If nothing of interest was on the radio, Mama usually stacked several LP’s on the stereo. The Best of the Hit Parade, Easy Listening, Big Band, folk or pop music, even the classics kept us company while we competed for houses and hotels and racked up points.

Of course, there were always things to do outside the house between school and supper time, too. Some days there were Cub Scouts or violin lessons for my brother, Brownie Scouts or piano lessons for me. Unorganized afternoons meant we could hang out with friends in a neighborhood playground or stop off at somebody else’s house on the way home.

One year my hopeful mother enrolled me in dance lessons. Our little class was supposed to learn the basic elements of ballet and ballroom dancing, starting with ballet. I did strive to get the hang of ballet steps, I really did. First position: heels together, toes out to the side, knees straight. Straight? Forget plies, I never quite achieved first, second or third position.

Then came the disastrous afternoon I arrived home without my dance costume – somehow in the few blocks between dance studio and home the bag with my dress of green and lavender ruffles simply vanished. Shortly afterward the instructor informed my disappointed mother that I wasn’t “dance material,” but without that frilly dress my heart wasn’t in it anyway. I never really missed those lessons.

These days when there’s nothing but re-runs on TV and I’ve run out of something new or interesting to read, I might settle down to play a game of Mah Jong or Solitaire. They’re on a computer screen, of course. Stashed in a drawer somewhere is an old deck of Bicycle cards but I haven’t dealt a hand with it in many years.

And the last time I played Monopoly was when Tim and I joined our church home group for game night, and Tim and the preacher teamed up on the rest of us. Now that was fun! Brought back fond memories of 1950′s Monopoly, Mama, Scrabble and all.

One big entertainment complex for cost-conscious families was the airport. Saturday afternoons you’d find a few cars parked up against the chain link fence or under the tall pine trees growing alongside the terminal tarmac. Dads would point out to assorted children those tiny specks in the sky as they came in for a landing. “See way up there? That’s the airplane, see?”

And we’d squint against the glare, following the speck until it was discernible as a plane, then disappeared from view on a far-side runway. “Listen for it, listen!” And soon we would hear the roar of those big engines as the plane taxied into sight. We’d wave and yell as though the passengers, maybe even the plane itself could hear us cheering it on. We’d wait until the engines finally stopped, the tall steps were rolled into place and all those fortunate people began disembarking. Satisfied, we’d prepare to pile back into the car, excitement over.

Sometimes instead of heading home daddy would drive us over to general aviation to look at an airplane up close. Two seaters or four seaters, single wing or biplane, many shapes and sizes of planes were parked inside the hanger and out. Sometimes daddy would find somebody to talk to about engine size, airspeed, all that technical stuff. Nobody ever tried to run us off in those days as we walked around, letting our imaginations put us into those cockpits. Sky King! Red Baron!

The whole property was a community asset and not just for airplane watchers, riders or flyers. On the Cemetery Road side were large, leafy pecan trees growing near one of the narrow paved roads. When the pecans were prolific, moms brought their children and their paper sacks, parked on the grassy shoulder and picked up enough nuts for Thanksgiving and Christmas pies and fruit cakes.

Those back roads were also good places for novice drivers. That’s where my cousin David Allen tried to teach me to drive daddy’s straight-shift Ford. A slipping clutch got the best of me and the car choked off every time I went from first to second gear. Exasperated, we finally gave up on the lesson. But in mama’s punch-button drive Plymouth later on, I practiced driving, turning around and parallel parking, every maneuver that might be called for on my driver’s test, all out there on those airport roads. The light traffic made the airport the safest, yet most realistic place to learn driving for me and most of my friends.

On East Palmetto near the main entrance was the Airport Drive-in Restaurant popular with teenagers. It was a good place to go before a movie, or instead. Hamburgers, soft drinks, and a dimly lighted parking lot made it a convenient and more-or-less private place to talk. I don’t recall if the food was good or bad, but I spent a summer evening or two there with dates listening to the car radio and eating with the windows down to catch a breeze. (No car air conditioners.)

We’d drive through the airport over to Cemetery Road, stretching the minutes before going home. We’d pass Marlowe Manufacturing along the way and occasionally another car, making several circuits and passing the ends of unused runways. If it was still daylight, we’d look for the hulk of an old abandoned plane, parked and forgotten on one of those old runways.

The annual Agricultural Fair set up on the town end of the airport for many years, with a family-friendly admission charge. Mama and daddy insisted we tour the exhibition buildings before us kids could ride any of the rides. They stopped too often to suit me; they knew too many people in those exhibit booths! Pyramids of home-preserved jelly and jams sat next to quart jars of cucumber pickles. There were gigantic pumpkins and gourds and hand-pieced quilts, blue ribbons pinned on everything imaginable.

We’d meander through tractors and disc harrows, finally arriving at our last stop – the baby animals. Trying to pet the piglets or catch a baby chick, we’d lean over the fence rails as mama and daddy congratulated the proud 4H’ers who had raised these adorable creatures.

Well, the fairgrounds were eventually relocated down the highway and the old terminal building, hangers and all have evolved into a shiny, new regional complex. Still, I enjoy reminiscing about our old 1950′s airport, especially these days when I have to pay for parking out there.

We did have real teams, too. The leader, whoever that might be, picked her best friend to captain the opposing team. Sides were then picked, always a daunting necessity. Some girls were good at chase, being taller and long-legged. Some were better at jumping, some at hopping, and some at tripping up the rest of us.

I did okay getting picked until about the fourth grade. That’s when the visiting eye doctor checked everybody’s vision and I started wearing glasses. Of course I could see the blackboard much better, but something weird happened to my depth perception on the playground. Nothing was quite where I thought it was any more. That only messed up my hopscotch skills a little, but running across the schoolyard was suddenly troublesome. Little clumps of grass, pools of rain water or chunks of broken brick kept getting in my way. Soon I became the last one picked no matter what the game, and cheering on the other girls gradually became my “sports” activity.

At Poynor Junior High the schoolyard was replaced by the gymnasium, where phys-ed was a more organized affair. Jumping jacks may not technically be a team sport, but they are supposed to be synchronized. I could manage okay if I stuck to the back row, where I couldn’t accidentally cause a disastrous domino effect. Running around the gym in formation was one way to warm-up for half-court basketball, but I always knew that would be it for me. No-one voluntarily chose me for their side if they could help it. Sometimes they couldn’t help it, like when the teacher did the selecting. Both me and the other girls groaned if she ever appointed me to a team.

Have you ever shot a basket and just knew it was right on? But the ball had a mind of its own and missed the rim by a hair? Every time? I could plainly see where the basket was, and I could plainly throw the ball in exactly the right spot. But it never was exactly the right spot – the refraction of my eyeglass lenses did something peculiar to all that. After a while even the well-meaning PE coach took pity on us all and let me stick to calisthenics. No more team sports for me.

At McClenaghan our physical education classes were shortened and their frequency lessened. Part of the class was spent listening to lectures, part on calisthenics, and part on choosing up sides for basketball or softball. That part of my time was spent on homework. I didn’t mind. I enjoyed watching the teams running and jumping, thoroughly exhausting themselves. Whenever we took the class out to the field behind the school, I sat on the bleachers and read history, occasionally looking up to yell encouragement to the players.

You know, there were distinct sports seasons back then. Fall meant football! Naturally the more accomplished females in gym class went out for cheerleading. Go, Yellow Jackets! I watched a few football games during the fall, but I really looked forward to basketball. That didn’t start until after football was over, and it didn’t require sitting outside in cold weather squinting against the field lights to see who was who under their helmets. In the relative comfort of the gym, despite echoes bouncing off the walls and the gallops of so many big feet, the players were quite distinguishable.

Then, as winter-time basketball was winding up, softball and baseball got under way and you knew it would soon be spring. Occasional breezes got us through the warm, then hot weather, and I was back to holding down a seat in the stadium bleachers. If we had winning or losing seasons I couldn’t tell you right now, but we sure did have enthusiastic teams and fans.

By my last year in high school, even gym class calisthenics were no longer required. Piano lessons, the McClenaghan chorale and choir rehearsals took up my spare time, in between dating. And I was looking forward to college – Francis Marion University was then USC at Florence and thus I pulled for all the Gamecock teams. I still do, but nowadays my own “sports activity” has morphed into flipping the remote control, watching TV while peddling my exercise bike.