TBT: Back When I Was Almost 10

Recently, I've been looking at the map of the area where I spent part of my childhood. I often think about all the freedom we had as children back then. Three full months of summer days spent roaming here and there with only periodic trips back home to eat or to get popsicle money when the Good Humor man and his ice cream truck came round. It was pretty much outside all day until dinner time. 

This day was an unusual occurrence. Despite living in a small 2 bedroom apartment and no, no air-conditioning at that time, we did have a large park across the main road. Pretty much it was an area where some trees had been cleared for a ball field and down at the end of the park was a branch of the Anacostia River which flowed westward into Washington DC, periodically flooding before it arrived in the city. Fletchers' Field had picnic benches, pavilions and public toilets which was a big deal in the newly emerging suburbs of Prince George's County MD. 

I don't know what the event was here but I don't recall many more like this. My friend Mary Ellen is in the center with a dark shirt and I am to her right drinking a soda from a glass bottle. The two girls behind us were friends but not close friends. I love seeing the mothers sitting at the big picnic table in the rear of the shot, all in cotton dresses mostly hand made I imagine. I wonder if my mother was because she worked full time in Washington DC.  Did she take a day off work for this? Without men in the photo I think it must be a weekday.  But this was life... back  in the 50s just before I turned 10 in September.

TBT 1964 Biloxi Mississippi

This was my first real venture South unless you count the vacation my family took when I was 10. At that time we drove from Maryland to Florida. This was not even 100 years after the Civil War and my father pointed out many of the burnt plantation chimneys - Sherman Monuments he said. It's hard to realize now that he would have had older relatives that may have fought in that was just as he had fought in WWII. The American South had not started much of its recovery in the mid 1950s and I felt like I was seeing a place that I didn't understand.

But this trip to Biloxi was ten years after that 1954 trip. I had just turned 20 and the Civil Rights movement was gaining strength. Martin Luther King had made his "I have a dream..." the previous year and while desegregation had come to Washington DC, the city still had de facto segregation. My friends and I, tired of college, had thought grand thoughts of 'doing something' to ensure voting rights.  But in reality, it didn't touch us.

My boyfriend had flunked out of college and (in the early days of the Vietnam war) enlisted in the Air Force. I wanted to see him and so I took a train south to Keesler AFB, accompanied by my future mother-in-law. It just would not have done to go off by myself!  We took the train at my future father-in-law's insistence with his belief that airplanes weren't safe.

There I stand, dressed like a proper young lady, clothes well coordinated with purse and heels matching. Ah to be that size again...5'7 and barely a size 8.  But I also remember it was my first experience with separate water fountains...white and colored. I remember the bus we took for a day trip into New Orleans and one of the other young men from the base having to go into 'his' (the colored) waiting room. I remember learning to look for the signs showing me which 'whatever' was for me because I was white. Much of what I saw shocked me as it was so blatant and so accepted. I remember realizing that I wasn't as brave about 'doing something' as I thought I was when I was back home. In time I also learned that we had just as much inequality where I lived up North. It might be more subtle but it was real.  Sadly, today it's still real - 50 years later.


Footonote: There was an earlier post about this trip and that long train ride. In that I say 1963, which I suspect is correct. Or maybe 1964 is. I'm not even sure my xh would know.

best friends -about 1954

about 1954 best friends
Originally uploaded by redazadi

The threads on vintage photos have given me an incentive to make Thursdays a day when I spend at least 30 min on the old ones.

This one taken from about 1954 is interesting in that it's in a little metal frame. Summer, few cares ...well that's not true...but that's why we were friends. We shared family secrets with each other.

Moi on right, Mary Ellen on left...to me said as one word...Marellen. ;-)