Maggie's Farm

Kindergarten 1951 ~ that was my 2nd year there before first grade. We had a great time and I still have my kindergarten graduation picture, we were in little gowns with the flat hats. I could read at about the second grade level at that time, I shared a bedroom with my older brother, eleven years older and he worked at the local Safeway and brought me a lot of comic books, he was a junior in High School when I started first grade.

I know how to handle money because he would give me money to go down to the local neighborhood store and purchase his cigarettes with a nickel or dime for me to buy a candy bar to eat on the way home.

We also had the run of our little county seat town of 5,000 and at that age I could walk a mile with my fishing pole and spend an afternoon at the local lake. I could walk downtown at five years old an pay my 15 cents on Saturday afternoon to watch a movie, a cowboy show, which was preceded by a news reel, a cartoon, a short serial and then some silly Gene Autry of Rory Rogers stuff. On hot summer days it was cool inside but full of hot sweaty kids who walked, rode their bikes and smelled kind of ripe.

In our town in the 1950's the black kids were up in the balcony and we did not sit too close under there because they would spit on folks who were close, just for fun. The Indian kids in our town sat on the left side of the theater and in the cowboy Indian movies they would yell for the Indians while us white kids would yell for the cowboys or cavalry in those funny old days.

Sometimes my mom would give me a dollar for a haircut and with the quarter left over I would buy a root beer at the drug store for a nickel and a candy bar for a nickel and still have my 15 cents for the movie. I was adept at sneaking my goodies into the movie and they did not much give a damn about that anyway.

Strange to think about the funny good old days but that's the silly stuff we did. By the way, not one locked their homes, we had a milk man who would go into each home and put the milk bottles in the fridge and he drove a funny truck that we would hop up into and get bits of ice and ride along with him for a few blocks just for the fun of riding along standing up to an open door and having fun. Then we would hop off and walk a few blocks back home.

Those were such different times and we really did have a lot of fun just being goofy, dirty, little kids.