Busy Seemed To Equal Happy

I need to backtrack a bit before my story about school starting.  That first summer we lived in New Jersey was really fun except for going to Oklahoma for a family visit the first part of August.  Notice I did not call it a vacation as that is going off to someplace where you have fun, don't get in a hurry, eat out and stay in hotels or cool cabins in the woods.

Not only going to visit family could be an ordeal but Dennis' rationalization was that you get in the car at 3:00 in the morning and drive the thirteen hundred miles only stopping to eat.  God forbid you would pay to stay in a hotel and waste all that time and money. I always figured we were in a hurry so there would be lots of time to play cards, watch great television shows like Hee Haw and have Dennis' Mother cook all his favorite foods that I never learned to cook. I never learned to make gravy or fry chicken or fish.

That trip we did drive over to visit with my Mother one day. I did get to meet the new man in her life and found him quite charming and fun. He owned quite a few restaurants in Oklahoma City and attended many social affairs.  Mother was turning into a very happy, easier to get along with social butterfly and it was actually fun to see her school-girl flirty side.

However the best part was coming home.  We had left the Barnes' children in charge of Tug.  They were to put him out on a leash attached to the clothes line everyday, bring him in and feed him at night. Sounded like a good plan until we got home and the entire house seemed to be jumping up and down from fleas. Seems like we did not think about the fleas and the humid weather of the East Coast. Actually they did not seem to bother the boys and I but Dennis must have tasted very good.
I did suggest to him that I could go buy a couple of flea collars, hook them together for his neck and that would solve the problem.  That did not go over so well so I had to resort to more professional methods.

When school started I decided that I would maybe get more involved and be a homeroom mother instead of just showing up with cupcakes or cookies when someone called and asked. I was rather surprised when the note came home about a Home and School Association meeting.  I had attended a Historical Society meeting or two and was told the national organization of the PTA had been founded in Riverton.  Now there was no PTA?

Never did get answer about the PTA's disappearance but it looked upon my arrival at the meeting that the Home and School Association might well be doomed.  Only two of the newly elected officers and the Principal showed up for the meeting.  I have never been exactly sure how by the end of the meeting I was the new President and a Homeroom Mother for both Wes and Wally's classes.  The Secretary agreed to also do the Treasurer job although there was no money, no dues and no fund raisers planned.

Mr. Kline, the very cute Principal, told me my first job was to put together and print the school booklet.  This would have the school rules, times and dates of events, a calendar of holidays and a complete list of every student and teacher with addresses and phone numbers.  He then took me into the office and showed me the mimeograph machine, gave me a box of stencils and a stack of papers and class lists all that had to be typed onto the stencils.  He also said that this needed to be done as soon as possible.

For those of you who do not know anything about mimeograph stencils and machines they were the fore runners to the photocopier.  The stencils were a sort of purple/blue piece of stuff attached to a backing paper.  When you typed on a stencil it actually cut the letters in the purple/blue part.  Then you tore the back off and laid it on this drum part of the mimeograph machine and as the paper rolled through you got the printed sheets. Simple - right?  Wrong.  First of all the stencil had this very strange smell you never forget.  Then when you make a typing error you had to dab correction fluid on the mistake, let it dry and retype. Even with tossing out my Underwood boat-anchor with the missing o typewriter and purchasing a new electric one my stencils still looked like a teenager's worst nightmare case of acne with little dabs of correction fluid everywhere. Then the sheer time element in typing twenty seven pages and making three hundred plus copies was enough to make me resign.

In the end I was rather proud of myself to the point of thinking if I could do that then I could do anything.  As I watched the pages fly off the machine I got to thinking about the carnivals, the talent shows and all the fundraisers there were when I was in school. There could be a lot more to this than mimeographing.  We could charge dues, make more parents join, raise money for things the school needed and have some fun at the same time.  See how easy it was for me to get involved with something.

One day when the boys and I were out raking leaves this car pulled up against the curb.  It wasn't exactly parked as the back of it was still sticking out on the street. I had seen this car before driving around town at about five miles an hour. It was an early 1950's thing, maybe a Dodge or a Desota, one of those with big bubbly fenders.  The driver was what the boys called an OBH.  An OBH was a blue/gray haired person who had to look through the steering wheel as they were too short to look over the top. 

The lady (OBH) asked Wally to get her a tissue. He was a little confused as to what a tissue was since his mother (me) never bought them.  After all napkins, paper towels or toilet paper would do the same thing and were much easier to find than a box of tissues. When he asked me what to do I sent him in the house for a napkin which must have done the trick because the lady drove over part of the yard on her way back to the road and disappeared around the corner.

Sis appeared about this time and told us the lady was Miss Echols.  She was in her nineties and had been the Librarian for many years.  She actually lived around the corner in a two story house that the kids in town thought ghosts lived in.  As the story went the house was originally in Palmyra but when she started working at the Riverton Library she had the house moved to Riverton.  No one had been in the house for years but the story was that their were only little narrow paths through all the stuff piled in the house.  If you asked her if she had some historical item she would smile and say yes but it was "down under" at the moment and she couldn't get to it. I guess she knew she would not be able to find a box of tissues at home either.

It was the most beautiful fall I had ever seen.  Kansas City had trees that turned different colors but nothing like New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  With that also came days of raking leaves that the boys and Tug loved to jump in so that you got to rake them again.  Also with Fall came Halloween. The night before Halloween Palmyra and Riverton got together and had a parade. The firetrucks from each town, the Palmyra High School Band, several floats and every kid from both towns in their costumes marching in the parade.  The parade started in Riverton and ended at the park in Palmyra with hot dogs and ice cream for everyone.

Why would they have a Halloween parade the night before the big event?  It seems like All Hallows Eve was the prime  for childhood pranks and a little vandalism.  By keeping all the kids busy it cut down on the rolls of toilet paper in trees and using soap to write all over cars.
On Halloween day before the parties at school the kids paraded on the sidewalks in Riverton.  Then there was the usual trick or treating in the evening.