814 bedroom

My bedroom in 814.

My room was at the front of the house upstairs, with two sash windows facing Wisconsin Avenue. The best bedroom really, the full width of the house. There were a few scatter rugs on the fine floor, tongue and groove narrow maple boards. This was the floor in everyone's house in Gladstone. People had carpet squares downstairs and scatter rugs upstairs.
The walls were covered with a light blue wallpaper with a stylised design of pale blue daisies. I wasn't very fond of it. I seemed to see it too much, at nap times  and even more troublesome early bedtimes, when I was in bed and could hear kids playing in the street.
 There was a complete child-size bedroom suite of ivory-painted bed, wardrobe, dressing table and chest. What I remember best about them was the chips in the ivory paint, revealing a dark green undercoat. Every chip was a different shape and in my imagination each shape represented something. I remember a small open car with a driver with a very big head. The wallpaper probably dated from the days of Aunt Eunice, who lived at 814 from the time of her marriage in 1923 to her death in 1942. Since she was childless,  the child's  bedroom set may well have come from Uncle Floyd's family, who had lived next door at 818. Uncle Floyd's three children were born in the 1920s.

Uncle Floyd and Aunt Eunice were  often mentioned. Uncle Floyd was Grandpa's brother, now dead, so Mamma's uncle, and Aunt Eunice had been Grandpa's aunt, his own mother's sister. I never troubled to think about how people were connected. I wasn't exactly aware that most family members who were mentioned had died some time ago.

My bed had a wedding-ring quilt for a bedspread, and that fully satisfied my love of pattern. The ground was white, and the interlocking wedding rings were made of 3x1 inch rectangles of printed cotton from much earlier in the century, bright colours and frivolous patterns. The backing to the quilt was a nice bright pink. I found out much later that Mamma's friend Aunt Blanche had made it.

Another piece of furniture was a wicker rocking chair (any time from 1880 to 1920) with an upholstered seat and back covered in flowery blue material, very comfortable. And the best thing about the rocking chair was cuddling in Mamma's lap, rocking and hearing her sing.
She loved to sing, and I loved the songs. How old was I? old enough to remember the words. One song was for me, and started "Lorna Mary was her name….."  The next line ended "...when she came." I long after realised this was the story of my adoption. Mamma's own words and music.

Great fun and very exciting with its changes of pace was "I've been working on the railroad".

I've been working on the railroad

All the live-long day.

I've been working on the railroad

Just to pass the time away.

Can't you hear the whistle blowing,

Rise up so early in the morn;

Can't you hear the captain shouting,

"Dinah, blow your horn!"

Dinah, won't you blow,

Dinah, won't you blow,

Dinah, won't you blow your horn?

Dinah, won't you blow,

Dinah, won't you blow,

Dinah, won't you blow your horn?

Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah

Someone's in the kitchen I know

Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah

Strummin' on the old banjo!

Singin' fee, fie, fiddly-i-o

Fee, fie, fiddly-i-o-o-o-o

Fee, fie, fiddly-i-o

Strummin' on the old banjo.

And then: "Gentleman songsters out on a spree, doomed from here to eternity, may God had mercy on such as we……baa   baaa   baaa." It made a nice lullaby, but surely my mother was the only person ever to think that?

We are poor little lambs
Who have lost our way.
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We are little black sheep
Who have gone astray.
Baa! Baa! Baa!

Gentlemen songsters off on a spree
Damned from here to eternity
God have mercy on such as we.
Baa! Baa! Baa!

Another one was Brahms' "Lullaby and good night". I can still remember some of the tune but only the first line.

Another thing about my bedroom: sometimes a dangerous black panther lurked under the bed, though sometimes it lurked at the jog in the long corridor that led to the bathroom. That was a place you had to get past quickly at night.

Less interesting inhabitants of the bedroom were Hulda, Patsy and Carl. Dolls that I suppose I played with, but my most vivid and pleasurable memory is of experimentally using a pin to poke tiny holes in the plastic face of Hulda.


More about singing
The living room at 814

The piano. A spinet piano, not an upright, highly polished,  with a sansevaria plant in suspended animation on the top of it, and Joe and I are hiding under it as Mamma plays "The Thirdmantheme". Now that's exciting music, and it must have been pretty new film music at the time Mamma was playing it.  Much later I learned it was from "The Third Man", and "theme" had a meaning of its own.
Later on: sheet music played by Mamma: "Hot Diggety Dog, What You Do to Me", with Perry Como's picture on the cover of the sheet music folder. There must have been plenty of cheerful music of that kind in the early 50s. Mamma loved music, and had talent. (I liked music well enough and had none. Singing in tune was always beyond me.)
Near the piano, the living room bookshelf's bottom shelf was occupied by a complete set of expensively bound music books, about which I was deeply incurious. Later, Mom told me these were a 14th birthday present from Grandma and Grandpa, chosen for their talented daughter, and that at age 14 she had been very disappointed!

Music had its place, quite a big place, in the Brownies, where Mamma was the leader of the troop. I can remember Mamma conducting us in a song associated with the Brownie promise:
Whene'er you make a promise
Remember its importance
And when made
Engrave it upon your heart.

Most of the Brownie meetings were for fun, with lots of singing games. "Jump Jim Crow" was one of them. Quite soon, we stopped that one, because, Mamma explained to me, it had bad associations with racism in the south. Prejudice against negroes was something we deplored, I learned. I also learned at the same time of my life that most of my schoolmates, taking cues from their own parents, strongly believed that negroes were an inferior race. None of us had ever seen a negro, and I doubt if many parents had either. Delta County Michigan even after the year 2000 was the least racially mixed county in the USA, I learned from the internet.

Another source of entertainment in the living room was a large mahogany-coloured piece of furniture that combined a radio, a record player, and a place to store record albums. The record player worked at 78 rpm, so that 45 minutes' worth of music was stored in an album of 4 or 5 big heavy bakelite records, bound in hard covers like a photo album. Some commitment was required to play a classical symphony. But that didn't happen much. The radio was usually on, and usually playing WDBC, the Escanaba station, with a mix of music popular in the Upper Peninsula, sport, news and weather.  We also heard nationally popular radio programs in the early evening: the Lone Ranger, Jack Benny, Amos 'n' Andy.
Summer afternoons passed drowsily with ball by ball commentary on baseball games. The radio was Daddy's instrument. He was a keen baseball fan, and also keenly interested in current affairs. Certain right-wing columnists had nationwide radio programmes, which he disagreed with, but never missed.  Fulton Lewis Junior ("Mouthfull" was Daddy's name for him) or Gabriel Heatter. Both had the apparently essential quality of right-wing broadcasters: being doom-laden. From this piece of furniture, I learned "Joe Stalin is dead", and interesting names.  Panmunjon, for example. That was a Korean War location.   Daddy's place in the living room was the easy chair by the radio, with his book and cigarettes and ashtray on a side table close to hand. Mamma sat opposite, often darning. Hand-knitted socks require a lot of darning. Grandma supplied the socks.

Where was the fireplace?  It occupied a ceremonial place in the centre of the front wall of the living room, remote from easy chairs.  Once, surely, there had been wood fires. Now clever logs with electric elements built in filled the space. The chimney was lined with lacquered copper panels to resist the heat from the logs. They were never turned on though. The mantelpiece was made of  a stone-like substance, possibly greenish or goldish. The structure extended above the mantel shelf up to the ceiling, incorporating a semicircular mirror. As I see it in my mind's eye, it was a rather attractive art-deco confection, and quite likely to have been Aunt Eunice's doing. Aunt Eunice would have given the house a thorough revamp in the 1920s, when she married the richest man in Gladstone.

And the books? Because both Mamma and Daddy always had a book on the go, but I think at 814 they were kept in the front room. Some were kept in the front hall, and some were kept in the landing upstairs. I remember magazines lived on the wide low radiator in the sunroom, just off the living room. We took Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, Collier's magazine - all weeklies. Plus the Escanaba Daily Press, the Chicago Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal, dailies, and the weekly Delta Reporter, which had full reports of the doings of Gladstone High School football and basketball and all the social news you cared to give them. If you went to Flat Rock (3 miles away) to spend the afternoon with your sister-in-law,  the Reporter would set it up in type and distribute to the world.