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.

Edgar Allen Poe and other collected works

I reckon I'm one of the few people in Britain, possibly the world, who has read all the works of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849.
A Complete Works, maybe 6 volumes? resided in my wonderful new bookshelves, the shelves that were put up in my new bedroom when we moved to 818 in 1955. I was 10.

Edgar Allen Poe was a writer of creepy stories, nightmares, burials-while-living, murderous machines, deaths of the beloved, etc. I read them all, not particularly taken by anything I read, or frightened either. The Murders in the Rue Morgue was possibly the most enjoyable because it was an early detective story.  What did Edgar Allen Poe do for me?  He gave me plenty of practice in decoding early 19th century prose and vocabulary.  I did appreciate The Raven and Annabel Lee, the music of those poems appealed.

Well, the bookshelves meant more to me than Mr Creepy. They were New, a quality I valued exceedingly at that time. Four or five long pine floorboards filling an alcove in my new bedroom. New wood, pale pine, unvarnished, so exciting. And they were supported by the most marvellous bricks, shades of pale peach  and thrillingly new and clean and modern-looking. Though it never occurred to me to think about it, it was Mamma who realised this was perfect for me,

All the shelves were full right away. My mother must have retrieved a library of collected works from Grandma and Grandpa's house. In those days books were kept, never recycled, so I got the benefit of someone's taste in literature. Whose??  I am guessing it was Aunt Eunice, Great Grandpa's second wife. She had been a schoolteacher, 6th grade, until her elevation to the pinnacle of Gladstone society in 1922 when she (60-something)  married Great Grandpa, a widower after the death of Grandma Rose. I'm pretty sure hers were the collected works of Flaubert.

Of course, Grandma Rose might have bought some of the books, the money was there after all. Once the factory got going, the twentieth century must have been prosperous for them. I speculate she might even have bought some for Great Grandpa, because it seems to me some of the authors would have appealed more to men, and, who knows, among his many fine qualities, Great Grandpa might have had a taste for reading.

In fact, the collected short stories of O Henry and the frozen north of Jack London (several volumes of each)  appealed to me as well. White Fang and The Call of the Wild were favourites. I remember that strangeness of reading a book written from the point of view of a dog or a wolf. School readers provided nothing like that.

Other books: the complete works of Charles Dickens in, I believe, 20 volumes of very small type and thin paper. I read my way through these, finding a little to engage me in A Tale of Two Cities. (So obvs I was a teenager by then.) Otherwise, these books fed my habit: Reading, doesn't matter what it is. I didn't come to Dickens till decades later, when I discovered he had something that Trollope lacked. 

Some of the books in those modern-looking shelves were Mamma's college texts. A primer in Spanish! I went through that one, wishing to understand it all  Anthologies for Poetry 101, with all the 19th-century classics, expensively bound too. bought in the 1920s.  That's where Byron and Tennyson first turned up for me. I read these too, liking a few showy lines here and there, not knowing how much I'd love some poems in the future.  A book that had an interesting cover was New Wings for Women. Red white and blue, lively with diagonals, shouting Modern!! I never bothered to look inside that book, obviously a post-WW2 production and of no interest to me, child of the conservative Upper Peninsula 1950s that I was. There were a couple of Art books, reproductions of pictures from, possibly, the Art Institute in Chicago, where Mamma had studied in the 30s. I looked at these pictures, didn't understand or think, just looked.

Another bookshelf in that room was a tall narrow set of 6 shelves, just right for paperbacks. When I started buying books, that's where they went. You got books at drugstores from a revolving rack.  I remember my fine collection of 1950s science fiction. Ray Bradbury,  Frederick Pohl, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clark: writers who could imagine living on another world. That appealed to me A LOT. Before I knew how to go about it, I knew I wanted to live in another world.

At the same time, I bought Classics from the drugstore, when poss. My beloved copy of Jane Eyre, with my 14 yr old signature in best Palmer Method. Some time later I bought The Ambassadors by Henry James, and signed that one too, with my new grown-up signature. Jane Eyre went straight into my bloodstream, Henry James never did.

This narrow bookshelf was painted ivory colour, to match my Louis XV bedroom suite with double bed, dressing table, desk and chair.  The bed had a turquoise chenille spread, and altogether I was pleased with these things.

The books were the best, though.

My Book House

Books for children?
There weren't many in Gladstone in the fifties.
I learned to read, age 6, with Dick and Jane, little sister Sally and Spot the dog. Other than those names, the most memorable part of the experience was the half-circle of 6-yr-old-size little red chairs for the reading lesson. I liked those chairs. Dick and Jane left me fairly cold.

My reading life began in second grade.
 I had a library book - which means Mama must have taken me to the Gladstone School and Public library (not big) - about Indians of different tribes. It was la big book, mostly text, each chapter describing  how tribes lived in different places in the continent by means of a little story about a child. I loved the stories but most of all I loved the single big colour picture that went with each chapter. To me it seemed immensely detailed and brightly beautiful. The Mesa Verde cliff dwellings I could enter, climbing up the narrow pole ladders. The immensely tall and dark evergreens of the North West took me far from home. At that age, I didn't really realise that Gladstone was largely surrounded by similar trees (but shorter).

That book took me right away from home, I couldn't get enough of it. And so I learned that any book could do that for me.

But - any book? There weren't many.   The library was there, and used, but pretty limited. Bookstores?  Non-existent.  Someone else had been thinking of this, how to get enough books to children in isolated towns across the continent. And my loving mother had invested probably quite a bit of money in My Book House.

Here is a golden memory: it's a grey winter day, snow is deep but I'm in the house at a loose end. Mama goes into the utility room at the back of the kitchen. This room is unheated and functions as a freezer all winter. She comes out with a  brand new book for me! The book is large, dark blue, with a color picture on the front cover.  It's freezing cold!  We go into the living room and she shows me how to open a book for the first time, gently opening out the cover and the pages in  several places. Frozen air comes out of the pages, and also enchantment.

There are color pictures on every page, and stories galore. It's a book to read and keep forever. And over the next few years, a new book will appear from time to time,  each book a little step up from the last. Finally My Book House is complete in twelve volumes, making a handsome row of dark blue spines with gold lettering, what a treasure to me.