The Early 50s

Since I was born in 46 and Cricket in 48 we were pretty young in the early 50s so my memory is sort of sketchy. Mom and Dad were trying to make a life for us in a world that was new and probably much different than they expected. Much changed after WWII. I am only now able to grasp the cultural changes that the first few years of their marriage presented them.

A New World

They were apart for the first two years of their marriage. Mom, married at 15 but not a wife until nearly 18 living with her parents in Haskell had experienced life quietly and simply while she waited for her husband to return. Her extravagance consisted of the movie occasionally. That movie also had a NewsReel which became the main source of news and context for things that were so important to her, yet surreal.

Dad on the other hand had filled his 19 thru 22 years in barracks and on troupe trains and roaming around the countryside of Italy. He developed a taste for rank cheese and cheap wine. He learned to drink and cuss and take risks… These differences in who they were becoming would strain and ultimately break their marriage. Though not for many years.

Each had developed their own expectations of their new life. Each was influenced by the American post-war culture. In the housing boom that followed the war, the campaign to turn young adults into homeowners wasn’t just about promoting a house, it was about defining a norm for family life, and glorifying the pursuit of that norm.

The more that people bought into this dream the more dissatisfied they became with their life. My dad until very late in his life pursued that “better” life. Now before I sound ungrateful understand that our starting point for family life was pretty basic. When the above photo was made we may have moved to a house with indoor plumbing…maybe. It came around this time. So I benefited from his drive to better himself and thereby our family. But it did come at a cost.

My First Grade Year

In 1952 I started first grade in Haskell. We lived in a rent house on the northwest side of town across a cotton field from the hospital where I was born. Since I was there the first day of school I guess there was the normal “tell us your name” type of introductions. This would be the first of four introductions to this class…three of them coming that first year. Later that fall we would move to Big Springs. Strangely enough across an open field from the VA hospital where Dad would be a patient several times during his life. But not at this time. He had a job that was better than the job he had. I am not sure which job this was…milkman, sewing machine salesman, not hog farmer (that came later) or another of a lot of things he tried. This is where I have to force myself to remember these times in the context of what I know now…not what I felt then. He bettered our financial prospects with every incarnation.

Back to Haskell…1st grade second introduction. I cannot remember where we lived that time but it was just a few weeks. Then it is off to Abilene where we lived in a tiny house in a section of north Abilene called “Donkey Flats”. The neighborhood was in a floodplain and the house next to us had a dirt floor and an outhouse. I felt like we were fortunate when I played with the kids next door who literally had nothing. Their house burned just before we moved back to ….wait for it….Haskell.

This time we moved next to Granny and Papa Phelps into a “shotgun” house. It gets that name because the rooms are in a straight line. You can see the back door from the front door and the interior of every room except the bathroom. This time when I was introduced to my first grade class (third time) some said they thought I had just been sick. Fortunately, whatever work Dad had lasted into my second grade year when we moved to Abilene.

But that is another story.