View allAll Photos Tagged doover
As the Pride of Baltimore returns to Fairport Harbor the crowd on the breakwall was cheering and waving. What a beautiful evening for the Tall Ship Parade of Sail on Lake Erie. The kick-off to the Tall Ships Festival in Fairport Harbor, Ohio, USA 2016.
The prior version of this was taken a few months ago, right before my computer crashed, and this whole set was lost. I thought it was fun, though, and really wanted to do it again.
The first time I took it, it was actually raining, and the kids were all bundled in their boots and winter coats. This was taken on an 80-degree day, in pretty much full sun. Wish I'd gotten some shots of the funny looks we were getting from passersby, with our umbrella out on the first really beautiful day of the year!
I don't know if "Eye (s) was my Favorite theme for the year but it was certainly one of the most challenging! Taking a good clean photo of your own eye is incredibly difficult....at least I think so. But I've learned quite a bit in the past year about light and photography, so hopefully, this shot is Much better than the first one. If interested, the other photo is in my Album entitled MacroMondays. :) OH... and if you look at the reflection in the eye, you can see my barn and the mountain ... not Old Rag, but the one next to it whose name I do not remember.
i know that this looks almost exactly like the one before it, but i seriously love this & i also love that one
that one is more of a darker edit & i feel like this is just summer
it's free & bright & happy & everything i am looking forward to in the next few months
oh summer, i've missed you.
Our Daily Challenge - Do over 'sweet and sour'
In this one the lemon is balanced on top of the 100 and 1000's container.
Still not 100% happy. But definitely better than the first.
This challenge rocked!
This forlorn little cemetery statue stopped me in my tracks recently. It struck me as the perfect metaphor for how I feel lately. Completely buried in a never-ending avalanche of bad news. I am a news junkie at heart, but even I've had to limit my exposure in an often futile effort to maintain mental wellness. The delayed outcome of the presidential election, coupled with the annoying and unnecessary delay in transition, have only served to punctuate an already awful year. And meanwhile the pandemic rages on. I was thinking the other day just how conditioned I've become to a daily onslaught of bad news. I recall the early days of the pandemic and the anxiety attacks that followed even a quick stop at a grocery store. Im way past that point now. Difficult to even remember a time before it all began. Going into stores without a mask; embracing people; shaking hands. Even family gatherings, all gone. Everything has changed this year, for better or worse. I feel oddly detached from the approaching holidays. The Covid format threatens to suck most of the joy right out of the season. I'm not quite as downbeat as this all sounds. I continue to find ways to relieve the stress by staying active and being creative. Can't help but wonder if artwork developed during the pandemic might someday be regarded as a unique genre. I'm not talking about photos of people wearing masks. Rather the subconscious impact on our worldview that emerges when we create. No doubt the pandemic has influenced us all, perhaps in ways that are yet to be recognized.
Last week I was busy marking student papers and missed the MacroMonday themed challenge for "Beauty of Bokeh" (December 21). So I decided to play catch-up this week and take advantage of Christmas decorations and holiday lights.
In the mornin' you go gunnin'
For the man who stole your water
And you fire till he is done in
But they catch you at the border
And the mourners are all singin'
As they drag you by your feet
But the hangman isn't hangin'
And they put you on the street, yeah
You go back Jack do it again
Wheel turnin' 'round and 'round
You go back Jack do it again
When you know she's no high climber
Then you find your only friend
In a room with your two timer
And you're sure you're near the end
Then you love a little wild one
And she brings you only sorrow
All the time you know she's smilin'
You'll be on your knees tomorrow, yeah
You go back Jack do it again
Wheel turnin' 'round and 'round
You go back Jack do it again
Now you swear and kick and beg us
That you're not a gamblin' man
Then you find you're back in Vegas
With a handle in your hand
Your black cards can make you money
So you hide them when you're able
In the land of milk and honey
You must put them on the table, yeah
You go back Jack do it again
Wheel turnin' 'round and 'round
You go back Jack do it again
BECKER, WALTER CARL / FAGEN, DONALD JAY
Published by
Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
You know, you take the shot, then you travel home and wish you would have had a "do over", well, this cemetary is one of them. If you notice in my photo stream, I took a shot of this over a year ago. I did it from the car because there was no parking. So today I got a do-over, I found parking and took a few shots. In the words of James Brown, "I feel good".
DDC Art/Artsy/Artistic (Do Over)
This do over is from January 31 2023. I thought I'd give it an artsy look.
Keeping with the festive season for this week's MacroMonday challenge of "Redux 2015". I revisited the August 31 challenge to capture "Sparkle" .... this time, however, I took a look at some sparkle on my Christmas tree.
After I had seen everything I wanted to see in Roswell, I hit the road again -- and started driving west towards California, which is the direction that my family took when moving from Roswell to Riverside, CA in the spring of 1954.
We drove through the Alamagordo site of various missile tests, not too far from where the original atomic bomb test had taken place in the 1940s.
This photo was taken about 50 miles west of Socorro, NM -- between the towns of Magdalena and Datil. You've probably never heard of those towns, but it's also in the general vicinity, on the Plains of St. Augustin, of the Very Large Array (VLA) radio astronomy observatory. Of course, the VLA wasn't here when we drove through this area in 1954: its construction did not begin until 1973, and it was formally inaugurated in 1980.
I know you're thinking to yourself, "Where have I seen those VLA radar dishes before?" (There are 27 of them, in case you wondered, and each one weighs 209 metric tons.)
The answer, of course, is Contact -- the 1997 movie starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. (Don't tell me you haven't seen the movie. Shame, shame! Go buy it or rent it or stream it right now. Here's the URL to learn more about the movie: www.imdb.com/media/rm1260489216/tt0118884?ref_=tt_ov_i )
As for the VLA, you can read more about it in this Wikipedia article:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array
*****************************
Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 40 years after we first moved to Roswell, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
2. For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
3. In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
4. For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
Mom has labeled this entire album page "Picnic at Lake Worth, Ft. Worth, Texas, March 24, 1951" -- and the individual photo is labeled "Hi, Dad!"
Note: from the partially-legible logo on the front grille of the car, it seems that our car at the time was a Packard. I thought we had gotten our first Packard a few years later, when we lived in Omaha, but apparently that's not true.
*********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the brief 7-week period that my family spent in Ft. Wort, TX in the spring of 1951 — i.e., the period before Omaha, Riverside, Roswell, and Denver (which you may have seen already in my Flickr archives). I went back nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Denver) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch5.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
Actually, I should listen to my own advice: unlike my subsequent visits to Roswell, Riverside, and Omaha I did not take any photos when I tracked down my old homes from the 1951 period in Ft. Worth, nor the subsequent 1952-53 period in Denver.
While most of our residential occupancies lasted a full year, the period in Ft. Worth lasted for roughly two months — at the end of which, Dad was transferred by his employer up to Denver. I have no idea why this happened; and since my parents have now passed away, there’s really nobody I can ask at this point...
So, what do I remember about the two months that I spent in Ft. Worth? Hardly anything at the moment, though perhaps more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. It took several days for our family to drive from our previous location (outside NYC, in Long Island) down to Texas; I only remember that my parents sat in the front seat with my baby sister (who was only about six months old at the time), and I sat in the back seat, staring out at highways and scenery as we drove down through Appalachia and the American Southeast.
2. We moved into a rented house, but I have no memory of how long it took, or even what neighborhood it was in. I do remember Ft. Worth being the first of several subsequent cities where my parents said to me, “You’ll be going to school at the XYZ school, and you can walk there by going down this street, and then that street, and then that street … so walk on down there tomorrow morning, and sign yourself in.” They didn’t take me to school on the first day to make sure I was enrolled or registered; it was just assumed that I could do it myself. Maybe that was normal back in the 1950s; maybe it’s still normal today, in some parts of the country. But in big cities today, I think most parents would be horrified.
3. I got my first bicycle in Ft. Worth — and I remember it being presented to me as a birthday present for my 7th birthday; you’ll see a picture of it in the front yard in the last photo in this set. I don’t think I had ever tried to ride a bike before, but everyone assumed that it would come quickly and easily. And it did ...
Mom has labeled this entire album page as "Patty doing her 'tricks' - picnic at Lake Worth, March 24, 1951" -- and the individual photo is labeled "Now what, Dad?"
*********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the brief 7-week period that my family spent in Ft. Wort, TX in the spring of 1951 — i.e., the period before Omaha,Riverside, Roswell, and Denver (which you may have seen already in my Flickr archives). I went back nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Denver) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch5.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
Actually, I should listen to my own advice: unlike my subsequent visits to Roswell, Riverside, and Omaha I did not take any photos when I tracked down my old homes from the 1951 period in Ft. Worth, nor the subsequent 1952-53 period in Denver.
While most of our residential occupancies lasted a full year, the period in Ft. Worth lasted for roughly two months — at the end of which, Dad was transferred by his employer up to Denver. I have no idea why this happened; and since my parents have now passed away, there’s really nobody I can ask at this point...
So, what do I remember about the two months that I spent in Ft. Worth? Hardly anything at the moment, though perhaps more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. It took several days for our family to drive from our previous location (outside NYC, in Long Island) down to Texas; I only remember that my parents sat in the front seat with my baby sister (who was only about six months old at the time), and I sat in the back seat, staring out at highways and scenery as we drove down through Appalachia and the American Southeast.
2. We moved into a rented house, but I have no memory of how long it took, or even what neighborhood it was in.
I do remember Ft. Worth being the first of several subsequent cities where my parents said to me, “You’ll be going to school at the XYZ school, and you can walk there by going down this street, and then that street, and then that street … so walk on down there tomorrow morning, and sign yourself in.” They didn’t take me to school on the first day to make sure I was enrolled or registered; it was just assumed that I could do it myself. Maybe that was normal back in the 1950s; maybe it’s still normal today, in some parts of the country. But in big cities today, I think most parents would be horrified.
3. I got my first bicycle in Ft. Worth — and I remember it being presented to me as a birthday present for my 7th birthday; you’ll see a picture of it in the front yard in the last photo in this set. I don’t think I had ever tried to ride a bike before, but everyone assumed that it would come quickly and easily. And it did ...
Dad fishing somewhere in New Mexico -- no notes or explanations in the album. But they sure don't grow fish very big in New Mexico!
*****************************
Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 40 years after we first moved to Roswell, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
2. For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
3. In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
4. For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
Mom has written on this album page, "Marion, Patty, Packard, House & Bike, 6336 Malvey Street," which was in Ft. Worth, Texas.
Mom and Patrice are on the extreme left side of the photo...
I think the car that you see in the garage was actually a Studebaker, but I have no memory of it.
And I think I got the bike shortly after we moved into this house -- on my 7th birthday, at the end of April. That being the case, I've dated the photo for May 1, 1951 because Mom put no date on this album page.
*********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the brief 7-week period that my family spent in Ft. Wort, TX in the spring of 1951 — i.e., the period before Omaha,Riverside, Roswell, and Denver (which you may have seen already in my Flickr archives). I went back nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Denver) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch5.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
Actually, I should listen to my own advice: unlike my subsequent visits to Roswell, Riverside, and Omaha I did not take any photos when I tracked down my old homes from the 1951 period in Ft. Worth, nor the subsequent 1952-53 period in Denver.
While most of our residential occupancies lasted a full year, the period in Ft. Worth lasted for roughly two months — at the end of which, Dad was transferred by his employer up to Denver. I have no idea why this happened; and since my parents have now passed away, there’s really nobody I can ask at this point...
So, what do I remember about the two months that I spent in Ft. Worth? Hardly anything at the moment, though perhaps more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. It took several days for our family to drive from our previous location (outside NYC, in Long Island) down to Texas; I only remember that my parents sat in the front seat with my baby sister (who was only about six months old at the time), and I sat in the back seat, staring out at highways and scenery as we drove down through Appalachia and the American Southeast.
2. We moved into a rented house, but I have no memory of how long it took, or even what neighborhood it was in.
I do remember Ft. Worth being the first of several subsequent cities where my parents said to me, “You’ll be going to school at the XYZ school, and you can walk there by going down this street, and then that street, and then that street … so walk on down there tomorrow morning, and sign yourself in.” They didn’t take me to school on the first day to make sure I was enrolled or registered; it was just assumed that I could do it myself. Maybe that was normal back in the 1950s; maybe it’s still normal today, in some parts of the country. But in big cities today, I think most parents would be horrified.
3. I got my first bicycle in Ft. Worth — and I remember it being presented to me as a birthday present for my 7th birthday; you’ll see a picture of it in the front yard in the last photo in this set. I don’t think I had ever tried to ride a bike before, but everyone assumed that it would come quickly and easily. And it did ...
My father's note in the family scrapbook said, "Ed was always first to make friends with the natives." I assume the reference to "natives" here was the dog -- which was not ours, and which I have no memory of at all. The girl on the right is Patrice, the older of the two sisters I grew up with; at this point, she was a few months shy of her third birthday.
This was taken shortly after we arrived in Roswell, before we had found a house to live in.
I know that my younger sister Aleda celebrated her first several birthdays (on Mar 17th) in a motel as we moved around the country, and I think this might well have been the first such occasion. That being the case, I'm assuming that this photo was taken a few days later...
*****************************
This may have been photographed near the house where I lived with my parents and two of my five sisters in 1953-4. The photo was taken nearly 40 years after we first moved into the house, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
Mom has labeled this entire album page "Picnic at Lake Worth, Ft. Worth, Texas, March 24, 1951" -- and the individual photo is titled "Eeeek!"
*********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the brief 7-week period that my family spent in Ft. Wort, TX in the spring of 1951 — i.e., the period before Omaha,Riverside, Roswell, and Denver (which you may have seen already in my Flickr archives). I went back nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Denver) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch5.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
Actually, I should listen to my own advice: unlike my subsequent visits to Roswell, Riverside, and Omaha I did not take any photos when I tracked down my old homes from the 1951 period in Ft. Worth, nor the subsequent 1952-53 period in Denver.
While most of our residential occupancies lasted a full year, the period in Ft. Worth lasted for roughly two months — at the end of which, Dad was transferred by his employer up to Denver. I have no idea why this happened; and since my parents have now passed away, there’s really nobody I can ask at this point...
So, what do I remember about the two months that I spent in Ft. Worth? Hardly anything at the moment, though perhaps more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. It took several days for our family to drive from our previous location (outside NYC, in Long Island) down to Texas; I only remember that my parents sat in the front seat with my baby sister (who was only about six months old at the time), and I sat in the back seat, staring out at highways and scenery as we drove down through Appalachia and the American Southeast.
2. We moved into a rented house, but I have no memory of how long it took, or even what neighborhood it was in.
I do remember Ft. Worth being the first of several subsequent cities where my parents said to me, “You’ll be going to school at the XYZ school, and you can walk there by going down this street, and then that street, and then that street … so walk on down there tomorrow morning, and sign yourself in.” They didn’t take me to school on the first day to make sure I was enrolled or registered; it was just assumed that I could do it myself. Maybe that was normal back in the 1950s; maybe it’s still normal today, in some parts of the country. But in big cities today, I think most parents would be horrified.
3. I got my first bicycle in Ft. Worth — and I remember it being presented to me as a birthday present for my 7th birthday; you’ll see a picture of it in the front yard in the last photo in this set. I don’t think I had ever tried to ride a bike before, but everyone assumed that it would come quickly and easily. And it did ...
Black was fairly good-natured about riding around in cars, Jeeps, and little wagons
********************************
Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 40 years after we first moved to Riverside, CA, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Riverside) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch8.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Riverside? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Riverside to Omaha, where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I attended one school, somewhere in downtown Riverside, when my parents were looking for a house; and when they finally found a house out at the edge of town (at the base of the San Bernardino foothills), I was switched to a different school. This was typical; I usually attended two different schools in every city we lived in, and I attended a total of 17 schools before heading off to college.
2. While I eventually rode my bike to and from the second house to my school, I started off riding a school bus. A bunch of us kids would wait on a corner for the bus to arrive; and it was at the edge of a huge orange grove that seemed to stretch on forever. There were always a few rotten oranges lying on the ground, thoroughly rotten, and these substituted nicely for snowballs. There is nothing like the experience of being smacked in the stomach, of your fresh clean shirt, with a rotten orange.
3. Like most other suburban kids in the 1950s, I was allowed to do all sorts of things alone — as long as I returned home by dinner time. I could ride my bike anywhere I wanted, alone; I could hike way up into the hills alone (as long as I had a pocket-knife, which my father insisted I carry in case I was bitten by a rattlesnake). And I was allowed to sleep outside in the back yard, in a sleeping bag, virtually whenever I wanted to. The weather was always quite mild, the skies were clear (Los Angeles smog had not reached us in those days), and the stars were utterly amazing. There were shooting stars to watch, an experience I have never forgotten.
4. I discovered that marbles were excellent projectiles to shoot with one’s slingshot, and that they would actually travel in a more-or-less straight line. I became pretty good at shooting lizards with my slingshot; all I needed was an endless supply of marbles (because you could only shoot them once, at which point they would generally disappear somewhere). So I began practicing quite hard, played competitive games of marbles every day at school, and eventually amassed great quantities of the little round things.
5. Even better than lizards were spiders; they were everywhere, and they were relatively easy to catch. I don’t think any of them were dangerous, and in any case, none of them bit me. I sometimes put them in my pants pocket for the day, and I often brought them home. And I would put them in the dresser drawer with my socks and underwear; it seemed like a good place for them to relax. My mother discovered a couple of them one day, and was not impressed.
6. We had relatives in the city of Los Angeles, and made the 50-mile drive to visit them once or twice a year. We also made a 50-mile drive once or twice to visit San Juan Capistrano, which my parents thought was the most wonderful place in the world — mostly, they told me, because of the famous swallows that migrate each year from someplace in Argentina. In fact, I think they were impressed because they were old enough to like a 1940 hit song, “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” which I couldn’t stand. If they had told me the place was the locale of the first Zorro novella (“The Curse of Capistrano,” published in 1919), I would have been much more impressed.
7. Riverside is where I got my first dog—a mutt named Blackie, that was part of a litter produced by the next-door neighbor’s dog. It provided an open invitation for me to visit the next-door neighbors whenever I wanted, and swim in their pool (a rarity in those days). At the end of our year in Riverside, Blackie moved with us to our next location — traveling all the way in a little house/bed that had been made for him in the World War II Jeep that Dad hitched to his Chevrolet.
8. Riverside is also where I had my first exposure, at school, to kids of other ethnic backgrounds. There were Asian kids, and black kids, and Latino kids (whom, sadly, my father referred to generically as “Mexicans,” but whom he also held in high respect because he remembered watching their comrades working harder and longer than any of the “white boys” in the rough mining and ranching camps on the Utah/Colorado border, where he had grown up). All of us were thrown together in the same classroom, all of us traveled to each other’s houses and neighborhoods after school, and nobody seemed to think it was unusual in any way.
9. I learned, to my enormous delight, that I *was* different in one special way: I was left-handed. During the pickup baseball games that we played constantly during recess, lunch, and after school, there were never enough baseball gloves for everyone, so everyone simply shared with everyone else (after all, if your team is at bat, you don’t need your baseball glove). But I was the only left-handed kid around, apparently the only one in the whole school; so nobody ever wanted to share my glove.
The album caption says "First snow in Roswell in 50 years". I don't know if that's precisely true, but I do recall that it was a HUGE deal to see snow that far south in New Mexico...
*****************************
Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 40 years after we first moved to Roswell, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
2. For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
3. In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
4. For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
This picture looks like it was taken in the spring of 1953, while it was still chilly enough (even in southern New Mexico!) to require coats outside. I think our family car is in the background of this photo...
The woman in this photo is my mother; she would have been a couple months shy of her 32nd birthday when this was taken.
The little girl is my younger sister Aleda, who had not yet celebrated her first birthday.
Dad's note on this photo, in the family scrapbook, says "House hunting?", suggesting that he wasn't entirely sure when this picture was taken...
*****************************
Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 40 years after we first moved to Roswell, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
Mom has labeled this album page "Easter 1951," but no other details. According to a google-searched Web page, Easter fell on March 25th of that year -- so I've dated the photo accordingly
*********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the brief 7-week period that my family spent in Ft. Wort, TX in the spring of 1951 — i.e., the period before Omaha,Riverside, Roswell, and Denver (which you may have seen already in my Flickr archives). I went back nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Denver) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch5.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
Actually, I should listen to my own advice: unlike my subsequent visits to Roswell, Riverside, and Omaha I did not take any photos when I tracked down my old homes from the 1951 period in Ft. Worth, nor the subsequent 1952-53 period in Denver.
While most of our residential occupancies lasted a full year, the period in Ft. Worth lasted for roughly two months — at the end of which, Dad was transferred by his employer up to Denver. I have no idea why this happened; and since my parents have now passed away, there’s really nobody I can ask at this point...
So, what do I remember about the two months that I spent in Ft. Worth? Hardly anything at the moment, though perhaps more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. It took several days for our family to drive from our previous location (outside NYC, in Long Island) down to Texas; I only remember that my parents sat in the front seat with my baby sister (who was only about six months old at the time), and I sat in the back seat, staring out at highways and scenery as we drove down through Appalachia and the American Southeast.
2. We moved into a rented house, but I have no memory of how long it took, or even what neighborhood it was in.
I do remember Ft. Worth being the first of several subsequent cities where my parents said to me, “You’ll be going to school at the XYZ school, and you can walk there by going down this street, and then that street, and then that street … so walk on down there tomorrow morning, and sign yourself in.” They didn’t take me to school on the first day to make sure I was enrolled or registered; it was just assumed that I could do it myself. Maybe that was normal back in the 1950s; maybe it’s still normal today, in some parts of the country. But in big cities today, I think most parents would be horrified.
3. I got my first bicycle in Ft. Worth — and I remember it being presented to me as a birthday present for my 7th birthday; you’ll see a picture of it in the front yard in the last photo in this set. I don’t think I had ever tried to ride a bike before, but everyone assumed that it would come quickly and easily. And it did ...
Photos of a trip that I took in Feb 1992 to visit the house where I lived for a year in Riverside, during the 1953-54 time period. We were located near the foothills of the San Bernardino mountains, and I often hiked up to the top of the hills -- hence the photos from that perspective. All of this was motivated by the desire to do some research for the novel I was writing at the time, "Do-Overs".
This is one of several photos that I took in the foothills where I played -- mostly alone -- during the year that we lived here in the mid-1950s. One of the most depressing discoveries on my return trip in 1992 was the presence of the smog from Los Angeles, some 50 miles to the west ...
********************************
Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 40 years after we first moved to Riverside, CA, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Riverside) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch8.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Riverside? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Riverside to Omaha, where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I attended one school, somewhere in downtown Riverside, when my parents were looking for a house; and when they finally found a house out at the edge of town (at the base of the San Bernardino foothills), I was switched to a different school. This was typical; I usually attended two different schools in every city we lived in, and I attended a total of 17 schools before heading off to college.
2. While I eventually rode my bike to and from the second house to my school, I started off riding a school bus. A bunch of us kids would wait on a corner for the bus to arrive; and it was at the edge of a huge orange grove that seemed to stretch on forever. There were always a few rotten oranges lying on the ground, thoroughly rotten, and these substituted nicely for snowballs. There is nothing like the experience of being smacked in the stomach, of your fresh clean shirt, with a rotten orange.
3. Like most other suburban kids in the 1950s, I was allowed to do all sorts of things alone — as long as I returned home by dinner time. I could ride my bike anywhere I wanted, alone; I could hike way up into the hills alone (as long as I had a pocket-knife, which my father insisted I carry in case I was bitten by a rattlesnake). And I was allowed to sleep outside in the back yard, in a sleeping bag, virtually whenever I wanted to. The weather was always quite mild, the skies were clear (Los Angeles smog had not reached us in those days), and the stars were utterly amazing. There were shooting stars to watch, an experience I have never forgotten.
4. I discovered that marbles were excellent projectiles to shoot with one’s slingshot, and that they would actually travel in a more-or-less straight line. I became pretty good at shooting lizards with my slingshot; all I needed was an endless supply of marbles (because you could only shoot them once, at which point they would generally disappear somewhere). So I began practicing quite hard, played competitive games of marbles every day at school, and eventually amassed great quantities of the little round things.
5. Even better than lizards were spiders; they were everywhere, and they were relatively easy to catch. I don’t think any of them were dangerous, and in any case, none of them bit me. I sometimes put them in my pants pocket for the day, and I often brought them home. And I would put them in the dresser drawer with my socks and underwear; it seemed like a good place for them to relax. My mother discovered a couple of them one day, and was not impressed.
6. We had relatives in the city of Los Angeles, and made the 50-mile drive to visit them once or twice a year. We also made a 50-mile drive once or twice to visit San Juan Capistrano, which my parents thought was the most wonderful place in the world — mostly, they told me, because of the famous swallows that migrate each year from someplace in Argentina. In fact, I think they were impressed because they were old enough to like a 1940 hit song, “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” which I couldn’t stand. If they had told me the place was the locale of the first Zorro novella (“The Curse of Capistrano,” published in 1919), I would have been much more impressed.
7. Riverside is where I got my first dog—a mutt named Blackie, that was part of a litter produced by the next-door neighbor’s dog. It provided an open invitation for me to visit the next-door neighbors whenever I wanted, and swim in their pool (a rarity in those days). At the end of our year in Riverside, Blackie moved with us to our next location — traveling all the way in a little house/bed that had been made for him in the World War II Jeep that Dad hitched to his Chevrolet.
8. Riverside is also where I had my first exposure, at school, to kids of other ethnic backgrounds. There were Asian kids, and black kids, and Latino kids (whom, sadly, my father referred to generically as “Mexicans,” but whom he also held in high respect because he remembered watching their comrades working harder and longer than any of the “white boys” in the rough mining and ranching camps on the Utah/Colorado border, where he had grown up). All of us were thrown together in the same classroom, all of us traveled to each other’s houses and neighborhoods after school, and nobody seemed to think it was unusual in any way.
9. I learned, to my enormous delight, that I *was* different in one special way: I was left-handed. During the pickup baseball games that we played constantly during recess, lunch, and after school, there were never enough baseball gloves for everyone, so everyone simply shared with everyone else (after all, if your team is at bat, you don’t need your baseball glove). But I was the only left-handed kid around, apparently the only one in the whole school; so nobody ever wanted to share my glove.
Photos of a trip that I took in Feb 1992 to visit the house where I lived for a year in Riverside, during the 1953-54 time period. We were located near the foothills of the San Bernardino mountains, and I often hiked up to the top of the hills -- hence the photos from that perspective. All of this was motivated by the desire to do some research for the novel I was writing at the time, "Do-Overs".
This is one of several photos that I took in the foothills where I played -- mostly alone -- during the year that we lived here in the mid-1950s. One of the most depressing discoveries on my return trip in 1992 was the presence of the smog from Los Angeles, some 50 miles to the west ...
********************************
Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 40 years after we first moved to Riverside, CA, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Riverside) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch8.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Riverside? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Riverside to Omaha, where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I attended one school, somewhere in downtown Riverside, when my parents were looking for a house; and when they finally found a house out at the edge of town (at the base of the San Bernardino foothills), I was switched to a different school. This was typical; I usually attended two different schools in every city we lived in, and I attended a total of 17 schools before heading off to college.
2. While I eventually rode my bike to and from the second house to my school, I started off riding a school bus. A bunch of us kids would wait on a corner for the bus to arrive; and it was at the edge of a huge orange grove that seemed to stretch on forever. There were always a few rotten oranges lying on the ground, thoroughly rotten, and these substituted nicely for snowballs. There is nothing like the experience of being smacked in the stomach, of your fresh clean shirt, with a rotten orange.
3. Like most other suburban kids in the 1950s, I was allowed to do all sorts of things alone — as long as I returned home by dinner time. I could ride my bike anywhere I wanted, alone; I could hike way up into the hills alone (as long as I had a pocket-knife, which my father insisted I carry in case I was bitten by a rattlesnake). And I was allowed to sleep outside in the back yard, in a sleeping bag, virtually whenever I wanted to. The weather was always quite mild, the skies were clear (Los Angeles smog had not reached us in those days), and the stars were utterly amazing. There were shooting stars to watch, an experience I have never forgotten.
4. I discovered that marbles were excellent projectiles to shoot with one’s slingshot, and that they would actually travel in a more-or-less straight line. I became pretty good at shooting lizards with my slingshot; all I needed was an endless supply of marbles (because you could only shoot them once, at which point they would generally disappear somewhere). So I began practicing quite hard, played competitive games of marbles every day at school, and eventually amassed great quantities of the little round things.
5. Even better than lizards were spiders; they were everywhere, and they were relatively easy to catch. I don’t think any of them were dangerous, and in any case, none of them bit me. I sometimes put them in my pants pocket for the day, and I often brought them home. And I would put them in the dresser drawer with my socks and underwear; it seemed like a good place for them to relax. My mother discovered a couple of them one day, and was not impressed.
6. We had relatives in the city of Los Angeles, and made the 50-mile drive to visit them once or twice a year. We also made a 50-mile drive once or twice to visit San Juan Capistrano, which my parents thought was the most wonderful place in the world — mostly, they told me, because of the famous swallows that migrate each year from someplace in Argentina. In fact, I think they were impressed because they were old enough to like a 1940 hit song, “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” which I couldn’t stand. If they had told me the place was the locale of the first Zorro novella (“The Curse of Capistrano,” published in 1919), I would have been much more impressed.
7. Riverside is where I got my first dog—a mutt named Blackie, that was part of a litter produced by the next-door neighbor’s dog. It provided an open invitation for me to visit the next-door neighbors whenever I wanted, and swim in their pool (a rarity in those days). At the end of our year in Riverside, Blackie moved with us to our next location — traveling all the way in a little house/bed that had been made for him in the World War II Jeep that Dad hitched to his Chevrolet.
8. Riverside is also where I had my first exposure, at school, to kids of other ethnic backgrounds. There were Asian kids, and black kids, and Latino kids (whom, sadly, my father referred to generically as “Mexicans,” but whom he also held in high respect because he remembered watching their comrades working harder and longer than any of the “white boys” in the rough mining and ranching camps on the Utah/Colorado border, where he had grown up). All of us were thrown together in the same classroom, all of us traveled to each other’s houses and neighborhoods after school, and nobody seemed to think it was unusual in any way.
9. I learned, to my enormous delight, that I *was* different in one special way: I was left-handed. During the pickup baseball games that we played constantly during recess, lunch, and after school, there were never enough baseball gloves for everyone, so everyone simply shared with everyone else (after all, if your team is at bat, you don’t need your baseball glove). But I was the only left-handed kid around, apparently the only one in the whole school; so nobody ever wanted to share my glove.
Do Over-What's Your Sign
I missed this one back on April 6 as I was away in Toronto visiting my family. So thought I'd do it today. I used my iPad Air for this photograph. It has a mirror image setting and I thought it would be appropriate to represent two Shizandras. I wouldn't mind having another one of her.
This is one of three pictures on a page labeled "More picnic pictures, 7/20/52". This particular picture says, "Daddy [Ray], Aleda (4 mos old!) and Eddie climb a tree"
**********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the year that my family spent in Denver in 1952-53 — i.e., the period before Omaha, before Riverside, and before Roswell (which you may have seen already in my Flickr archives). I went back nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Denver) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch6.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
Actually, I should listen to my own advice: unlike my subsequent visits to Roswell, Riverside, and Omaha I did not take any photos when I tracked down my old homes from the 1952-53 period in Denver. I did locate the second house, and I was stunned to see how it had changed over a period of 40 years: as you’ll see in the photos in this album, it was a new house, under construction, when we moved in. The only “trees” were a few scrawny saplings that my Dad planted in the front and back yard. 40 years later, the trees towered above the house … but the house itself seemed tiny, in comparison to what had seemed like an enormous mansion to an 8 year old boy.
While most of our residential occupancies last just a single year, the period in Denver lasted roughly two years. But it felt almost like two separate cities: first we lived in a rented house in the Denver suburb of Aurora; and then we moved into a new house that my parents purchased somewhere on the south side of Denver. So, as usual, I ended up going to two different schools, and developed a fairly superficial set of friendships with two different groups of kids.
So, what do I remember about the two years that I spent in Denver? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. While living in our first home, I finished off my second-grade school year. I did reasonably well in school on most subjects — it was a couple years later, in Roswell, that I announced at breakfast that I had mentally calculated the number of seconds in a century, in the hope that it would help me fall asleep. I rattled off the number, and when my Dad repeated the calculations on his slide rule, he shook his head and told me that I had forgotten to account for leap years. Anyway, in Denver, my 2nd-grade teacher told me I had a much more serious educational problem: my penmanship was atrocious. The school authorities insisted that I spend the summer practicing penmanship, and strongly suggested to my parents that the *real* problem was that I was left-handed. Several attempts were made to make me start writing with my right hand — all of which were dismal failures. I eventually gave up on penmanship, and began printing everything … a habit that continued until I was given a hand-me-down manual typewriter by my parents at the age of 12.
2. The summer of 1951 was hot and humid; and like many other families in the area, my mother took me and the older of my two sisters (the other one was born a year later) to a large public swimming pool (it seemed enormous at the time, but it was probably pretty small). Anyway, it was a great breeding place for germs of all kinds; and sometime in the late summer, everyone but my mother came down with polio. We were all taken off to three different hospitals; and the neighbors were so panicked that my mother might be infectious that they stopped speaking to her altogether. Miraculously, all three of us had gotten the least-virulent form of polio, and we all recovered sufficiently within a week or two that we could come home. I was fairly weak for the next couple of weeks, and had to take a hot bath every day; but aside from that, none of us suffered any no permanent effects.
3. It was late 1951 or early 1952 when we moved into the house that my parents had purchased in another part of town; I remember that my younger sister was born there on St. Patrick’s Day. As usual, I was allowed to wander anywhere I wanted, on foot or on bicycle, as long as I came home on time for dinner. One day I took a long section of rope, climbed way up into a tree a mile or two away from home, and then way out on a long sturdy branch. I tied one end of the rope around the branch, and then wrapped another part of the rope twice around my (left) hand. I swung down from the branch, intending to descend in an orderly fashion, just like I had seen firemen doing it in the movies. Unfortunately, it didn’t work: I slid helter-skelter to the ground, landing in a heap, and the rope around my hand cut through the skin, almost through the tendons, and all the way to the bone. I had to have my hand wrapped in bandages for the first month of my 3rd grade school year; and once again the Authorities tried to use the opportunity to get me to use my right hand for penmanship. Once again, they failed.
4. In the summer of 1952, I was sent off to a sleep-away camp for two weeks, somewhere in the mountains of Colorado. I have no idea why, but it was a lot of fun … until I was thrown off a horse and knocked unconscious. The camp authorities decided there was no reason to inform my parents, though my parents were rather curious when I subsequently refused to climb up on a horse wherever we went. They also noticed that I was limping when I came home from camp, which the camp authorities had apparently not noticed; I had hiked all the way to the top of a mountain with my fellow camp-mates, and I had a rock in one of my boots. It caused a blister, which got infected, and I was probably lucky that they didn’t have to amputate my foot. All in all, the camp experienced was deemed a failure, and I was never sent away again.
5. I got my first slingshot in Denver. It was not a “professional” Wham-O slingshot with natural rubber and ash wood; instead, Dad made one for me from a Y-shaped chunk of plywood, and with strips of rubber from an old automobile inner tube. I thought it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen — and immediately began shooting at every bird I could see on a telephone wire or branch of a tree. I never did hit a single one of the. (By the way, Wham-O eventually went on to achieve even more fame with its hula hoop, frisbee, and hack sack. You can read all about them here on the Internet: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wham-O )
6. The next best thing, besides a slingshot, was the top of a coffee can. They tended to have fairly sharp edges, but if you held it carefully and threw it just right, it would sail for miles and miles … at least it seemed that way. It wouldn’t return to you, a la boomerangs (which every kid had heard about, but none had ever actually seen) — but it was just like throwing a flying saucer. Unfortunately, coffee-can-tops were not readily found, especially since we kids never drank any coffee. We had to wait patiently for our parents to finish off an entire can of coffee, and then scoop it out of the garbage can when it was thrown out.
Dad's note on the album page says "Watermellon [sic] in the back yard."
He's feeding the watermelon to Aleda; Patrice is on the right side of the ph oto
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Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 40 years after we first moved to Roswell, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
2. For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
3. In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
4. For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
Our house in Roswell at 1114 So. Pennsylvania Avenue in beautiful downtown Roswell... Dad's note on this album page says "Next door to the Police Chief," which I must admit that I was blissfully unaware of -- not that I got into that much trouble at the age of 9!
I have vague memories of this house, and remember that I had a bedroom of my own -- so to speak -- about the size of a large closet, which could only be reached by walking through my parents' bedroom. But I was only 9, so what's the big deal?
My knowledge of automobiles is so inadequate that I can't tell you what is parked in the driveway, though my recollection is that my parents had a Chevrolet until sometime in 1956 -- when my Dad splurged on a big, fat, semi-automatic Packard. But it was also here in Roswell that he bought a a second-hand World War II jeep at some kind of government auction/sale, complete with a bullet hole in the front. That Jeep stayed in the family for the next 50 years, and it's what I learned to drive on...
(more details about the house itself, in the days to come)
**************************************************************************
This is the house in Roswell, NM — on South Pennsylvania Avenue — where I lived with my parents and two of my five sisters in 1953-4. I returned to see the house nearly 40 years after we first moved into it, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
2. For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
3. In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
4. For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “hornies.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
After I had seen everything I wanted to see in Roswell, I hit the road again -- and started driving west towards California, which is the direction that my family took when moving from Roswell to Riverside, CA in the spring of 1954.
We drove through the Alamagordo site of various missile tests, not too far from where the original atomic bomb test had taken place in the 1940s.
This photo was taken about 50 miles west of Socorro, NM -- between the towns of Magdalena and Datil. You've probably never heard of those towns, but it's also in the general vicinity, on the Plains of St. Augustin, of the Very Large Array (VLA) radio astronomy observatory. Of course, the VLA wasn't here when we drove through this area in 1954: its construction did not begin until 1973, and it was formally inaugurated in 1980.
I know you're thinking to yourself, "Where have I seen those VLA radar dishes before?" (There are 27 of them, in case you wondered, and each one weighs 209 metric tons.)
The answer, of course, is Contact -- the 1997 movie starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. (Don't tell me you haven't seen the movie. Shame, shame! Go buy it or rent it or stream it right now. Here's the URL to learn more about the movie: www.imdb.com/media/rm1260489216/tt0118884?ref_=tt_ov_i )
As for the VLA, you can read more about it in this Wikipedia article:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array
*****************************
Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 40 years after we first moved to Roswell, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
2. For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
3. In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
4. For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
Photos of a trip that I took in Feb 1992 to visit the house where I lived for a year in Riverside, during the 1953-54 time period. We were located near the foothills of the San Bernardino mountains, and I often hiked up to the top of the hills -- hence the photos from that perspective. All of this was motivated by the desire to do some research for the novel I was writing at the time, "Do-Overs".
This is one of several photos that I took in the foothills where I played -- mostly alone -- during the year that we lived here in the mid-1950s. One of the most depressing discoveries on my return trip in 1992 was the presence of the smog from Los Angeles, some 50 miles to the west ...
This was one of the rare views, near the top of the foothills, where you could actually see some blue sky.
********************************
Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 40 years after we first moved to Riverside, CA, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Riverside) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch8.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Riverside? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Riverside to Omaha, where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I attended one school, somewhere in downtown Riverside, when my parents were looking for a house; and when they finally found a house out at the edge of town (at the base of the San Bernardino foothills), I was switched to a different school. This was typical; I usually attended two different schools in every city we lived in, and I attended a total of 17 schools before heading off to college.
2. While I eventually rode my bike to and from the second house to my school, I started off riding a school bus. A bunch of us kids would wait on a corner for the bus to arrive; and it was at the edge of a huge orange grove that seemed to stretch on forever. There were always a few rotten oranges lying on the ground, thoroughly rotten, and these substituted nicely for snowballs. There is nothing like the experience of being smacked in the stomach, of your fresh clean shirt, with a rotten orange.
3. Like most other suburban kids in the 1950s, I was allowed to do all sorts of things alone — as long as I returned home by dinner time. I could ride my bike anywhere I wanted, alone; I could hike way up into the hills alone (as long as I had a pocket-knife, which my father insisted I carry in case I was bitten by a rattlesnake). And I was allowed to sleep outside in the back yard, in a sleeping bag, virtually whenever I wanted to. The weather was always quite mild, the skies were clear (Los Angeles smog had not reached us in those days), and the stars were utterly amazing. There were shooting stars to watch, an experience I have never forgotten.
4. I discovered that marbles were excellent projectiles to shoot with one’s slingshot, and that they would actually travel in a more-or-less straight line. I became pretty good at shooting lizards with my slingshot; all I needed was an endless supply of marbles (because you could only shoot them once, at which point they would generally disappear somewhere). So I began practicing quite hard, played competitive games of marbles every day at school, and eventually amassed great quantities of the little round things.
5. Even better than lizards were spiders; they were everywhere, and they were relatively easy to catch. I don’t think any of them were dangerous, and in any case, none of them bit me. I sometimes put them in my pants pocket for the day, and I often brought them home. And I would put them in the dresser drawer with my socks and underwear; it seemed like a good place for them to relax. My mother discovered a couple of them one day, and was not impressed.
6. We had relatives in the city of Los Angeles, and made the 50-mile drive to visit them once or twice a year. We also made a 50-mile drive once or twice to visit San Juan Capistrano, which my parents thought was the most wonderful place in the world — mostly, they told me, because of the famous swallows that migrate each year from someplace in Argentina. In fact, I think they were impressed because they were old enough to like a 1940 hit song, “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” which I couldn’t stand. If they had told me the place was the locale of the first Zorro novella (“The Curse of Capistrano,” published in 1919), I would have been much more impressed.
7. Riverside is where I got my first dog—a mutt named Blackie, that was part of a litter produced by the next-door neighbor’s dog. It provided an open invitation for me to visit the next-door neighbors whenever I wanted, and swim in their pool (a rarity in those days). At the end of our year in Riverside, Blackie moved with us to our next location — traveling all the way in a little house/bed that had been made for him in the World War II Jeep that Dad hitched to his Chevrolet.
8. Riverside is also where I had my first exposure, at school, to kids of other ethnic backgrounds. There were Asian kids, and black kids, and Latino kids (whom, sadly, my father referred to generically as “Mexicans,” but whom he also held in high respect because he remembered watching their comrades working harder and longer than any of the “white boys” in the rough mining and ranching camps on the Utah/Colorado border, where he had grown up). All of us were thrown together in the same classroom, all of us traveled to each other’s houses and neighborhoods after school, and nobody seemed to think it was unusual in any way.
9. I learned, to my enormous delight, that I *was* different in one special way: I was left-handed. During the pickup baseball games that we played constantly during recess, lunch, and after school, there were never enough baseball gloves for everyone, so everyone simply shared with everyone else (after all, if your team is at bat, you don’t need your baseball glove). But I was the only left-handed kid around, apparently the only one in the whole school; so nobody ever wanted to share my glove.
Just finished writing the first draft of Do Over, the middle school-grade novel I've been working on for more than a year.
I'm sooo grateful to be able to type these two words! :D
This picture is labeled, "Inspecting the fishing at Ft. Worth"
*********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the brief 7-week period that my family spent in Ft. Wort, TX in the spring of 1951 — i.e., the period before Omaha,Riverside, Roswell, and Denver (which you may have seen already in my Flickr archives). I went back nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Denver) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch5.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
Actually, I should listen to my own advice: unlike my subsequent visits to Roswell, Riverside, and Omaha I did not take any photos when I tracked down my old homes from the 1951 period in Ft. Worth, nor the subsequent 1952-53 period in Denver.
While most of our residential occupancies lasted a full year, the period in Ft. Worth lasted for roughly two months — at the end of which, Dad was transferred by his employer up to Denver. I have no idea why this happened; and since my parents have now passed away, there’s really nobody I can ask at this point...
So, what do I remember about the two months that I spent in Ft. Worth? Hardly anything at the moment, though perhaps more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. It took several days for our family to drive from our previous location (outside NYC, in Long Island) down to Texas; I only remember that my parents sat in the front seat with my baby sister (who was only about six months old at the time), and I sat in the back seat, staring out at highways and scenery as we drove down through Appalachia and the American Southeast.
2. We moved into a rented house, but I have no memory of how long it took, or even what neighborhood it was in.
I do remember Ft. Worth being the first of several subsequent cities where my parents said to me, “You’ll be going to school at the XYZ school, and you can walk there by going down this street, and then that street, and then that street … so walk on down there tomorrow morning, and sign yourself in.” They didn’t take me to school on the first day to make sure I was enrolled or registered; it was just assumed that I could do it myself. Maybe that was normal back in the 1950s; maybe it’s still normal today, in some parts of the country. But in big cities today, I think most parents would be horrified.
3. I got my first bicycle in Ft. Worth — and I remember it being presented to me as a birthday present for my 7th birthday; you’ll see a picture of it in the front yard in the last photo in this set. I don’t think I had ever tried to ride a bike before, but everyone assumed that it would come quickly and easily. And it did ...
This is a picture from the front of the house where we lived in Omaha.
The road is now known simply as "Childs Road," and technically it's in the suburb of Bellevue, which is in South Omaha. (I've geotagged this photo, so you can see exactly where it's located.)
One of my weekly chores was to mow the front lawn (and the side and back lawns too). It doesn't look very big, but we only had a manual lawnmower, and I was only 11; it seemed like an eternal amount of time to get it all cut. (Shortly after I went off to college, years later, Dad decided that it would be a great time to get a gas-powered lawnmower. C'est la vie.)
*********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the year that my family spent in Omaha in 1955-56. But the final 10 color photos were taken nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Omaha) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch9.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Omaha? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I attended the last couple months of 6th grade, and all of 7th grade, in one school. My parents moved from Omaha to Long Island, NY in the spring of my 7th grade school year; but unlike previous years, they made arrangements for me to stay with a neighbor’s family, so that I could finish the school year before joining them in New York.
2. Our dog, Blackie, traveled with us from our previous home in Riverside, and was with us until my parents left Omaha for New York; at that point, they gave him to some other family. For some reason, this had almost no impact on me. It was a case of “out of sight, out of mind” — when Blackie was gone, I spent my final three months in Omaha without ever thinking about him again.
3. Most days, I rode my bike to school; but Omaha was the place where one of my sisters first started attending first grade — in the same school where I was attending 6th grade. I remember walking her to school along Bellevue Avenue on the first morning, which seemed to take forever: it was about a mile away.
4. As noted in a previous Flickr album about my year in Riverside, I was a year younger than my classmates; but I was tall for my age, and thus looked “normal” at a quick glance. But because I was a year younger, I was incredibly shy and awkward in the presence of girls. Omaha was certainly not “sin city,” but by 6th grade and 7th grade, puberty was beginning to hit, and the girls had grown to the point where they were occasionally interested in boys. The school tried to accommodate this social development by teaching us the square dance (and forbidding the playing of songs by Elvis Presley, whose music was just beginning to be heard on the radio). I was an awful dancer, and even more of a shy misfit than my classmates; I continue to be an awful dancer today.
5. My bike ride to school was uneventful most days; but the final part of the ride was a steep downhill stretch on Avery Road, lasting three or four blocks. My friends and I usually raced downhill as fast as we could; but one day, my front bicycle wheel began to wobble on the downhill run, and my bike drifted uncontrollably to the side of the road and then off into a ditch. I got banged up pretty badly.
6. But this accident was nothing compared to my worst mishap: a neighborhood friend and I enjoyed playing “cowboys and Indians” in the woods near his home (and his younger brother usually tagged along). I had a bow and a few arrows for our adventure, and we often shot at trees a hundred feet away. Unfortunately, the arrows often disappeared into the underbrush (because we were lousy shots) and were difficult to find. Consequently, one of us came up with the clever idea of standing behind the “target” tree, so that we could see where the randomly-shot arrows landed. Through a series of miscommunications, I poked my head out from behind the tree just as my friend shot one of the arrows … and it skipped off the side of the tree and into my face, impaling itself into my cheek bone about an inch below my eye. An inch higher, and I would not be typing these words … (meanwhile, my friend's younger brother grew up to be an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and he tracked me down on the Internet, decades later).
7. In the summer of 1956, my parents decided to spend their summer vacation prospecting for uranium (seriously!) in the remote hills of eastern Utah, where my dad had grown up on the Utah-Colorado border. This entailed a long, long drive from Omaha; and it involved leaving me and my two sisters with my grandparents near Vernal, UT. My grandparents lived in a very small mining village outside of Vernal; and while they had electricity and various other modern conveniences, they also had an outhouse in the back yard. Trips to the “bathroom” in the middle of the night were quite an adventure. On the way back to Omaha at the end of this vacation trip (with no uranium ore having been found), we stopped for a couple of days of camping somewhere in the mountains of Colorado; you’ll see a couple of photos from that camping trip in this album.
8. There were no lizards in Omaha, and thus no opportunity for lizard-hunting with my slingshot—which had been a significant hobby in my previous homes in Riverside and Roswell. Indeed, there was almost nothing to shoot at … and I couldn’t find anyone with whom I could play (and hopefully win) marbles, to use as slingshot ammunition. But for reasons I never questioned or investigated (but about which I’m very curious now), there was a small vineyard in the field behind our house, and I was able to climb over the fence and retrieve dozens of small, hard, green grapes. They turned out to be excellent ammunition … but I never did find any lizards.
9. A few months before my parents left for New York, I told them about the latest craze sweeping the neighborhood: “English bikes,” with three speeds, thin tires, and hand-brakes. I desperately wanted one, but Dad said it was far too expensive for him to buy as a frivolous gift for me: at the time, English bikes had an outrageous price tag of $25. I was told that I would have to earn the money myself if I wanted one … and the going rate for young, scrawny kids who shoveled sidewalks, pulled weeds from gardens, and did babysitting chores, was 25 cents per hour. That works out to 100 hours of work … but I did it, over the course of the next few months, and when I got to New York, the first thing I did was buy my English bike.
10. Toward the end of my 7th-grade school year, everyone in my class was subjected to a vision test: we were lined up in alphabetical order, and one-by-one read off a series of letters that we could barely see on a large placard taped onto the classroom blackboard. Because my surname starts with a “Y,” I was usually near the end of the line … and by the time I got to the front, I had usually memorized the letters (because they never bothered to change them, from one student to the next) without even realizing it consciously. But on this particular occasion in 7th grade, for some reason, they decided to line us up in reverse alphabetical order … and I was the first in line. For the first time in my life, I realized that I could not see anything of the letters, and that I was woefully near-sighted. When I got to New York, my parents took me to an optometrist to get my first set of glasses (and, yes, all of the neighborhood kids did begin taunting me immediately: “Four eyes! Four eyes!”) … and I’ve worn glasses ever since.
Three years after I arrived in New York, the glasses saved my vision when a home-brewed mix of gunpowder and powdered aluminum blew up in my face in the school chemistry lab (where I had an after-school volunteer job as a “lab assistant”). I suffered 2nd-degree burns on my face from the explosion, but the glasses protected my eyes. That, however, is a different story for a different time.
After I had seen everything I wanted to see in Roswell, I hit the road again -- and started driving west towards California, which is the direction that my family took when moving from Roswell to Riverside, CA in the spring of 1954.
We drove through the Alamagordo site of various missile tests, not too far from where the original atomic bomb test had taken place in the 1940s.
This photo was taken about 50 miles west of Socorro, NM -- between the towns of Magdalena and Datil. You've probably never heard of those towns, but it's also in the general vicinity, on the Plains of St. Augustin, of the Very Large Array (VLA) radio astronomy observatory. Of course, the VLA wasn't here when we drove through this area in 1954: its construction did not begin until 1973, and it was formally inaugurated in 1980.
I know you're thinking to yourself, "Where have I seen those VLA radar dishes before?" (There are 27 of them, in case you wondered, and each one weighs 209 metric tons.)
The answer, of course, is Contact -- the 1997 movie starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. (Don't tell me you haven't seen the movie. Shame, shame! Go buy it or rent it or stream it right now. Here's the URL to learn more about the movie: www.imdb.com/media/rm1260489216/tt0118884?ref_=tt_ov_i )
As for the VLA, you can read more about it in this Wikipedia article:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array
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Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 40 years after we first moved to Roswell, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
2. For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
3. In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
4. For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
This was taken during a family picnic in Riodoso, NM -- which is a bit of a drive from Roswell. But I drove along this area in 1992, and I recall seeing a lovely river, lined by some lush green trees -- so back in the 50s, it was probably a lovely area for a picnic.
Aleda is in the foreground in this photo, and Patrice is on the left. In the background is my mother, who was about 32 years old in this photo.
*****************************
Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 40 years after we first moved to Roswell, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
2. For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
3. In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
4. For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
My father's note in the family scrapbook says, "Our first day in Roswell, NM."This is apparently the motel where we lived while they were house-hunting...
*****************************
Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 60 years after we first moved to Roswell, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
Taken in the back yard of our Roswell house. Aleda (a little over one year old) is on the left, and Patrice (roughly 3 years old) is on the right.
And you can see what kind of coffee my parents were drinking ...
Dad's note on this album page says "House found!". It looks like somewhat later spring of the year, but I've assigned a fairly arbitrary date to this picture...
*****************************
Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 60 years after we first moved to Roswell, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
2. For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
3. In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
4. For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
(more details about the house itself, in the days to come)
**************************************************************************
This is the house in Roswell, NM — on South Pennsylvania Avenue — where I lived with my parents and two of my five sisters in 1953-4. The photo was taken nearly 40 years after we first moved into the house, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
2. For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
3. In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
4. For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
This is one of three pictures on a page labeled "Another picnic, July 27, 1952". This particular picture says "Sherry Rapp [next-door neighbor, I think], Patty and Eddie"
**********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the year that my family spent in Denver in 1952-53 — i.e., the period before Omaha, before Riverside, and before Roswell (which you may have seen already in my Flickr archives). I went back nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Denver) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch6.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
Actually, I should listen to my own advice: unlike my subsequent visits to Roswell, Riverside, and Omaha I did not take any photos when I tracked down my old homes from the 1952-53 period in Denver. I did locate the second house, and I was stunned to see how it had changed over a period of 40 years: as you’ll see in the photos in this album, it was a new house, under construction, when we moved in. The only “trees” were a few scrawny saplings that my Dad planted in the front and back yard. 40 years later, the trees towered above the house … but the house itself seemed tiny, in comparison to what had seemed like an enormous mansion to an 8 year old boy.
While most of our residential occupancies last just a single year, the period in Denver lasted roughly two years. But it felt almost like two separate cities: first we lived in a rented house in the Denver suburb of Aurora; and then we moved into a new house that my parents purchased somewhere on the south side of Denver. So, as usual, I ended up going to two different schools, and developed a fairly superficial set of friendships with two different groups of kids.
So, what do I remember about the two years that I spent in Denver? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. While living in our first home, I finished off my second-grade school year. I did reasonably well in school on most subjects — it was a couple years later, in Roswell, that I announced at breakfast that I had mentally calculated the number of seconds in a century, in the hope that it would help me fall asleep. I rattled off the number, and when my Dad repeated the calculations on his slide rule, he shook his head and told me that I had forgotten to account for leap years. Anyway, in Denver, my 2nd-grade teacher told me I had a much more serious educational problem: my penmanship was atrocious. The school authorities insisted that I spend the summer practicing penmanship, and strongly suggested to my parents that the *real* problem was that I was left-handed. Several attempts were made to make me start writing with my right hand — all of which were dismal failures. I eventually gave up on penmanship, and began printing everything … a habit that continued until I was given a hand-me-down manual typewriter by my parents at the age of 12.
2. The summer of 1951 was hot and humid; and like many other families in the area, my mother took me and the older of my two sisters (the other one was born a year later) to a large public swimming pool (it seemed enormous at the time, but it was probably pretty small). Anyway, it was a great breeding place for germs of all kinds; and sometime in the late summer, everyone but my mother came down with polio. We were all taken off to three different hospitals; and the neighbors were so panicked that my mother might be infectious that they stopped speaking to her altogether. Miraculously, all three of us had gotten the least-virulent form of polio, and we all recovered sufficiently within a week or two that we could come home. I was fairly weak for the next couple of weeks, and had to take a hot bath every day; but aside from that, none of us suffered any no permanent effects.
3. It was late 1951 or early 1952 when we moved into the house that my parents had purchased in another part of town; I remember that my younger sister was born there on St. Patrick’s Day. As usual, I was allowed to wander anywhere I wanted, on foot or on bicycle, as long as I came home on time for dinner. One day I took a long section of rope, climbed way up into a tree a mile or two away from home, and then way out on a long sturdy branch. I tied one end of the rope around the branch, and then wrapped another part of the rope twice around my (left) hand. I swung down from the branch, intending to descend in an orderly fashion, just like I had seen firemen doing it in the movies. Unfortunately, it didn’t work: I slid helter-skelter to the ground, landing in a heap, and the rope around my hand cut through the skin, almost through the tendons, and all the way to the bone. I had to have my hand wrapped in bandages for the first month of my 3rd grade school year; and once again the Authorities tried to use the opportunity to get me to use my right hand for penmanship. Once again, they failed.
4. In the summer of 1952, I was sent off to a sleep-away camp for two weeks, somewhere in the mountains of Colorado. I have no idea why, but it was a lot of fun … until I was thrown off a horse and knocked unconscious. The camp authorities decided there was no reason to inform my parents, though my parents were rather curious when I subsequently refused to climb up on a horse wherever we went. They also noticed that I was limping when I came home from camp, which the camp authorities had apparently not noticed; I had hiked all the way to the top of a mountain with my fellow camp-mates, and I had a rock in one of my boots. It caused a blister, which got infected, and I was probably lucky that they didn’t have to amputate my foot. All in all, the camp experienced was deemed a failure, and I was never sent away again.
5. I got my first slingshot in Denver. It was not a “professional” Wham-O slingshot with natural rubber and ash wood; instead, Dad made one for me from a Y-shaped chunk of plywood, and with strips of rubber from an old automobile inner tube. I thought it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen — and immediately began shooting at every bird I could see on a telephone wire or branch of a tree. I never did hit a single one of the. (By the way, Wham-O eventually went on to achieve even more fame with its hula hoop, frisbee, and hack sack. You can read all about them here on the Internet: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wham-O )
6. The next best thing, besides a slingshot, was the top of a coffee can. They tended to have fairly sharp edges, but if you held it carefully and threw it just right, it would sail for miles and miles … at least it seemed that way. It wouldn’t return to you, a la boomerangs (which every kid had heard about, but none had ever actually seen) — but it was just like throwing a flying saucer. Unfortunately, coffee-can-tops were not readily found, especially since we kids never drank any coffee. We had to wait patiently for our parents to finish off an entire can of coffee, and then scoop it out of the garbage can when it was thrown out.
Mom has labeled this entire album page as "Patty doing her 'tricks' - picnic at Lake Worth, March 24, 1951" -- and the individual photo is labeled "Oh, upside down again, ay?"
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Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the brief 7-week period that my family spent in Ft. Wort, TX in the spring of 1951 — i.e., the period before Omaha,Riverside, Roswell, and Denver (which you may have seen already in my Flickr archives). I went back nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Denver) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch5.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
Actually, I should listen to my own advice: unlike my subsequent visits to Roswell, Riverside, and Omaha I did not take any photos when I tracked down my old homes from the 1951 period in Ft. Worth, nor the subsequent 1952-53 period in Denver.
While most of our residential occupancies lasted a full year, the period in Ft. Worth lasted for roughly two months — at the end of which, Dad was transferred by his employer up to Denver. I have no idea why this happened; and since my parents have now passed away, there’s really nobody I can ask at this point...
So, what do I remember about the two months that I spent in Ft. Worth? Hardly anything at the moment, though perhaps more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. It took several days for our family to drive from our previous location (outside NYC, in Long Island) down to Texas; I only remember that my parents sat in the front seat with my baby sister (who was only about six months old at the time), and I sat in the back seat, staring out at highways and scenery as we drove down through Appalachia and the American Southeast.
2. We moved into a rented house, but I have no memory of how long it took, or even what neighborhood it was in.
I do remember Ft. Worth being the first of several subsequent cities where my parents said to me, “You’ll be going to school at the XYZ school, and you can walk there by going down this street, and then that street, and then that street … so walk on down there tomorrow morning, and sign yourself in.” They didn’t take me to school on the first day to make sure I was enrolled or registered; it was just assumed that I could do it myself. Maybe that was normal back in the 1950s; maybe it’s still normal today, in some parts of the country. But in big cities today, I think most parents would be horrified.
3. I got my first bicycle in Ft. Worth — and I remember it being presented to me as a birthday present for my 7th birthday; you’ll see a picture of it in the front yard in the last photo in this set. I don’t think I had ever tried to ride a bike before, but everyone assumed that it would come quickly and easily. And it did ...
This is one of three pictures on a page labeled "Easter 1952." This picture says "Aleda doesn't seem to think much of Easter."
**********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the year that my family spent in Denver in 1952-53 — i.e., the period before Omaha, before Riverside, and before Roswell (which you may have seen already in my Flickr archives). I went back nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Denver) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch6.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
Actually, I should listen to my own advice: unlike my subsequent visits to Roswell, Riverside, and Omaha I did not take any photos when I tracked down my old homes from the 1952-53 period in Denver. I did locate the second house, and I was stunned to see how it had changed over a period of 40 years: as you’ll see in the photos in this album, it was a new house, under construction, when we moved in. The only “trees” were a few scrawny saplings that my Dad planted in the front and back yard. 40 years later, the trees towered above the house … but the house itself seemed tiny, in comparison to what had seemed like an enormous mansion to an 8 year old boy.
While most of our residential occupancies last just a single year, the period in Denver lasted roughly two years. But it felt almost like two separate cities: first we lived in a rented house in the Denver suburb of Aurora; and then we moved into a new house that my parents purchased somewhere on the south side of Denver. So, as usual, I ended up going to two different schools, and developed a fairly superficial set of friendships with two different groups of kids.
So, what do I remember about the two years that I spent in Denver? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. While living in our first home, I finished off my second-grade school year. I did reasonably well in school on most subjects — it was a couple years later, in Roswell, that I announced at breakfast that I had mentally calculated the number of seconds in a century, in the hope that it would help me fall asleep. I rattled off the number, and when my Dad repeated the calculations on his slide rule, he shook his head and told me that I had forgotten to account for leap years. Anyway, in Denver, my 2nd-grade teacher told me I had a much more serious educational problem: my penmanship was atrocious. The school authorities insisted that I spend the summer practicing penmanship, and strongly suggested to my parents that the *real* problem was that I was left-handed. Several attempts were made to make me start writing with my right hand — all of which were dismal failures. I eventually gave up on penmanship, and began printing everything … a habit that continued until I was given a hand-me-down manual typewriter by my parents at the age of 12.
2. The summer of 1951 was hot and humid; and like many other families in the area, my mother took me and the older of my two sisters (the other one was born a year later) to a large public swimming pool (it seemed enormous at the time, but it was probably pretty small). Anyway, it was a great breeding place for germs of all kinds; and sometime in the late summer, everyone but my mother came down with polio. We were all taken off to three different hospitals; and the neighbors were so panicked that my mother might be infectious that they stopped speaking to her altogether. Miraculously, all three of us had gotten the least-virulent form of polio, and we all recovered sufficiently within a week or two that we could come home. I was fairly weak for the next couple of weeks, and had to take a hot bath every day; but aside from that, none of us suffered any no permanent effects.
3. It was late 1951 or early 1952 when we moved into the house that my parents had purchased in another part of town; I remember that my younger sister was born there on St. Patrick’s Day. As usual, I was allowed to wander anywhere I wanted, on foot or on bicycle, as long as I came home on time for dinner. One day I took a long section of rope, climbed way up into a tree a mile or two away from home, and then way out on a long sturdy branch. I tied one end of the rope around the branch, and then wrapped another part of the rope twice around my (left) hand. I swung down from the branch, intending to descend in an orderly fashion, just like I had seen firemen doing it in the movies. Unfortunately, it didn’t work: I slid helter-skelter to the ground, landing in a heap, and the rope around my hand cut through the skin, almost through the tendons, and all the way to the bone. I had to have my hand wrapped in bandages for the first month of my 3rd grade school year; and once again the Authorities tried to use the opportunity to get me to use my right hand for penmanship. Once again, they failed.
4. In the summer of 1952, I was sent off to a sleep-away camp for two weeks, somewhere in the mountains of Colorado. I have no idea why, but it was a lot of fun … until I was thrown off a horse and knocked unconscious. The camp authorities decided there was no reason to inform my parents, though my parents were rather curious when I subsequently refused to climb up on a horse wherever we went. They also noticed that I was limping when I came home from camp, which the camp authorities had apparently not noticed; I had hiked all the way to the top of a mountain with my fellow camp-mates, and I had a rock in one of my boots. It caused a blister, which got infected, and I was probably lucky that they didn’t have to amputate my foot. All in all, the camp experienced was deemed a failure, and I was never sent away again.
5. I got my first slingshot in Denver. It was not a “professional” Wham-O slingshot with natural rubber and ash wood; instead, Dad made one for me from a Y-shaped chunk of plywood, and with strips of rubber from an old automobile inner tube. I thought it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen — and immediately began shooting at every bird I could see on a telephone wire or branch of a tree. I never did hit a single one of the. (By the way, Wham-O eventually went on to achieve even more fame with its hula hoop, frisbee, and hack sack. You can read all about them here on the Internet: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wham-O )
6. The next best thing, besides a slingshot, was the top of a coffee can. They tended to have fairly sharp edges, but if you held it carefully and threw it just right, it would sail for miles and miles … at least it seemed that way. It wouldn’t return to you, a la boomerangs (which every kid had heard about, but none had ever actually seen) — but it was just like throwing a flying saucer. Unfortunately, coffee-can-tops were not readily found, especially since we kids never drank any coffee. We had to wait patiently for our parents to finish off an entire can of coffee, and then scoop it out of the garbage can when it was thrown out.
Photos of a trip that I took in Feb 1992 to visit the house where I lived for a year in Riverside, during the 1953-54 time period. We were located near the foothills of the San Bernardino mountains, and I often hiked up to the top of the hills -- hence the photos from that perspective. All of this was motivated by the desire to do some research for the novel I was writing at the time, "Do-Overs".
This is one of several photos that I took in the foothills where I played -- mostly alone -- during the year that we lived here in the mid-1950s. One of the most depressing discoveries on my return trip in 1992 was the presence of the smog from Los Angeles, some 50 miles to the west ...
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Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 40 years after we first moved to Riverside, CA, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Riverside) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch8.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Riverside? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Riverside to Omaha, where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I attended one school, somewhere in downtown Riverside, when my parents were looking for a house; and when they finally found a house out at the edge of town (at the base of the San Bernardino foothills), I was switched to a different school. This was typical; I usually attended two different schools in every city we lived in, and I attended a total of 17 schools before heading off to college.
2. While I eventually rode my bike to and from the second house to my school, I started off riding a school bus. A bunch of us kids would wait on a corner for the bus to arrive; and it was at the edge of a huge orange grove that seemed to stretch on forever. There were always a few rotten oranges lying on the ground, thoroughly rotten, and these substituted nicely for snowballs. There is nothing like the experience of being smacked in the stomach, of your fresh clean shirt, with a rotten orange.
3. Like most other suburban kids in the 1950s, I was allowed to do all sorts of things alone — as long as I returned home by dinner time. I could ride my bike anywhere I wanted, alone; I could hike way up into the hills alone (as long as I had a pocket-knife, which my father insisted I carry in case I was bitten by a rattlesnake). And I was allowed to sleep outside in the back yard, in a sleeping bag, virtually whenever I wanted to. The weather was always quite mild, the skies were clear (Los Angeles smog had not reached us in those days), and the stars were utterly amazing. There were shooting stars to watch, an experience I have never forgotten.
4. I discovered that marbles were excellent projectiles to shoot with one’s slingshot, and that they would actually travel in a more-or-less straight line. I became pretty good at shooting lizards with my slingshot; all I needed was an endless supply of marbles (because you could only shoot them once, at which point they would generally disappear somewhere). So I began practicing quite hard, played competitive games of marbles every day at school, and eventually amassed great quantities of the little round things.
5. Even better than lizards were spiders; they were everywhere, and they were relatively easy to catch. I don’t think any of them were dangerous, and in any case, none of them bit me. I sometimes put them in my pants pocket for the day, and I often brought them home. And I would put them in the dresser drawer with my socks and underwear; it seemed like a good place for them to relax. My mother discovered a couple of them one day, and was not impressed.
6. We had relatives in the city of Los Angeles, and made the 50-mile drive to visit them once or twice a year. We also made a 50-mile drive once or twice to visit San Juan Capistrano, which my parents thought was the most wonderful place in the world — mostly, they told me, because of the famous swallows that migrate each year from someplace in Argentina. In fact, I think they were impressed because they were old enough to like a 1940 hit song, “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” which I couldn’t stand. If they had told me the place was the locale of the first Zorro novella (“The Curse of Capistrano,” published in 1919), I would have been much more impressed.
7. Riverside is where I got my first dog—a mutt named Blackie, that was part of a litter produced by the next-door neighbor’s dog. It provided an open invitation for me to visit the next-door neighbors whenever I wanted, and swim in their pool (a rarity in those days). At the end of our year in Riverside, Blackie moved with us to our next location — traveling all the way in a little house/bed that had been made for him in the World War II Jeep that Dad hitched to his Chevrolet.
8. Riverside is also where I had my first exposure, at school, to kids of other ethnic backgrounds. There were Asian kids, and black kids, and Latino kids (whom, sadly, my father referred to generically as “Mexicans,” but whom he also held in high respect because he remembered watching their comrades working harder and longer than any of the “white boys” in the rough mining and ranching camps on the Utah/Colorado border, where he had grown up). All of us were thrown together in the same classroom, all of us traveled to each other’s houses and neighborhoods after school, and nobody seemed to think it was unusual in any way.
9. I learned, to my enormous delight, that I *was* different in one special way: I was left-handed. During the pickup baseball games that we played constantly during recess, lunch, and after school, there were never enough baseball gloves for everyone, so everyone simply shared with everyone else (after all, if your team is at bat, you don’t need your baseball glove). But I was the only left-handed kid around, apparently the only one in the whole school; so nobody ever wanted to share my glove.
This is the elementary school that I attended in Roswell in 1953-54. Sadly, I have absolutely no memories of it at all. Indeed, I have no idea who I was able to track it down when I came through this area nearly 40 years later ...
It's not too far from the house in Roswell, NM where I lived with my parents and two of my five sisters. The photo was taken nearly 40 years after we first moved into the house, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
Dad's note on the album page says "Ed's 'fort' and gremlins." I recall building several such "forts" in the back yard of our Roswell house, and perhaps even the Riverside house a year or two later. The forts were constructed from old wooden boxes, scraps of old blankets, and other such junk.
*****************************
Most of the photos in this album were taken nearly 40 years after we first moved to Roswell, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
2. For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
3. In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
4. For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/
The "Bottomless Lake," located about 10 miles east of Roswell. So called because there was an underground stream that ran through the lake and on into some underground limestone -- so if you dropped a weight from a boat in the middle of the lake, it would be sucked along by the current, and give the impression that the lake itself was bottomless. Anyway, it was a popular swimming spot during the summer.
It's not too far from the house in Roswell, NM where I lived with my parents and two of my five sisters. The photo was taken nearly 40 years after we first moved into the house, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Roswell) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch7.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Roswell? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now (including some of the drive from Roswell to Riverside, CA where our family moved next), as well as some “real” contemporaneous photos I’ve found in family scrapbooks.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I discovered roller skates while I lived here — perhaps aided by the presence of nice, smooth, wide sidewalks throughout this whole area of town. Sometimes my mother sent me on a small shopping expedition to the local grocery store, about two blocks away, to buy a quart of milk or a couple of other minor things. The shorts that I wore had no pockets (I have no idea why), so I put the coins that my mother gave me into my mouth, for safekeeping. That way, I had both hands free in case I tripped and fell … but if I had done so, I probably would have swallowed the coins.
2. For Christmas that year (i.e., Christmas of 1953), I was given a .22-caliber rifle. Even today, it would cause only a shrug in many rural parts of the U.S.; and it was certainly unremarkable in the 1950s. My dad felt that every boy should have a rifle, and should learn how to shoot it, clean it, and take care of it in a responsible fashion. I think his intention was to take me out into the open area outside of Roswell, to shoot at rabbits or gophers; but we ended up shooting at cans and bottles in the local dump.
3. In 1953, Roswell had not acquired any fame or attention for its proximity to the alleged alien landing in 1947. Trust me: if there had been even a hint of a rumor, the young kids in that town would have heard about it. Whatever may (or may not) have happened there . If you have no idea what this is all about, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
4. For young boys, it was great sport to shoot at moving creatures. Dogs and cats were considered off-limits; and as implied above, we were not allowed to wander the streets with a .22 rifle. But we all had slingshots, and there were an infinite number of lizards in the area. Unfortunately, lizard were far too quick to hit with a relatively inaccurate slingshot (especially if shot with an unevenly-shaped rock; and it was only a year later, in California, that I began shooting marbles). Our greatest success was actually with slower creatures: horned toads, usually referred to as “horny toads,” or just “horns.” Indeed, they were slow enough that you could capture them with bare hands. You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so take a look at this National Geographic article: animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad/