1952

Eisenhower is elected president. I remember president Eisenhower and "I like Ike" buttons. His presidency spanned the major part of my childhood, from 1st to 9th grade.

I enter 1st grade for the first time. We live in Idledale. I walk to school every day, truly about a mile down a mountainside. Idledale is a small town tucked away in the dry rocky mountains 30 miles west of Denver and is home to about 500 people. We have a 3-room school house which has 3 teachers and 8 grades. There are probably 60 students. High school is an hour bus ride away.

I have 2 brothers and 3 sisters. I love my little brother Jon dearly but I'm not sure if I yet realize that in 1952. My family is dysfunctional with an alcoholic father but I'm not aware that life outside my family is any different. Besides, who knew about dysfunction back then? Life was just the way it is. This photo of me was probably taken in 1951.

So anyway I begin school at the age of five and my 6th birthday is not until February. I'm sure my mother seeks relief from the physical and emotional pressures on her, not to mention that I'm not a dummy. I crave school. Unfortunately, I enter Mrs. Dunchee's 1st grade class with Carol, who is still wetting her pants. Teachers ask her parents to remove her, there's a big uproar, upshot being that they find out about me being too young so I am removed also. The 3rd/4th/5th grade teacher - who I loved dearly and who was such a fan of me - finds pity on me and begins bringing books by for me to read. So by the time I enter school again the following year I am head and shoulders above the others. I spend my time listening to 2nd grade lessons and thinking up inane questions to ask Mrs. Dunchee. In 2nd grade I will advance to become her 1st grade teacher's aide because I am so bored in 2nd grade, having listened to it all the prior year.

Jim Ridgeway, Gary Hector, the Forsberg's: Bonnie, Dorothy, Ronnie, Margie, Mike Kehoe and little sister Sandy and playing our version of "cowboys & indians" while our mothers got together with their friends for their club meeting - "Babble Dabble". Cute, huh? 1st and 2nd grade years are all ganged together - I can't separate them. So it is for a small child - timeless. Walking home in the snow, running down the mountainside in the morning, the little Idledale grocery store where we bought penny candies, the mound of dirt and rock, the houses, the people who lived in them, the Hanes', Mrs Carlson, the Town Hall meetings, the adopted twins who lived down the mountainside and spoke their own language, the time our father's new car rolled off the mountain and down into the roof of someone's house, the time some mean kids flooded our house with a hose, Mike & Pat Chicolacas who could eat hot peppers, the castle and the family that lived there: 12 children, a couple pairs of twins thrown in. They were, to my memory, the one wealthy family in town. I don't remember their names or faces. All these memories swirl around in the soup that is my childhood.

When I complete 4th grade (I did 3rd and 4th in one year), a change occurs and the upper grades are bussed to Morrison, 10 miles away, to a lovely new little elementary school at the base of what will one day be a well-known place - the Red Rocks Amphitheater. My boundaries broaden. But up until I am 10 my world is this mountain bowl with a road coming and going at either end. I run free most of the time. In the summer we swim in Bear Creek and swim at a swimming hole that is ultimately closed off to public use due to over-use and danger. Thank Goddess we knew nothing of those things in the 1950s (cold war notwithstanding - it didn't really touch us). We eat sour apples from an abandoned apple orchard and chokecherries are abundant at the end of summer. Strange that life can be idyllic and dysfunctional at the same time.

Perry Como, Patti Page, Doris Day, Eddie Fisher. A musical style that hasn't seemed to survive. :o) Never mind. I loved Perry Como. He sang a song: "Oh my Papa, to me he is so wonderful". I would sing that to myself at night sometimes to help me go to sleep. My older sisters and brothers hated our father, yet he doted on me. Ah, well, that's a story too. There we are into the dysfunction and here I am at the end of the post. I will leave it for another day. Methinks it will raise its face again one day.