Comment on Mysteries

This is a follow up to my post on mysteries in the bloodlines.  I received a comment from Mr. Doug Gonzales that provided valuable information about Henry Brodhack.  His information coupled with logic pointed to Henry being at  least half Native American.   Doug, I would love to get a hold of you, but I am not sure how to do it.  If you are on Ancestry.com, you could send me a message there.  This blog might also have a way to send me a message.

I am truly puzzled to learn that, a nephew tested 3% African American.  We did have ancestors who were slave holders from the South.  I can add the information that I had one of my male cousins DNA tested to determine if the Robertson line might have Native American blood. The Robertsons are pure Celts.

From the BYU testing , I learned that the most accurate way to test would be to find a woman whose mother was a Brodock and follow the mitochondrial DNA back through the female line. This procedure should determine if Submitta was Indian.  If we found a male with the Brodock surname  followed the male DNA back well....I'm getting in over my head, not to mention confused.

I learned from BYU-TV that not all DNA testing is equal... by a long shot.  I have a friend who knows her grandmother was Cherokee.  Ancestry.com DNA testing concluded she had a percentage of something that was not WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), but the test couldn't pin down what that percentage was.

In the meantime, who wants to be tested next?

O.A. Robertson - the Celt line

Rose Byrd - the English line, but there are rumors about an Indian Agent in the family

The Millers - Scotch and Danish and Norwegian

The puzzling Brodocks:  Left to right Charles, Henry (sitting), and friend.   Most of the girls were dark but two out of three boys were blondes like their mother.

Miller girls- more Scots, Danes and Norwegians.

Reaction to News

I was going through my Dad's old papers and stumbled across this newsletter from the 13th A.A.F., dated October 23, 1944.  I wonder how it would be to be fighting a war in the South Pacific and find out that the President had died.

Lessons From Nature

Despair

Hope

Despair

Hope

Despair

Hope

Despair

Hope

                                                                              

Despair

Hope

Why We Let the Men Come

Saturday Hermione, Cheryl and I decided to go four-wheeling in the mountains. The men wanted to come.  Being generous, we let them come with us.

Although the men frequently want to ride trails that, in our judgment, are not the best idea,

and they don't have much appreciation of wild flowers, 

They have some skill sets that are extremely useful.

 They enjoy a good view, especially if the view
includes elk.

They know when to call it quits on a trail.

They are superb at loading loading four-wheelers and hauling trailers.

Hurray for a fun day, if not a fine day, four-wheeling!

Springtime in the Rockies

Because of my knee procedure, I haven't been able to go hiking, walking etc.  A little over a week ago Wilbur took me for a drive into the mountains so I could get my fresh air fix.  It was a different world 1500 hundred feel higher. We started with a few piles of snow here and there and ended with significant snow everywhere.  We finally came to the drift that stopped us.

A couple days later, the newspaper reported that two teenagers decided to blast through the very drift where we stopped.  Search and Rescue pulled them out early in the morning of the next day.  No doubt their parents were pleased.

The drift that stopped us

Beattle killed trees near Park Lake

shootingstars preparing to bloom in a meadow

Mystery in the Blood Lines

Maude Brodock Robertson with son Les Robertson

When I was a kid, I remember my Uncles Les talking to my Dad about a man who told Les he looked like an Indian.  Uncle Les was incensed.  At that time, people I knew here were ashamed of Native American (NA) heritage.  Later, in doing family history work, some relations from Oklahoma wrote to me about an ancestor on the Brodock line who was Indian.  They decided this because a common ancestor, Henry Brodock, had his picture taken in Indian garb and Henry's daughter, their grandmother, claimed NA heritage.  Another relation claims Henry's mother, Submitta (not one other thing known about her other than her name), was Indian and has the same picture of Henry in NA apparel.

David Brodock (known as "Jake." His posture in this pic is just like my brother Jack's posture

Some other evidence that supports the NA theory is that  many of the Brodocks, including my grandmother, had black eyes and black hair.  Other than the "say so" of distant relatives, that is all the evidence I have.

One of Grandma's sisters.  Several of the girls
were dark like this.

Dave Brodock

Trying to track down this heritage would have been so much easier if: 1) Relatives had admitted they  had NA ancestry and 2) DNA testing had been available in the 1950's and 1960's.  Now, all my Brodock relatives have died.  I might be a sissy, but tracking down a shirt-tail Brodock relation that I've never met and asking for a DNA sample sounds awkward at best.

Grandma - Maude Brodock

Because I'm curious, I had a male Robertson cousin test his DNA. The test revealed that the male Robertson line is Celtic and nothing else.  Before I figured out how the DNA testing worked, I had my son tested.  This test revealed that my husband and his father's Welsh ancestors have more similarities with the Vikings than any of the other nationalities.  Well, I guess those Vikings did give Great Britain a heck of a time during the middle ages.

I still want to confirm the NA line.  Family History strongly indicates that our line ties up with Bartholomew Brodock, (before the name was Americanized :it was Brod Hack) one of the first settlers in the Mohawk Valley in New York.  So, along with our Scotch, English, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, German, French, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish heritage, there might be a drop of NA thrown in.  Review the pics and tell me what you
think.

Janette "Nettie" Brodock - David Brodock's sister

Henry Brodock (Brodhack) David Brodock's father
Supposedly, Submitta, his mother, was NA.

National Corporations and Magical Thinking

It's astonishing to me that large corporations ever evolved.  They really stink when it comes to efficiency, flexibility, and common sense.  For instance, the old Helena Cable TV was bought by Bresnan which was later bought by  Charter.  There are underground lines for Charter cable TV in the ground a stone's throw from my house.  But do you think I can get cable?  Nope.  Someday, if the cable company decides to expand 150 yards down the road to my place,  I can have cable.  I'm not sure what the deciding factor would be for this business expansion.  Does a committee back East somewhere sit down and consult with an astronomer to see if the moon is in the right phase?  Or does a decision to expand 150 yards have to do with the CEO getting his favorite Java at Starbucks in the morning?  This is a mystery.

I don't know much about cable TV, but I am reasonably certain that if the old cable TV company were still in operation, they would have run the cable to our house.  That business was run by people with reasoning ability.  They probably didn't spend their days gazing at computer generated sales models, but they possessed a modicum of common sense.  If they knew I wanted cable, they would have worked something out because they would see me as a person and a customer, not a statistic. A small company had the flexibility to make decisions on a case by case basis. They wouldn't crawl through a chain of command starting in my home town and ending up in Los Angeles to figure out whether or not to give me service.

Department stores that decide "one size fits all"  in the name of efficiency are another example of corporate stupidity.  A radio broadcast that mentioned J.C. Penny's had dubious sales reports didn't surprise me.  I used to buy a lot clothes at J.C. Penny's.  Then, the Corporate head decided to take the decision of what individual stores stocked out of the hands of the local store manager.  An employee told me that every store everywhere has to stock the same merchandise.  This decision decimated our local Penny's formerly excellent lingerie department, so I had to shop elsewhere.  Then came the spring when I saw the store stock numerous spring shades of men's sport coats in lilac, pink, yellow, and robin's egg blue.  I knew a huge sale on sport coats would be coming soon.  Sport coats in those shades may have been real sellers in Baltimore, but anyone who lived in my hometown would tell you that you couldn't give those jackets away here.  They had the sale, but the men shopping in my town decided to save 100% when it came to those jackets.

Call me a bird brain, but shipping merchandise thousands of miles only to ship it back again when it doesn't sell, doesn't seem like a way to make money.

It seems like when businesses get big, they lose contact with the the basic principles of commerce. Most people don't buy what they don't want, no matter how catchy the ad campaign. Big businesses kid themselves into thinking that what is easy for the business is the best course, and that the business can magically get customers to buy whatever the store decides to sell.  Earth to corporations:  we may live in the sticks, but we don't buy stuff we don't want.

Preparing for the Arrival of Small Children

While other grandmothers prepare for the arrival of grandchildren by removing the porcelain figurines from the end tables or locking the glass display case, I am rounding up my rocks.  My rocks have been stored in two boxes and a metal can in a bottom cabinet in the kitchen.  They are some of my most prized possessions, and my grandchildren are every bit as fascinated with them as I am.  Sad experience has taught me that children lose rocks and some rocks break.  That is why I now shove them in a box on my bedroom closet shelf when the grand kids come.

Other women buy Precious Moments figurines, vases from Italy worth thousands of dollars, and sapphire earrings.  I collect plain, unaltered rocks. Usually, the only thing I spend for them is time.  Obviously, my husband encourages this kind of collecting over jewelry and figurines.  My rocks are not necessarily interesting or valuable to anyone except me.  When I am hiking, I love to take a rock home to remember the hike.

Then, I have the rocks I inherited,  My grandmother, Maude Brodock Robertson, was an enthusiastic rock hound, according to my father.  She found the shark's tooth pictured above on a mine dump in Oregon Gulch.  I have three big seashells from her collection. I'm guessing she bought them on a trip to California for a religious convention.

Besides my rock hound grandmother, three or more of my ancestors were gold miners.  I guess you could say they liked rocks -the right kind of rocks.  Watching my grandchildren, I gather that a love for rocks is an inherited trait.

Sometime during the children's visit, I will bring out the rocks for an hour one day, and the grandchildren and I will all admire them.  We will celebrate our fascination with rocks.  I wouldn't trade my rocks for all the artistically created jewelry and vases made.  My rocks are more interesting and a lot less stressful.

Broomfield: The Town No One Calls Home

A not very good picture of one of Broomfield work-type buildings

So here I am for my 4th day in Broomfield trying to find my way around.  I ditched my Denver area map in favor of the local chamber of commerce map.  The Denver area map had so many streets that finding anything was comparable to sifting through my flour bin in search of one granule of flour.

The chamber of commerce map asserts that Broomfield is a planned community.  I am beginning to think the plan was to push visiting drivers to the brink of insanity.  Either that or the community does NOT like to waste names.  As we are driving around, we encounter Interlocken Loop, Interlocken Parkway, Interlocken Cresecent, and Interlocken Boulevard.  There are several street  names used over and over with a different suffix attached.

Driving all these streets with the same first name coupled with the community plan of having streets loop and circle around each other reminds me of square dancing instead of driving.

Since we don't know the area, we find ourselves asking questions such as, "Do you know where there is a laundromat?"  etc.  Nine out of ten times the response is, "I am not from here.  I just work here.  I don't know."  So here we have Wal Mart employees, gas station attendants, business customers, but none of them are from Broomfield.  Here are some of my questions:  where do the people from Broomfield work, shop, and hide out?  Are babies born and raised in Broomfield, or is the common method to import people to inhabit  the town when they reach age 21?  After the imports move in here are they advised to shop in other cities?

In spite of my frustrations as a visitor without kith or kin to advise me, Broomfield is a clean, new, nice community.

Greetings

Yesterday we arrived in Broomfield, Colorado for my  knee stem cell procedure.  So far it's been an interesting experience.

We reserved what we thought would be a nice hotel room.  Note to self:  if the hotel policy is that they are going to charge you, even if you don't take the room when you arrive and decide to stay somewhere else, you probably aren't going to like the room.

The hotel is kind of run down.   I thought a room on the second floor would be the quietest.  When the owner showed us the second floor room and started the heater/air conditioner it sounded like a bulldozer was waiting to plow through the exterior wall.  I almost started crying. He relocated us to a downstairs room that has a quiet heater/ air conditioner. We can't open the windows because they are old and cruddy.  The room smells like, well like an old hotel room.  I chose this hotel because the man assured me it was quiet.  Well, it is quiet, has space around it, and has Direct TV and Wifi.  Sometimes I wish I didn't have such a super sniffer.

This morning at 10:00 am I talked to the doc.  I think they schedule too much time for the initial visit.  The doc chatted on forever about the Paleo diet, why the China Study isn't accurate and the author is biased. I guess we had to find something to talk about for an hour. To my way of thinking the Paleo diet is nothing but the Atkins diet with an organic foods twist to it.  I saw in the 1970's and again a few years ago that the Atkins diet is no good.

For the procedure, I was a pin cushion.  A Physical Therapist did a form of acupuncture, I had blood drawn, and then platelets were re-injected into my knees.

This clinic has state of the art ultra sound.  The doc looked at my MRIs and then did an ultra sound.  When he re-injected the platelets, he had a ultrasound device that showed him exactly where the tears were and exactly where to put his needle to inject the platelets.  I could see it on the screen too. It was cool!

More tomorrow about street naming practices of Broomfield, Co and how to dutch oven there.

Emergency Preparedness

A few interesting things I learned from attending an Emergency Preparedness Seminar yesterday:

1) If you need to store oil but are tired of it turning rancid before you can use it up, store Crisco.  It will store indefinitely if unopened and kept in a cool, dark place.  If it melts, it doesn't store, though.

2) Studies show that people who are "sick"  of a food, will starve rather than keep eating it.  This is called appetite fatigue.

3)  Liven up food storage meals with : Mapleline, white flour (making sauces), bacon bits (3 year shelf life).
Parmesan Cheese ( a shelf life of a few years), Processed cheese , e.g. Old English Processed cheese spread).

4) Look for PETE on the bottom of plastic containers of food you buy at the grocery store.  If the bottles have screw on lids, you can use them to store food after they have been washed and dried.

5)  Learned from Hurricane Katrina:  Make a card for each family member with : a) their picture, b) name, birthdate, address, phone, parent's names (for children) c) family meeting place in and out of state, d)edical conditions and allergies.  Laminate the card and attach it to a lanyard.  Wear it inside your shirt in an emergency.

6)  Learned from hurricane Katrina:  buy a money belt and wear it around your waist.  The not so nice people in New Orleans, stole back packs.

O.A. Robertson Obituary

This week I was fortunate enough to find my great grandfather's obituary on page 8 of the Great Falls Tribune, June 9, 1926.  I don't know who wrote it, but it would be fun to find out if all the information is true.  When you read the obituary, you will understand my post about the family tales of lost treasure.

FUNERAL RITES CONDUCTED FOR O.A. ROBERTSON

Early Day Freighter, Miner and Rancher Dies at Advanced Age

Oscar A. Robertson, resident of Montana since 1964, who sluiced more than a half a million dollars worth of gold from the famous gulches of the territory and who later freighted and finally became a rancher, was buried Tuesday afternoon in Highland Cemetery.  The services were held at the W.H. George chapel, the Rev. S.C. Williams of the Presbyterian church officiating.  Mr. Robertson died June 6 at his home at 2007 Seventh avenue north [sic].

Norfolk, Va., was the native place of Oscar A. Robertson. [This is inaccurate. Alexandria, Virginia is the place he was born, according to O.A. himself.]  He was born September 20, 1843.  When the gold rush began in Montana he drove a six mule team from Omaha to Denver, then to Virginia City, arriving July 9, 1864.  He had a claim in the famous Alder Gulch from which was taken out $300,000 in gold dust.  In the spring of 1866 he went to Last Chance gulch, [sic] the present site of Helena.  Then he moved to Diamond City, east of Helena, one of the most productive camps in the west, and then to York gulch, north of Helena, where his placer operations brought him $25,000.  Also he acquired a mining claim at French bar near York, where he was in partnership with Samuel Hauser, an early day governor of the territory, and T.H. Kleinschmidt of Helena.  From this claim he took a large amount of gold dust.

February 8, 1872, Rose Byrd of York became Mr. Robertson's bride, and from this union two sons, O.D. Robertson and J.B. Robertson of Helena, were born.  Mrs. Robertson died at French Bar, March 17, 1878.

Following the mining operations, Mr. Robertson was engaged in freighting from Corrine, Utah to Helena and from Helena to Fort Benton, having several  16 mule teams engaged in this business. He later obtained extensive interests in quartz mines in the York district and in other mining camps.

In 1887, Mr. Robertson moved to the Smith river country, settling near Millegan, where he went into the cattle and horse business.  April 12, 1913, Miss Jennie B. Johnson was married to Mr. Robertson, who resided with him on the Millegan ranch until they recently moved to Great Falls.

In his freighting enterprise Mr. Robertson had an experience as an Indian fighter. This occurred in a canyon in Idaho when the redskins attacked his wagon train.  As a follower of mining, he participated in the stampedes at Sun River, Karabo, Yogo and Virginia City, Nev.  In the Sun River stampede the temperature dropped to 40 degrees below zero and several men were frozen to death.

Mr. Robertson was the proprietor of a meat market in Helena in the early days.  The market adjoined the old Gazette building near where the R.C. Wallace store now is.  He also had a meat market at York from 1871 to 1872.  He is survived by the widow and two sons.

O.A. Robertson's Meat Market  in Helena between Watson Brothers and J.H. Curtis businesses.  Although the picture date is 1865.

Cayuse Mining Company.  Not sure of the significance.

Critiholic

I am Montana-Native Endangered Species, and I am a recovering critiholic.  My problems began with my upbringing in a critical home.  However, taking responsibility for my own thoughts and actions is the first step in breaking the addiction cycle.   Therefore, I know my upbringing is no excuse for stigmatizing people as pompous bores when they run meetings over the time allowed.

One way I am trying to improve is refraining from murmured comments about driving that I find annoying.  My standard mumbled comment to a driver who cut me off or waited five seconds to proceed through a green light used to be, “Are you drunk or something?” This practice of murmured comments seemed harmless enough until I made a driving error. When I goofed, I vividly remember little Prudence asking me, “Are you drunk or something?”   I couldn’t help but wonder then if the cultivation of a little more patience and a little less criticism might be in order.

Now that I’m older than the hills and twice as dusty, as the saying goes, I’m giving myself permission to let up on my own blunders a bit when it comes to criticizing.  Leaving a cup of sugar out of the cookie recipe and feeding an entire spool of thread onto the vacuum cleaner brush enough doesn’t precisely qualify me as an idiot…I hope.

I have no doubt that vanquishing criticism will be good for my character.  But the problem of what reaction I should have to annoyances and irritations remains.  For example, how would be the best way to deal with someone who is constantly making me wait.  Should I paste a false smile on my face, go on tranquilizers and lie, “No problem at all.  I LIKE waiting in the foyer of a restaurant for 20 minutes.”  Should I be honest and convey in a kind way that my enthusiasm for waiting for the chronically late is equal to my enthusiasm for bread mold?

One coping strategy I have created has entertainment value.  Keeping with the example of the chronically late, it would be amusing to tell the person to arrive a half hour before I actually plan on meeting them.  Then when they arrive fifteen minutes after the appointed time, I could conceal myself and observe their novel experience as they wait for me. Instead of being irritated, I would gain satisfaction and enjoyment.  

As everyone knows, change is hard.  Now I am realizing that it could also be fun.

Fashion Sense, Western Style

I was looking through some of my grandfather's old pictures.  They depict what cowboys REALLY looked like in the 1800's and early 1900's. My grandfather should have known.  He was one of them.

One of the biggest differences is the cowboy hat.  Notice how the hat has a broad brim and is round, not turned up on the side. Wranglers wanted protection from the sun. Seems to me that the hat being turned up on the sides is probably a Hollywood creation.  My guess is that the side needed to be turned up on the side for movie shooting purposes - getting a good shot of the movie characters.  Here are what early cowboys actually looked like:


Grandpa wrote on the back:  Bill Moodry, champion rider and roper.  The photo is by Kirkland, Cheyenne, Wyoming.

This is a photo of branding by Huffman, a Miles City photographer.  Grandpa had these thumb-tacked to the wall of the kitchen.  He knew some of the people in these photos.

The back of this photo reads:  Beckwith & Bowen, Helena, Montana  The woolly chaps might have been warmer in the winter.

This is a picture of a famous roundup. According to a cousin,  Grand dad gave the original of this one to the museum.  The museum gave him this copy.  Charles Russell, famous cowboy artist and  a friend of Grand dad's is in this picture.  Grand dad also wrote on the back:  Dunc Robertson (grand dad), Highwood Hank, Wallace Storley, Grarz[?], Jerry Philpn, L.B. Taylor.

As you can see, what cowboys actually looked like, differs from the Hollywood version.  

Goodbye Max

Today I had to say goodbye to the best hiking partner I've ever had. He always had room for me in his schedule. He never complained on a hike, and he always wanted to go.

Max was either thirteen or fourteen.  I could never be sure of his age because I "adopted" him from the pound.  I had to pay his bail to adopt him.  Before I took him home, he was a regular at the pound.  After his former family had to pick him up from the pound four or five times, they left him there.  That's were I found him.  I saw him outside, taking air with the other dogs.  He pleaded with me to take him home.  I knew somehow that he was the dog for me, so I adopted him.

The pound workers were disgusted with his former family for not keeping him home.  After I had him for week, I couldn't be critical of the former family anymore.  Max was an escape artist. I think he had claustrophobia too because he hated a fence, a rope, or a closed room.  After being shut in my garden, a pretty good-sized area, he climbed out over the eight foot wire fence and walked down the wood pile.

Max was a favorite with the grandchildren.  I remember my granddaughter Stacy writing a letter to Max.  I didn't get a letter, but Max did.  I could trust him with my grandchildren.  He put up with loads of attention from children and babies, even when he was old.

 Max loved to run. He loved to be completely exhausted. I like to remember his first hike at Nary Time Gulch.  Talk about the joy of living, that was Max on that hike.  Afterwards, he jumped into the truck, dog-tired and happy.   During hikes, he would tear into the trees and across meadows, just for the joy of running and jumping.  Although, there were times when he came sprinting back to me, and I was seriously worried about what was chasing him.  And an encounter he had with a moose once, had me worried about my continued existence on the planet.

I distinctly remember twice when I was hiking and lost the trail.  He located it again for me. His finding the trail made the difference between turning back and continuing on.

Max loved children. He loved attention.  He loved the outdoors. He loved  going wherever we were going.  Goodbye, Max.  Until we meet again.

Public Education

This is probably a damnable heresy, but I am starting to doubt that public education is a good idea. This week, a friend discovered from her 12 year old son that the art teacher had a showed a U-Tube video during class that dealt with the art work of Salvador Dali. In my friend’s view, the art and the narration in the video were about as appropriate for her son as it would be to release rattlesnakes into the classroom for a study of zoology.  

The crux of the problem is widely divergent values that have taken root in our culture since the 1960s. Our nation has lost the moorings of a mostly Christian/religious ethical base. Our morals are rocking like a canoe in a hurricane. As this happens, what's a teacher to do? And what's a parent to do as schools hire teachers from this value vortex? There are parents and teachers who have an established moral code, and they can tell you what the code is. There are parents and teachers who are disciples of churches that teach Hollywood principles, "Do anything you want, and we'll make you feel good about it." There are parents and teachers who advocate anything legal if it promotes achievement, regardless of morals and ethics.  And there are and parents and teachers who simply don't care what goes on as long as no one bothers them. 

With such a wide split in values, morals, and ethics, some young teachers enter the classroom with no more notion of what would be appropriate for children from different value-structures than I have of quantum physics.

Add to the value vortex the artsy philosophy that anything called “art” has merit and therefore is above criticism and the mess gets gooey.  My friend's experience illustrates this values clash.

There are an abundance of people who are desensitized to what used to be a moral “no-brainer.” For instance, when my son was about eleven, we let him sleep over at a friend’s house. He and his buddy spent half the night watching R rate movie after R rated movie.  It never occurred to me that a responsible parent would rent R rated movies for eleven year olds.  It never occurred to them that anyone would object to the movies.

Over the past two decades, this value separation is growing more pronounced.  Case in point:  no ever thought of homeschooling when I was a child.  There were some children who lived on ranches so far from a school that the kids stayed home and took classes over the radio, but that was the extent of homeschooling.  

I don't see how public education can work when those with decided values are mixed with those of shifting values.

The Relaxed Days of Summer

As a kid growing up  in the 1960’s and 70’s, there really wasn’t much to do in our Montana town.  We had no soccer, gymnastics, Grand Street Theater etc.  We didn’t let the lack of organized activities stop us from having fun, though. Without any direction or permission from adults,  the neighborhood children planned and executed  hikes up Mount Ascension, baseball games, tennis (in the street) and kickball, to name a few of our sports.  Neighborhood children worked together to produce plays, using the Hooper’s front porch as our stage.  The play production never achieved fruition, but we had a fun time “writing” and “rehearsing.”  Whenever we liked, we took to the hills and made two armies to play “war.”  We hid behind rocks, trees, and drew maps in the dirt to illustrate our strategies.

 I remember an idea we culled from the movie Swiss Family Robinson that kept us occupied for a morning. My friends and I dug a hole in the empty lot next door, covering it with branches and twigs.  Next, we lured someone’s little brother to walk over the camouflaged hole.  Little brother fell into the hole.  Fortunately since we grew tired of digging at about 15 inches, the fall wasn’t far.

From the time I was six until I was eleven or so, we spent almost every summer evening, playing hide and go seek, or kick the can at Larson’s house.  They had a large, open lawn for running.  Summer evening fun always ended when the street lights flickered on.  That was the signal for children to go home. If you didn’t go home, parents in those days would call you – not by phone.  Any time your parents wanted you, they would holler for you from the front step of your house.

Kids’ sports for eight to eleven year olds were limited in those days.  There was Little League for the boys and City organized softball for the girls.  Little League was always held in the evenings.  Parents would sit in their cars and honk their horns when their team got a hit.  Girls’ softball was held in the afternoons at a field that doubled as the City ice rink in the winter.  Parents did not attend the girls’ softball.  I suppose I should have been highly offended, but I never thought about it, so I was never insulted.  I just had fun. 

Since we lived in town, our parents didn’t give us rides very often when I was a kid.  I walked to swim lessons (held in June at the YMCA downtown.)  I walked to softball games and practices.  I also walked to school unless the temperature was below zero.

It is true that I never had many of the opportunities that children have now.  Upon reflection, it seems that kids now don’t have some of the opportunities I had. I enjoy thinking about the times I had playing with neighborhood children as we created our own fun and organized ourselves.  I suppose every time in history has its pros and cons. During that time, our parents let us participate in sports just for the fun of it.  Parents didn’t seem to be driven to raise college athletes or Olympic “hopefuls.”  I am happy with the opportunities I did have.  I am grateful to have grown up in a time that was more relaxed.