Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Bicycles, Buses, Corsets and Sabra Webber
When I was about 8, I wanted a two-wheel bicycle. I took my older sister's bike and learned to ride it, but she did not care for this and I was punished whenever she caught me. Sometimes she would carry me around as a passenger on her bike.
Invariably, on the first day of summer, I would do something to make my feet bleed. Summer always meant a release from the need to wear shoes. Thus soft skinned feet were magnets for slivers and shards of glass found on the asphalt of our street. The sidewalks were water swept both naturally by the rain or with hoses after lawn mowing. The gutters accumulated debris, including glass and I usually found it all with my naked feet.
When I was 9, the first day of summer, I was riding on the back of my sister's bike when I inadvertantly had the tip of my right big toe caught in the spokes of the back tire. Poof, tip was gone and blood was flowing. Swoosh, quickly back to my house, sitting on the side of the bathtub, coldwater flowing, washing the blood away.
I think that doctor bills were paid out of the food budget, so my mother was frugal about taking bleeding children to the doctor. Only one time can I remember one of us girls actually having to see a doctor about accidental injuries - my older sister cut the arch of her foot and she required three stitches to close it up.
I think I remember that the first day of summer when I was 7, 8 AND 9, I cut my foot. It was the annual summer start ritual.
One of the things that was discovered about bycicles was that you could clothspin a playing card to the fender strut in such a way that the end of the card could be caught by the spokes of the tire. The sound that this made was impressive and sort of motorcycle-like. A bugling announcement that the bike was moving at speed around the neighborhood and a much tougher sound than the girlish handlebar jingling bell.
I forget whether the ritual was that you received your bicycle for your 9th or your 10th birthday, but I finally got my Swinn. I loved it. It made going to the play yard at the elementry school swift and gave me a sense of freedom and expanded my neighborhood dramatically.
I hung around with the two Thorpe boys and with Danny King. I was a tomboy and did just about everything they did, including touch football in the street. We explored all around within about 2 miles of our block. Up to East 14th, down East 14th to the Bal Theater for Saturday movies at 25 cents for a full day's entertainment of Flash Gordon, Roy Rogers, G-Men and some pukey musical or romance drama.
We dashed across the highway to the fields above and explored over that hill. We found the old Cherry Hill cemetary with tombstones from the early 1800s. We found the county reform school and receiving house for kids in emergency situations (so that is where they went!!). We found tarantula spiders and once even a dead cow that was so bloated from grass digestion that we poked the huge belly to get the gas to escape. We played at that for hours one day. The stink was beyond description.
We found the rope swing on the big eucalyptus tree that swung over the pond. The area was fiercely defended by the local kids and several times a summer we would plan wars to try to get time in the pond on hot days.
Finally, a public swimming pool was built at the high school, just three blocks away. That meant that summer family swimming passes were a cheap way for parents to offload their kids several times a week. The library was all the way down Bancroft Avenue and up Estadillo. We were a family of readers and each of us kids had library cards and pretty much carte blanche to pick out any books in the library we wanted to read. We usually went through 2 to 3 books a week in the summer time.
My mother had invested in two fruit trees. One was a bing cherry tree that she esplaniered against the warm garage wall. The other was a grafted plum tree. This was a sort of novelty tree - it had three types of plums grafted on it. These grafted branches flowered and cross pollonated to ensure that the tree was always loaded with fruit all summer long. The tree produced satsuma, santa rosa, and greengage plums. These were tart but tasty. I especially remember juicy plums picked and eaten directly and savored over my library book while laying on the chase lounge in the backyard on summer afternoons.
In seventh grade, Sabra moved into the new housing constructed on School Street connected to our street. Our street was no longer a dead end, but about 30-50 houses were build to fill in the land between our housing area and the highway. These houses were a bit more upscale than our old neighborhood. It was populated with families who had fathers who commuted to San Francisco to work as lawyers, stock brokers, bankers and in television production. The mothers of these families were all June Cleaver types. They picked their flowers in gloves, pearls and high heels in the grass.
The summer before I started the eighth grade, I started using the public bus to go to the library. Sabra would go with me and we sort of practiced bus riding to get ready for our daily rides we would need to take that autumn when we went back to school. The fare was ten cents and if you remembered to get a 'transfer' slip, you could go round trip on that dime.
At first it was an adventure to ride the bus. There was a certain maturity that settled on your shoulders as a bus riding person. You knew how to get around. You had new places to explore, and to watch out for.
As the time for school came closer and closer, Sabra got worried. She had been going to the doctor on and off all summer and she was diagnosed with scoliosis and was fitted with a back brace. Going to the swimming pool was a nightmare for her.
Her back brace was fitted to her with a corset-like apparatus that was laced up the back. This made it impossible for her to get out of the brace without assistance. That became my job. I was her partner and protected her privacy by lacing and unlacing her for physical education classes from eighth grade until we graduated from high school.
I was the girl in second grade with the patch over my good eye and glasses that were constantly being broken. I learned to save my glasses for tv and for school and not to wear them much else. I was cross-eyed and almost totally blind in my left eye, so I was sensitive to other people and their handicaps too.
I had started mensus early, not surprising in a house of five women. I had been about 9 and in the spring when I was in fifth grade. Sabra had not started when we went to junior high school and was worrying about it. She was skinny, a picky eater, and did not drink milk. When she finally started when she was 16, we both rejoiced in relief.
Sabra went on to become our graduating high school class president. She got a scholarship to Occidental College in Pomona. She graduated, went into the Peace Corps. She learned arabic and was sent to Tunsia to teach kindergarten. She stayed with an local family and learned much about the culture. She did this for eight to ten years. She met many people and developed a taste for cultural anthropology, especially the oral traditions associated with story telling. She came back to the US and did graduate and doctorial work in ethnography, published her obligatory book on story telling in the mid-east in the north african tradition and is now a teaching professor at Ohio State. She has one son.
http://nelc.ohio-state.edu/people/person.cfm?ID=195
I am proud of her and proud to know her. She stays in touch with the Halls, our old neighbors, both mother Barbara and with son Stephen. I will always call Stephen Tebie and remember him as a three year old kid wanting to be like his mother with a bobby pin clipped to the short hair of his butch cut styled hair.
Invariably, on the first day of summer, I would do something to make my feet bleed. Summer always meant a release from the need to wear shoes. Thus soft skinned feet were magnets for slivers and shards of glass found on the asphalt of our street. The sidewalks were water swept both naturally by the rain or with hoses after lawn mowing. The gutters accumulated debris, including glass and I usually found it all with my naked feet.
When I was 9, the first day of summer, I was riding on the back of my sister's bike when I inadvertantly had the tip of my right big toe caught in the spokes of the back tire. Poof, tip was gone and blood was flowing. Swoosh, quickly back to my house, sitting on the side of the bathtub, coldwater flowing, washing the blood away.
I think that doctor bills were paid out of the food budget, so my mother was frugal about taking bleeding children to the doctor. Only one time can I remember one of us girls actually having to see a doctor about accidental injuries - my older sister cut the arch of her foot and she required three stitches to close it up.
I think I remember that the first day of summer when I was 7, 8 AND 9, I cut my foot. It was the annual summer start ritual.
One of the things that was discovered about bycicles was that you could clothspin a playing card to the fender strut in such a way that the end of the card could be caught by the spokes of the tire. The sound that this made was impressive and sort of motorcycle-like. A bugling announcement that the bike was moving at speed around the neighborhood and a much tougher sound than the girlish handlebar jingling bell.
I forget whether the ritual was that you received your bicycle for your 9th or your 10th birthday, but I finally got my Swinn. I loved it. It made going to the play yard at the elementry school swift and gave me a sense of freedom and expanded my neighborhood dramatically.
I hung around with the two Thorpe boys and with Danny King. I was a tomboy and did just about everything they did, including touch football in the street. We explored all around within about 2 miles of our block. Up to East 14th, down East 14th to the Bal Theater for Saturday movies at 25 cents for a full day's entertainment of Flash Gordon, Roy Rogers, G-Men and some pukey musical or romance drama.
We dashed across the highway to the fields above and explored over that hill. We found the old Cherry Hill cemetary with tombstones from the early 1800s. We found the county reform school and receiving house for kids in emergency situations (so that is where they went!!). We found tarantula spiders and once even a dead cow that was so bloated from grass digestion that we poked the huge belly to get the gas to escape. We played at that for hours one day. The stink was beyond description.
We found the rope swing on the big eucalyptus tree that swung over the pond. The area was fiercely defended by the local kids and several times a summer we would plan wars to try to get time in the pond on hot days.
Finally, a public swimming pool was built at the high school, just three blocks away. That meant that summer family swimming passes were a cheap way for parents to offload their kids several times a week. The library was all the way down Bancroft Avenue and up Estadillo. We were a family of readers and each of us kids had library cards and pretty much carte blanche to pick out any books in the library we wanted to read. We usually went through 2 to 3 books a week in the summer time.
My mother had invested in two fruit trees. One was a bing cherry tree that she esplaniered against the warm garage wall. The other was a grafted plum tree. This was a sort of novelty tree - it had three types of plums grafted on it. These grafted branches flowered and cross pollonated to ensure that the tree was always loaded with fruit all summer long. The tree produced satsuma, santa rosa, and greengage plums. These were tart but tasty. I especially remember juicy plums picked and eaten directly and savored over my library book while laying on the chase lounge in the backyard on summer afternoons.
In seventh grade, Sabra moved into the new housing constructed on School Street connected to our street. Our street was no longer a dead end, but about 30-50 houses were build to fill in the land between our housing area and the highway. These houses were a bit more upscale than our old neighborhood. It was populated with families who had fathers who commuted to San Francisco to work as lawyers, stock brokers, bankers and in television production. The mothers of these families were all June Cleaver types. They picked their flowers in gloves, pearls and high heels in the grass.
The summer before I started the eighth grade, I started using the public bus to go to the library. Sabra would go with me and we sort of practiced bus riding to get ready for our daily rides we would need to take that autumn when we went back to school. The fare was ten cents and if you remembered to get a 'transfer' slip, you could go round trip on that dime.
At first it was an adventure to ride the bus. There was a certain maturity that settled on your shoulders as a bus riding person. You knew how to get around. You had new places to explore, and to watch out for.
As the time for school came closer and closer, Sabra got worried. She had been going to the doctor on and off all summer and she was diagnosed with scoliosis and was fitted with a back brace. Going to the swimming pool was a nightmare for her.
Her back brace was fitted to her with a corset-like apparatus that was laced up the back. This made it impossible for her to get out of the brace without assistance. That became my job. I was her partner and protected her privacy by lacing and unlacing her for physical education classes from eighth grade until we graduated from high school.
I was the girl in second grade with the patch over my good eye and glasses that were constantly being broken. I learned to save my glasses for tv and for school and not to wear them much else. I was cross-eyed and almost totally blind in my left eye, so I was sensitive to other people and their handicaps too.
I had started mensus early, not surprising in a house of five women. I had been about 9 and in the spring when I was in fifth grade. Sabra had not started when we went to junior high school and was worrying about it. She was skinny, a picky eater, and did not drink milk. When she finally started when she was 16, we both rejoiced in relief.
Sabra went on to become our graduating high school class president. She got a scholarship to Occidental College in Pomona. She graduated, went into the Peace Corps. She learned arabic and was sent to Tunsia to teach kindergarten. She stayed with an local family and learned much about the culture. She did this for eight to ten years. She met many people and developed a taste for cultural anthropology, especially the oral traditions associated with story telling. She came back to the US and did graduate and doctorial work in ethnography, published her obligatory book on story telling in the mid-east in the north african tradition and is now a teaching professor at Ohio State. She has one son.
http://nelc.ohio-state.edu/people/person.cfm?ID=195
I am proud of her and proud to know her. She stays in touch with the Halls, our old neighbors, both mother Barbara and with son Stephen. I will always call Stephen Tebie and remember him as a three year old kid wanting to be like his mother with a bobby pin clipped to the short hair of his butch cut styled hair.
# posted by Dornar @ 10:20 AM 
