Growing Up - Childhood Years

I don't have many pictures of Saddie. This one would be from around 1949. (I look like I'm about 2.) I'm sure my mother made the dress with all the smocking. I don't recall her making bonnets.

An Easter picture from the same time period. Yes, my hair has always been curly.

Every Easter my mother made a complete new outfit, as did many mothers in those days. She worked wonders with that old Singer portable. I still have it, but haven't tried to run it  I can't recall ever shopping for clothes as a child.

For a couple or three years running another girl in my Sunday School class and I showed up on Easter morning with dresses from the same pattern! Our mothers said they had not coordinated and of course the materials were different. It became a running joke.

This must have been taken around the same time. I don't look real happy about it, do I?

I can't place the location.

Strange to say, but I can place this in time by the fact that I had all my baby teeth. I must have been four.

A playground accident in kindergarten loosened one of my front teeth. Our dentist at the time was a butcher and he decided to pull the damaged tooth. Without any painkillers. It wasn't ready to come out. Ouch!

The next time my mother tried to take me to the dentist I grabbed the sofa -- the largest and heaviest piece of furniture I could reach -- and wouldn't let go. She found a new dentist. My father continued to use the butcher until he retired (he was a client). His new dentist discovered advanced periodontal disease, the result of years of  dental malpractice. We were thankful that expensive remedial treatment was able to save his teeth.

My fourth grade class at Bowmar Avenue Elementary.

The building was a beautiful International Style structure. It is still used as an elementary school. I can name many of these children with no problem -- probably most of them if I took some time. Children stayed together as they progressed through the grades.

(I'm the 6th from the left in the back row.)

Another Easter photo -- with the Faulk family: Fred, Charles and Jeneva. Fred and Jeneva were neighbors and possibly my closest friends throughout childhood.

The rabbit was an Easter present. It didn't work out well for the rabbit.

I'm not sure exactly how this photo fits into the sequence. My brother Emmett dropped out of college and joined the Army sometime around 1959, I think. This may have been taken shortly before he left for Germany, where he spent most of his tour.

My mother may be smiling for the picture, but she was devastated.

My sixth grade photo shows off my crooked teeth. I blame the butcher dentist since premature loss of baby teeth can cause the permanent ones to come in crooked, but they may well have been crooked anyway.