Thursday, January 29, 2009

Little Cousins




Aunt Emma took pictures of her little nieces and nephews for years & years on every occasion that came along. I don't remember any of the occasions but the pictures are great!

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Reed and I look like something isn't going our way, maybe Aunt Emma was interrupting our play and bugging us to line up on the front porch so she could take our picture. I really liked riding my tricycle around on the sidewalks in our yard. Notice how adorable Reed looks sitting in his pedal car. That's our dog "Biscuit" is laying on the porch.




We had quite a few cousins in our family so Aunt Emma was always taking our picture. It had to be her hobby to take pictures and develop them in her closet because we snooped in her bedroom and found her picture developing trays and chemicals in her closet.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The Guilty Little Sister Is Gayla!


As requested by Stephanie who wanted a photo of the wig, here it is!!! It proves that Stephanie's mother, Gayla, in this photo, is guilty of getting into mischief and playing with my stuff....probably when I wasn't at home. Unfortunately, this is not "THE" wig that I wore and Mom thought looked like a shaggy dog. This wig was one Mom had while we lived in Quincy. Wigs were the rage!

Gayla looks pretty sophisticated, don't you think? Sort of like Sophia Loren, except for the brand new rather large permanent front teeth.

Also, check out the little shirt Gayla is wearing...homemade! I was the Nielsen family seamstress and made lots of the clothes Ruth, Gayla and DeAnn wore...including clothes for myself and Mom! I still like to sew but nobody wants me to sew for them...BooHoo!

New House, New Car, New Wig ~ 1971


Life was pretty good that year! We had just moved into a new house in Wenatchee, Washington where Jack was hired as the new manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken store. While I was attending the mid-week Relief Society Meeting one day, sneaky Jack went car shopping! He bought a new car and surprised me! It was a 1971 Dodge Demon with automatic shift. Automatic shift meant that I could drive so Jack taught me to drive.

I think Sheri and Roger were pretty excited to have me driving. They went on all the teaching rides standing up on the back seat together (there were no seatbelts & child car seats). One particular time when we were out practicing, I was driving in heavy traffic where 2 lanes turned left on the green light. I was nervous about making the turn but I did it! Sheri and Roger both cheered me from the back seat, "Yea, Mom Did it!"

Goofy looking wig, don't you think?

Monday, January 26, 2009

Mom & her Thundering Herd!



We sat, lined up on our livingroom couch many times, watching TV. Our house was very basic with 3 bedrooms and one bathroom. The black & white TV set was in the corner of the livingroom opposite the couch. We each had our favorite TV shows but on Saturday night every week, we all watched the count down of the hit songs to find out which song would be #1 on the Hit Parade. I remember songs titles such as "Autum Leaves" and "Love Is A Many Splendored Thing" reaching #1.

I know this picture was taken on a Saturday night because my hair is all put up in what was called "pin curls" held in place with bobby pins and a bandana. My hair was put in pin curls wet and left to dry over night while I slept. We didn't have an electric curling iron, just bobby pins! Mom curled her hair the same way. From the looks of Reed's hair in this photo, I can tell he spent lots of time in the bathroom combing it just perfect! Most of the time my hair was awful on Sunday morning & I cried at the sight of the jangled mess. No amount of combing & fussing could tame it down. My hair woes went on continually.

When I was about 16, I saw wigs advertised in the newspaper at a depatment store in Seattle. I was sure a wig would solve all my hair problems. Mom & Dad actually took me and Reed to Seattle on my wig shopping trip. I sat in the chair and the man fixed me up with a brown wig (very cheap, cost under $20.00) and I was happy! I wore the wig out of the store but on the trip home, Mom turned around to look at me as I sat in the back seat. She gave a little jump of surprise & said she thought she saw shaggy dog but it was me! I never did wear that wig out in public. I tried and tried to make it look good on me but it never looked good no matter what!

Years later when Sheri & Roger were little kids, I made another attempt at wearing a wig. The wig was higher quality and I actually wore it in public a few times until a man in our ward asked if he could borrow it. He wanted to wear my wig as part of his costume in a "Rock Band" act. I let him borrow the wig but I never wore it again. From then on that poor wig was only good for the kids to wear on Halloween.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

1957 Nielsen Family Dinner ~ 613 K St. S.W.


Family dinner time was an every day happening in our family but this may be the only snapshot of us sitting together around the dinner table. It appears that Dad took our picture, thus preserving the moment that we took for granted at the time. Looking at this photo now, 52 years later, I am feeling rather old! Mom was in her 30s and we were the little kids.

We ate simple food, mostly meat, potatoes and gravy. Mom was really good at making hamburger meat patties & frying them up fast then making milk gravy in the pan. Mom bottled fruit every summer & we drank raw cows milk. We weren't familiar with exotic vegetables such as broccoli and cauliflower or green peppers, we ate regular vegetables such as corn and green beans that were easy to grow out on the farm. Mom and Dad weren't gardeners, they were farmers.

Mom made lumpy whole wheat mush for breakfast, I still don't like lumps in my mush. C
an you see a 2 quart jar sitting there on the table with a little milk left in the bottom? It reminds me that Mom hated spilt milk. She hated the mess! Even if we almost spilled our milk we were in trouble. Mom learned to cook when she was a teenager cooking for her brothers and father on their dry farm in Pocatello Valley, Idaho every summer. She learned to cook "Poke Style" where the food was served on the table in the cooking pan and the milk was poured straight from the jar it was stored in. Nothing was fancy, just easier when all the household water was carried in from the well and had to be heated on the wood burning stove.

In 1957, eating at a restaurant wasn't done in our family. I don't think the idea of taking us kids to a restaurant ever came up! There weren't many restaurants in Quincy, Washington and fast food was coming in the future, except for the A&W Root Beer stand. Sometimes we went there to buy a gallon of root beer in a jug so we could take it home to make our own root beer floats...it was much cheaper to do it that way.


Thursday, January 15, 2009

1949 Oldsmobile 88



That 1949 Oldsmobile 88 was our family car when we moved to Washington in the early 1950s but it had a prior history. I have a faint memory of going to Logan with Dad to bring it home as a new car. It was painted two tone... gray on the bottom and cream color on the top. When it was still quite new Mom decided to drive it to LasVegas! She and a few girl friends were going to see a show starring their favorite singer, Vic Damone. He must have been a real lady-killer at the time! Mom arrived back home with little candy treats for Reed and I but bad news for Dad. She had wrecked the new car! The next thing I remember was getting the car back with a new paint job. It was two-tone but with orange on the bottom and cream on the top. I didn't know it at the time but Mom's favorite colors were red and orange. The car looked really snazzy painted orange. Sometime later, Mom had our livingroom couch cut in half and re-upholstered with fake leather in a bright red color. Yikes! Still later, when Mom chose the paint color for the kicthen walls in their new house out on the farm, she chose "Flamingo Red" and it looked fabulous! Even later when she chose the formica counter top color for the kitchen in Utah, she chose orange! I liked it so much that I chose the same color for our kitchen. Red and orange are vibrant, lively colors just like Mom's personality!

Monday, January 12, 2009

Kids Home Alone in the 1940s

Ruth, Reed, Rosalin

Our house seemed big when I was a little kid, there were un-used rooms upstairs. I first remember sleeping in the room next to the livingroom. I think it could have been the parlor at one time. Later, when Reed and I were older, we each had a bedroom upstairs. My bedroom window was the upstairs window in front of the house while Reed's window looked out in back. There was another empty room upstairs with the little balcony that came out on the roof of the front porch. There was another odd little room with a window facing west and in there was Dad's big scary elk head hanging on the wall. At night, that elk head was especially scary with it's shiny glass eyes staring out from in the dark. I didn't like the doors opened to those empty rooms when I was on my way upstairs to bed.



I recall that Reed & I were left home alone quite a few times tending ourselves while Mom was uptown or visiting girl friends. Mom had lots of friends and she sang in a trio. Mom must have thought we were old enough to tend ourselves. (I remember Mom telling that she and her brothers were left home to tend themselves when they were little too. They rode their tricycles through the house, banging up the mop boards something awful. They also went swinging on the kitchen cupboard doors pretending to be Tarzan.) We had fun but we did stupid things and got spanked when Mom came home. One time we found a mushy, half rotten apple on the grass by the front porch. We thought it probably fell down from Heaven and it should be thrown back up to Heaven. Reed picked it up & took it in the house where he threw it up, time after time, splattering up Mom's wallpaper in the livingroom. We got spanked!

We found boxes of old stuff on the floor in the empty room upstairs! Mom's satin wedding dress and her yellow satin party dress attracted our attention. We sat on them and slid down the stairs lickedy-split. That was great fun! We also snooped in Mom & Dad's closet in their bedroom before Christmas and found everything Santa was bringing. That's was more fun than Christmas morning.

Eventually we got a baby sister, Ruth! Ruth says she remembers laying in her new-born baby bed and crying when Reed sprinkled "Ivory Snow" laundry detergent flakes all over and they got in her eyes and made them hurt. Mom left us home to tend Ruth before she walked. Ruth crawled around and little poop balls fell out of her diaper so Reed wrapped them in toilet paper like little presents and put them up in the cupboard with the dishes. Ruth was a pest, we thought, so we tied her hands and feet with Dad's red hankies and left her in the bedroom out of the way.

Fortunately, we didn't have any really bad accidents except for time when we were babysitting our next little baby sister, Gayla. I was only 10 or 11 at the time and Reed was 2 years younger. We didn't really understand how dangerous it was to have baby diapers and clothes sitting in a pile on the stove next to the burner while we were heating her baby bottle in a pan of water. The diapers caught on fire, so in the panic, we called Margaret Christofferson, the neighbor across the street, who didn't like Mom. The fire was put out but Mom wasn't happy about who we called to help!
Can you see the "rascal" look in Reed's face? Aunt Emma showed up with her camera one day while we were home alone. She found a bedspread & hung it as a background then sat us on the piano bench for our photograph. Actually, Reed was the main rascal, he did a lot of crazy little things such as hit the white ivory piano keys with a stick, leaving the edges all chipped & ragged.
(Years later I replaced the beat up ivory key covers with new-looking used ivory I bought on the internet.) Mom's collection of 78 rpm phonograph records were shattered into bits & pieces when Reed rolled them across the room at high speeds. He must have thought it was great fun when they crashed into the walls and broke...I was the innocent by-stander.