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.

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. Can 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.