White Bucks And A Hot Summer Day of My Youth…..

For those who know me well, which is mostly my husband, children and grand children, they most likely feel that I am always telling stories!

 

Someone can ask a simple question and I end up going through a dissertation,… that for most people would take maybe 30 seconds tops, but I am compelled to make a “story” out of it.  

 

I mean there are so many details that could be forgotten for-e-ver… if I didn’t do my duty of passing information down to my loved ones and anyone else who will listen or in the case of this blog…read.

 

I can’t help it.

 

I really do have a lot of stories to tell….I mean, let’s face it…I have been around awhile and I guess you could safely say that I am the matriarch of our family.

 

 

You know, like the old lady with the weathered face and her loose strays of graying hair pulling loose from the messy bun carelessly pinned to the back of her head.

 

You know, the one who sits in a old, white, paint-chipped rocking chair on a creaking front porch, the slightly soiled apron resting in her lap full of fresh green beans from the garden as she snaps and tosses the stem ends in a rusty colander at her feet.

 

You know, and she is surrounded by lots of young-uns, her own grandkids and great grandkids and perhaps a few stray neighbor kids who have nothing better to do on a hot July afternoon than sit and listen mesmerized to the stories she tells.

 

Yep, there are stories to tell and I don’t mean of pioneer days and crossing the Kansas prairies in a Conestoga (covered) wagon or panning for gold in Alaska….even though a couple of my children, and one dear co-worker from years ago, may think I am that old.

 

No, the stories I have to tell are simple, day to day living stories.  

 

Routine stories of a family living in the country of a very small town.  A town with no stop lights except for the one blinking light at the intersection of the main street and Highway 18….and certainly no drive-thru fast food anything!

 The main street which was (and still is) only a block long… (pic above is facing North, and pic below is facing South)….

had a hardware store, small grocery store, meat locker, small restaurant, (owned by my family for a few years), a drug store and of course the epitome of small town living… the pool hall on the corner.  (Right side, tall building on the corner in the below pic.)

You know, the pool hall your parents called a beer joint and admonished all to “stay away” from. They didn’t want the horrors of the pool and snooker shooters, along with the town beer drinkers to taint their children. Soooo when walking home from the little grocery store, we always crossed the street to the “safe side” before we got to the open doors and the echoing sounds of pool balls hitting in a game of billiards or the clanking of beer bottles as they were tossed away. 

 

*Just a little irony to this story….the restaurant my Mom and Dad owned….you can see a little red sign sticking out of the building on the left of the above picture…..that sign I believe says “Coors”…yep, that building is now the “beer joint”! 😉  You can’t make this stuff up folks! 

The pic above is of the drug store….pretty much the same today as it was back then. The bar stools were wooden and the front of the soda fountain was a blackish bronze.  It is called the “Linger Long” I believe.

 

But back to my story…I tend to digress just a bit.  Oh, before, I get back on track….I just learned a bit of information, not to long ago… that this quaint little town had a horrible fire in April of 1912, about 2 weeks after the Titanic sank and NO, I was not around in  those days.  WAAAAY before my time.  Just sayin’.

 

My blog is filled with my stories. Some are witty with a bit of sarcasm, Some are funny and Some perhaps “fall flat”… but they are all my stories.

Last year, when my beautiful grand daughter number 3 visited…I was sitting on the lanai, cool drink in hand as she, her fiance and the Captain swam in the pool.   I had just gotten out of the pool and something was casually said about my Father and the next thing I knew, beautiful grand daughter said….”I didn’t know that”….”tell me that story”….”no one ever told me that”, and so the story telling would begin.

You see?

I tell stories.

And today, I was thinking back to a very hot July day in that little town I grew up in. There was not a whole lot to do as the closest mall (if you could call it that) was 20-30 minutes away….and still is to this day.  

And….remember that this was a time before all the social networking, texting on cell phones and Google. These were the good old days when you actually had to call your friends to plan something to do.  AND the call was placed on your single home phone, which was certainly not a source of entertaining games.  The dials were rotary. and my little town didn’t even get rotary phones for the rural areas until much much later.  In fact, before my parents bought the restaurant, my Mother (and me) worked the switchboard in the telephone office.  (another story for another time) 

That particular summer, one of my gal pals and I were sitting on the back porch of her house, knocking the excess flour off our white buck shoes.

The attire of the day was the usual faded blue jeans… (pale baby blue denim) to you folks who think of “faded” as the dark faded jeans of today.  

No, these blue jeans were a pretty shade of baby blue and even though they were called “faded”…they were not faded at all.  They were dyed a very light blue that was not splotchy but color consistent.  And they were soft.  I actually think they were bleached white and then dyed that pretty shade of blue and they fit snugly.  

I tried to look on the internet for an old vintage picture  of the pale blue jeans and I never found anything that looked the same.  Who knows?  Maybe in that little dinky town…we were ahead of our time? ) not hardly!

We had the legs of these jeans rolled up neatly to just below our knees because that is the way we wore them.  (See above pic in our regular dark denim blue jeans)

Our crisp, white cotton shirts were tucked in neatly.  Our feet wore white bobby sox, coupled with the famous white buck shoes that had the awful habit of becoming scuffed and dirty, so in order to keep them white…we would dust them with all purpose flour from our mother’s kitchens.  It became a ritual to “flour” your shoes just before going off to high school each day…. which had to be done outside, because our Moms frowned on the whole kitchen being dusted with flour!  White bucks had an almost suede surface which couldn’t be polished.  We had all determined that flour dusting was the way to go.  Luckily we walked everywhere and to school.  This gave our shoes time to rid themselves of the crime scene footprint of flour, so we wouldn’t be embarrassed in the classrooms or anywhere.

So, here we were.  Dressed nicely.  Shoes floured.  And Bored with nothing to do.  Our allowances were spent so we wouldn’t be able to hang out at the corner drug store drinking green rivers or cherry phosphates and eating Guy’s potato chips, which was one of our favorite pastimes.

All of a sudden, I had a great idea.

“lets go down to the river and take pictures with my new Brownie camera.”

My Mom had gotten me the camera because I kept begging her for one.  

I mean all the other kids had cameras of their own and I knew my parents would never allow me to use the fancy, complicated camera my Dad brought back from Germany after the war.

So my mother got me a Brownie camera much like this one pictured below except mine had plastic knobs rather than metal….probably the closest thing to a point and shoot in those days.  I probably didn’t deserve it, but she always seem to favor her oldest daughter.  I will never forget that. Thanks Mom, for loving me first.

So off we went through the main street of town, took a left and walked to Sand Creek…in other words, the river.

We took the little dirt foot path down a slight incline to the edge of the water and to our surprise…there was an old row boat fastened to a tree branch at the water’s edge.

What a photographer’s dream!

We didn’t know who it belonged to….and we had to admit that we probably shouldn’t get into the boat for pictures… but we did it anyway.

I decided that I would be the first one photographed so I climbed into the boat and positioned myself on the middle seat so that I could prop one of my legs up on the front seat and lean back in a provocative pose.  My rolled up jeans looked cute with my tanned leg looking even darker against my white bobby sox and white buck shoes.  I know I looked “cool”.

My friend took several pictures of me and of course we couldn’t see the results because the film had to be taken to the drug store for processing.

Again, please remember this was before cell phone pictures although I do believe Polaroid pictures were around then….. but none of the people I ran around with had cameras like that.

So then it was her turn to pose in the boat and I got out and she got in and I took over the task of being the photographer… as she did many of the same poses I did…(I was a leader even back then) and I snapped away.

And just as she was about to get out of the boat….she actually had one foot on the bank of the creek and one still in the boat when we heard the booming voice at the top of the incline.

“Get out of my Boat” the gruff voice yelled. And in her haste to finish getting out of the boat, my friend slipped on the bank and her foot slid right into the creek. 

“Oh Nooooo!” I yelled. “Look at your white Bucks”!!! 

You see, I was more concerned about her ruining her white buck shoes in that dirty old river water than being in trouble with the gruff voice behind me. 

I grabbed her hand and she sorta did the splits as one of her white bucks gave a slurpy sound as it slid off of her foot and sank into the muddy river bottom.  Luckily the creek was only about a foot deep at the edge, but now her other foot was in the water as she became so unbalanced.  Probably because I was tugging on her arm with one of my hands.  I had the camera in the other hand and I couldn’t let go of my prized possession….and I was trying to keep my white bucks  out and away from that murky water.

By this time the gruffy voiced man yanked my friend out of the water while muttering all sorts of obscenities and sort of tossed her onto the bank.  She lay there all sprawled out with big dirty brown splotches of river water on her pretty baby blue jeans.  One of her once white bobby sox’s was now hanging limply on her foot, half on and half off and it was an ugly, motley  shade of brown. 

“I need my shoe”, she half cried and I looked at the craggy face of the old man who was putting the tether rope back in his boat, and I said in the sweetest voice I could muster…

“can you see my friend’s shoe down there?”

The old man grimaced, muttered something under his breath and reached down in the water and brought up the mucky brown shoe, dripping with muddy river water.

As he handed me the dripping shoe, I smiled sweetly and thanked him, holding the shoe as far away from me as possible.

I think I did my best acting that day of the grateful heroine, saving my friend.

Although my friend cried,  almost all the way home as she hobbled along the bumpy small town sidewalks, uprooted by tree roots, yes, she cried for her white bucks!

When we got to her house, we took the garden hose to try to wash off the dirty river water but it just made matters worse. Both her white buck shoes were ruined. 

It didn’t really matter about the white bucks, because as with all things….the next school year we had turned to penny loafers….our white bucks growing dust bunnies in our closets.

Years later, when going through some old pictures in Mom’s picture box…I came across those pictures we took on the river that day.  I tossed them back into the pile of pictures, perhaps dismissing them because of our silly school girl antics…. and I have never seen them since.

But I do think back to that day….on a hot July day with nothing to do but reminisce and tell stories to anyone who will listen to me. 

Have a great and blessed day!