 Walking to Williamsport’s Commercial Area (Uptown in other words) One advantage of living in a small town in the 40s and 50s was that we could walk everywhere. Mama would let Betty and me walk down to the alley and back, past Bertha and Sam Jones’ house. They probably got a kick out of seeing us on our little walks. Sam often sat on his screened in back porch and always spoke to us. They were single brother and sister retired teachers. Sam had “dropsy”. Bertha had a little car that she tooled around in. The post office was located across the alley from the Christian Church at that time. It was small and looked like a little western jail with Claude Crabill behind the bars to hand out our mail. He had a wooden leg, probably from his military service. The mail came in twice a day, so my mother let Betty and me venture uptown to pick up ours and the Jones’s mail. My mother never went walking uptown so we were thrilled to be out on our own. My mother also sent us to the grocery store, sometimes more than once a day if she forgot something. We hated that but we loved seeing Archie and Bernice Rawlinson at the IGA store. Archie was a trickster and he and Bernice were always joking and laughing about something. The same was true for The Red and White Store. “Bus” Whitten and Ray and Rose Horch were equally fun. I was in the Hardware Store many times for small household repair items. Of course, they were all in small drawers behind the counter and had to be taken out and displayed by Ray Ulm. Ray was quiet and seemed shy. He looked like the male in the “American Gothic” painting by Grant Wood. That is not meant to be pejorative. Harold “Red” Fry owned the drugstore. Betty and I often stopped there on our way to school to buy pencils, tablets and cough drops. All of these merchants were kind and pleasant people. As shocking as this seems, what is now the post office in Williamsport was a movie theatre. The fact is, Williamsport had pretty much everything that big towns have. I saw “Bambi” there after it came out. My sister Jean, who was always the first to get new-fangled things, also got lice there. And she gave them to us. We had long hair and smelled like kerosene for weeks. Mama combed our hair with a fine-tooth comb until our scalps hurt. My mother was ruthless with a comb! She pulled our pigtails so tight, it’s a wonder our eyes didn’t pop out. ©Marilyn Francis Ferguson 2020 Photography/graphics by Michele Ferguson Schuck
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Present Events I had planned to start a three-part series this week about my sister Kathleen but with the present upheaval regarding the coronavirus, I will keep this blog short. When I was in Williamsport’s own Mrs. (Mary Alice) Greenwood’s high school typing class, our opening exercise was a sentence written by Thomas Paine. It goes like this: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” That statement is as true today as it was in 1776. Consequently, I want to give you a song by Tennessee Ernie Ford that has been a comfort to me in trying times. I hope it will be a comfort to you too and yes, I know it is old but the words are still good. : ) ©Marilyn Francis Ferguson 2020 Photography/graphics by Michele Ferguson Schuck The Depression and the End of WWII I don’t remember a lot about the Depression and the War. Mama and Daddy must have done a good job in shielding us from the problems of the world at that time. We had a battery- operated radio in the living room where we heard the news. The radio stood on a small walnut chest beside the front door. The top drawer contained the battery which was larger than a car battery of today. I remember my mother had red and blue rationing tokens to buy sugar and butter. That generation became hoarders because of the rationing of food items. My mother was one of them. After she died and we cleaned out her house, we went upstairs to find a large lard can full of something heavy. Upon removing the lid, we discovered it was bags of sugar. In recent years, I saw one of the most thrilling sights of my lifetime on TV when the Americans arrived to rescue people in WWII prison camps. The prisoners yelled, “The Americans are coming, the Americans are coming.” I have never been a war hawk but that statement alone makes me proud to be an American and gives me goose bumps. We stand up for what we believe. It is who we are…. Our family has a friend from Holland whose mother is my age. She had to eat tulip bulbs during the war to survive. A whole generation of Hollanders are shorter due to the lack of food during that time. On VE Day (Victory in Europe), she stood in Amsterdam Square shouting and celebrating just like I did when the war was over in 1945. My mother gave me a pan lid and a big spoon. I went out on the sidewalk in front of the house and banged on the lid. I was seven years old. ©Marilyn Francis Ferguson 2020 Photography/graphics by Michele Ferguson Schuck  The Transients and Potsie As I mentioned in the last blog, in the early to mid-forties, there were a lot of transient people roaming the country. Some were young men out to find work. Since Williamsport is not that far from Route 23, some of them showed up in town. The parsonage at that time had a barn on the alley behind the house. Bertha and Sam Jones on the other side of our house had one as well. I think barns may have been prevalent in Williamsport at that time. They may have been used for horses in earlier times but were now used as garages. One day a blonde, blue eyed Claude Wolfe was found sleeping in the minister’s barn. My brother Bob became his friend. My sister Jean was near dating age and was attracted to these young men. Lowell Keaton was another who arrived in town from Kentucky. They all had bicycles and hung around with Bob, who also had a bicycle and later a motor bike. My sister Jean was a real artist and saw a picture in the newspaper to emulate to win a free art education. She sent it in and one day a representative from an art school came to see her. She was drinking coffee in the living room when he was spied walking down the sidewalk to our house. She decided that she was not going to see him and ran into the kitchen with the coffee pot in her hand. Our kitchen floor sloped downward, and she slipped and fell. When she did, the contents of the coffee pot spilled everywhere. She never saw the art school representative. My mother wrote the poem featured in this blog about Jean, who she nicknamed Potsie. ©Marilyn Francis Ferguson 2020 Photography/graphics by Michele Ferguson Schuck |
Marilyn Francis FergusonGrowing up in Williamsport, Ohio is a blog by Marilyn Francis Ferguson which describes small town life in the 1940s and 1950s. Blog Categories
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