Growing Up in Williamsport, Ohio

The Transition
 
When I started writing these blogs, I wasn’t thinking so much of writing about my family. I soon realized that I couldn’t write about events without giving the people involved in them a name. I have tried to write the blogs chronologically and have found that sometimes difficult too. I have tried to keep things in the correct time frame. However sometimes, things happen at the same time. Sometimes the blog starts in one year and ends up a few years later. My last few blogs ended up in the early 50s. Consequently, I want to back up a little into the late 40s for some stories about school, Williamsport and its people.

Our Upstairs and Front Porch
 
When we moved into the house on Water Street, the upstairs was essentially an attic. It was one long room with windows on each end. The inside of it was like the one on “Little House on the Prairie”. It was not finished and there was no wall board. Since there were five of us needing places to sleep, my brother Bob took on the job. He put on wall board and divided the space into two rooms. He let Betty and me help. Consequently, there were little blobs of plaster on the wall board where it was joined. They were painted over and still there when the house was torn down. I guess you could call them little blobs of love. : )
 
Kat and Jean slept in one of those rooms and Bob in the other. Betty and I slept downstairs. After our older siblings were gone from home, Betty and I got the upstairs for our bedrooms. While they were our bedrooms, we slept in rooms that had onions and green beans (leather britches) drying there in the winter. You could say we slept with onions and green beans.
 
I think that “Little House on the Prairie” shows were not always realistic. Our house had a metal/tin roof. While it was nice to hear the rain on the roof, whoever slept up there froze in the winter and baked in it like an oven in the summer. Because of that, our family spent long hours on summer nights on our front porch.  We loved the front porch! We could sit in the swing and see the big dipper in the sky in front of us. We sat through rain and storms on the porch. When we got older, our friends joined us there. Boyfriends sat on the swing with us. And when the swing fell, so did our boyfriends. I’m sure some of them remember that. Some are still alive and they know who they are. : )
 
Betty and I practically lived on the front porch. We invented our own entertainment. Plin Morris lived across the street from us. He worked on a farm but always wore a white shirt and a fedora. We watched for him to come home from work. He was bald and we waited for him to take off his hat because his head was stark white. We were little kids and had to be entertained somehow.
 
Another activity that Betty and I did on the front porch was looking for license plates on cars that were out-of-state. I had a little spiral ringed note pad and every time we saw one, we marked it down. I believe that I had wander lust even then. I never left the state until my Senior year in high school when our class went to Washington D.C. and New York City the year I graduated.

©Marilyn Francis Ferguson 2020
Photography/graphics by Michele Ferguson Schuck