Growing Up in Williamsport, Ohio

Fashion Sense
 
My sense of fashion started early. When I was young, my mother made my younger sister Betty and me wear beige colored, cotton, ribbed stockings to school. I hated them. They were cumbersome and had to be held up with elastic garters. I wore them to school, went into the bathroom in the basement of the school and rolled them down (my mother never knew). When my daughter Michele heard this account, she asked, “You mean like Olive Oyle?” Well yes, like Olive Oyle. I’m sure I looked worse than if I had left them up.
 
Unlike kids today, my parents biggest clothing expenses were winter coats and shoes. We got a new cardigan sweater every winter in our favorite color. Mine was always green. They sacrificed for us to have winter clothes. We sometimes got our coats at Sharffs and shoes at Block’s. I had narrow feet so Block’s was the only place I could buy shoes that fit. The older “Blockie” and his son were nice men and always x-rayed our toes to make sure the shoes fit. The x-ray machine looked like a water fountain but you put your feet in at the bottom and looked through an opening in the top.
 
My mother had a penchant for jewelry. One year at Christmas she measured around our necks for glass bead necklaces that she ordered. She got a real kick out of me because I accused her of measuring us for undershirts, which I also hated. 
 
My daughter Michele, who does fantastic graphics for this blog, commented that we always seemed to have nice clothes. My mother was a good seamstress and made some of my clothes seen in my blog. The fact is that we never had more than four or five outfits at any given time.
 
My grandson Isaac recently commented to me that I wear the same outfits all of the time. He said he could name each one. I guess when you have grown up with the bare necessities, old habits die hard.
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©Marilyn Francis Ferguson 2020
Photography/graphics by Michele Ferguson Schuck