Growing Up in Williamsport, Ohio

Summer Friends 
 
Betty and I had friends in our grades at school during the school year. Many of them lived in the country and came to school on buses. In the summer, we had summer friends who were from our neighborhood. When we were teenagers, we walked to school with them. Most were younger or older than we were and that included would-be boyfriends.
 
Janice O’Conner was not in my grade at school but lived a couple of blocks down the street from us. Her brother Ronald was in my class. Her Grandparents, Bernice and Ballard O’Conner, lived across the alley behind us. They were the “wallpaperers” in Williamsport.  They had wallpapered our living room and probably every other room in our house for that matter. 
 
I don’t know when I started going to the Christian Church. Our little gaggle of summer friends went sporadically to the church which was exactly nine homes north of our house. Some of our summer friends included my sister Betty, Rosie Shonkweiler, Janice O’Conner, George Jones, Myrna Higman, Roxie Tatman and Alan Harper, just to name a few.
 
When we went to church, we had an area about a third of the way from the front on the left side where we all sat. We were well behaved but on Easter Sunday a terrible thing happened. Janice O’Conner came walking down to sit with us. One of the boys had his legs crossed and his foot was sticking out. Janice came walking down the aisle to be seated. She had on a filmy, blue, nylon dress and tripped over his foot. She looked like a butterfly flying through the air but her arms flailed like she was swimming. We all burst out laughing. The bad news is that we couldn’t stop laughing. We laughed and snickered through the entire service. The minister’s wife remarked later that we had ruined the Easter service. That was never our intension but even today, the vision of Janice flying through the air makes me laugh.
 
Our summer friends turned out to be some of our best friends and are still our friends today.
 
©Marilyn Francis Ferguson 2020
Photography/graphics by Michele Ferguson Schuck