Once upon a time

Random items from my past, present, and future.

Saturday, May 14, 2005

 

Earliest Wyoming Memories

I can remember living in a basement apartment in Casper. It was set up with rooms in single file, so you had to walk through every room to get to the room farthest from the door. I seem to recall that we walked down a set of steps at the back of the house and entered into the kitchen. We had an icebox in the kitchen. Yes, not a refrigerator, but an icebox. The iceman came every couple days to put more ice in the icebox. Things stayed cool, but probably not cold.

We were living in this apartment when Ma & Pa gave me my first electric train. The engine was black and was a model of a steam locomotive. I currently have the engine and tender setting on top of one of the file cabinets in my home office. I'm guessing I got it for Christmas 1949. That makes my train 55-1/2 years old. I can remember making one track setup that was long and went through a couple rooms in our apartment. The train would go down the track, I would stop it, and then back it up to where it had started. The track did not make a loop because I wanted to go as far through the house as possible. See, I was doing strange things even at the age of five.

I can remember the excitement of moving into our new house at 1003 W. 21st Street. It was a two-bedroom house without a garage. It had an unfinished basement with a dirt floor. When we first moved in, they still had trenches in front where the utilities were being put in. The yard was all dirt. There were no sidewalks. Shortly after we moved in, the trenches were filled and sidewalks were put in. My Dad had to put in the yard. He put in Kentucky Bluegrass. It required lots of manual labor, including rolling the yard many times with a heavy roller (which I'm guessing was rented). I remember once falling into one of the utility trenches. One of my friends' mother pulled me out. I had several good friends close to us. Johnny and Karen Sayles were next door (our house was on the corner). Lexie Richards was next to the Sayles. Cheryl Delgarno was right across the street (21st Street) from us. Her Dad owned a trucking company. John Albert Monikee (not sure of the spelling) lived a few blocks away. I remember playing with him a lot, but I'm not sure how I met him. Since he didn't live close enough to meet by playing in the yard, I must have met him at school.

One of my most vivid memories was playing in our backyard. There were a lot of leftover things from all the construction, one of which was a board stuck in the ground. It was like a 1" by 6" inch board sticking straight out of the ground. It was about four feet tall. It must have been marking a utility valve or something. Anyway, I decided it was something I needed to play with, so I tried to pull it out of the ground. I wasn't strong enough, so I started rocking it back and forth. The board was not very strong because it broke off near the ground, but it broke off with a very sharp piece sticking up out of the ground. I fell down on the sharp piece and it stuck into my thigh. I was wearing a new pair of jeans and it put a one-inch hole in the jeans and then a one-inch hole in me. I can't remember how I explained this to Mother, but I can remember her doctoring my wound. I still have a large one-inch scar on my thigh. For some reason I have remember this incident as if it happened yesterday instead of almost 55 years ago.

Comments: Post a Comment



<< Home

Archives

January 2005   April 2005   May 2005   June 2005   July 2005   May 2007   July 2007   August 2007  

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?