1961: My Blanket

By Corinne H. Smith

1961:  I turned four years old.  Daddy was 32, and he worked as a research chemist at Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Penna.  Mom was a stay-at-home Mom.  We lived on Hathaway Street in West Hempfield Township.  The #1 song on the radio on my fourth birthday was “Big Bad John” by Jimmy Dean.  Mom snapped this photograph.

     I was a security blanket kid.  When I was young, I carried a small white blanket around with me, everywhere I went.  Tottering around the house, exploring the backyard, wherever and whatever.  Eventually all of the nap wore off of it.  All of its edges got frayed.  Holes appeared.  After a whirl in the washer, it could still become soft and white again.  But I literally loved that blanket to death.

     After a while, I stopped carrying it around so much.  At night, I left the blanket on the chair beside my bed.  I looked at it as I fell asleep.  Some days, I forgot to grab it whenever I left the house to accompany my parents on errands around the neighborhood.  The blanket stayed behind, always resting on the chair.

     And then one day, it was gone.  I searched every inch of my bedroom.  I crawled under the bed.  I looked around the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, everywhere, several times.  I finally approached my mother, the ruler of the house.  I asked her if she had seen my blanket.

     “I threw it out!” she exclaimed.  What?!?  I did not understand her.  How could something of mine, suddenly be dispatched by someone else who had no right to do so?  “It was torn and tattered,” she quipped, supposedly as further explanation.  “Besides, you didn’t need it anymore.”   Well.  This news was indeed a shock to my young self.  It showed me who was in charge.  Certainly not me, the youngest member of the three-person household.  I quietly mourned the loss as best as I could.  And I went on with my merry little life.

     I thought of my blanket again several years later, when A Charlie Brown Christmas aired on TV for the first time in 1965.  I watched in fascination as Linus turned his security blanket into a snowball slingshot and a shepherd’s headpiece.  How had I missed creating such magic with my own blanket?  I longed to question why it was all right for this famous cartoon boy to carry one, when I wasn’t allowed to.  But I already knew what my mother’s answer would be.  “Linus doesn’t live in this house.”  So I kept my mouth shut. And year after year, I would watch that traditional Christmas special and be reminded of those blissful early days of my own, when I too had a security blanket, just like Linus van Pelt.

     Mom died in July 1993.  My father, my aunt, and I soon sorted through her clothing and other belongings.  The cedar chest became mine.  When I opened the lid, I found a number of embroidery pieces in various stages of work.  I eventually finished the unfinished ones; and we framed them all and gave them to friends.  Beneath the craft items were some woolen sweaters I hadn’t seen in a good long while.  A few of them fit me.  The others had to be donated away. 

     At the very bottom of the chest lay the little white dress that I had been baptized in.  I couldn’t believe that buttons could be made that tiny.  Right next to the dress was a ratty looking pile of threadbare material.  Only one person in the world could recognize this raggedy rag, and that person was me.  I pulled it out of the chest.  My blanket!  What a surprise!  Wow.  Well.  More than 30 years after it disappeared, I learned what really happened to it.

     Thanks, Mom.  I guess I can finally forgive you.  The blanket can go back on the chair beside my bed.

 

My blanket and the cedar chest, 2013

1960: Brother-Cat Tigie

By Corinne H. Smith

1960:  I turned three years old.  Daddy was 31, and he worked as a research chemist at Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Penna.  Mom was a stay-at-home Mom.  We lived on Hathaway Street in West Hempfield Township.  The #1 song on the radio on my third birthday was “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” by Elvis Presley.  Mom snapped this photograph.

     This year we added a new member to our family.  Enter a gray and black striped tabby kitten named Tigie.  His official name was TIE-gee, pronounced with a hard G.  Quickly we shortened it to one syllable, Tige, still with a long I and a hard G.  Whenever my Grandma Banzhoff visited, she called him “Tidee.”  But this was usually because she didn’t have her teeth in at the time.  And she was also hard of hearing.  Tigie’s birthday was May 7th.

     Mom had been a dog person. She grew up with a pooch named Teddy who wore a homemade hat that always had “one more star on it than Eisenhower had.”  Her brothers would salute him whenever they came home from the war.

     Daddy had grown up with barn cats and house cats.  Old albums contain many photos of him and his siblings in their yard, with at least one cat nearby.  He remembers the night when a mother cat named Susan climbed the pear tree at the side of the house.  As she stepped through the open window of the second-floor bedroom he shared with his brother Richard, the boys saw that she was carrying one of her kittens in her mouth.  My father still marvels at this feline feat.

     Tige was a wonderful cat.  I considered him my brother, since I was otherwise an only child.  He lived for a spectacular 22 years and set a high standard for all of our subsequent cats.  His long life is even more amazing, given the fact that he was an indoor-outdoor cat and was prone to all of the potential dangers lurking outside of our two houses.  He probably wouldn’t be so lucky today if we lived in those same, but now busier, neighborhoods.

Tige and me, trying out the sofa bed for visitors

     In our first house, Daddy built a set of in-and-out doors for Tige.  They were craftily tucked inside one of the window wells of our basement.  The little doors made distinctive sounds when they slapped shut.  As soon as we heard one, we’d say “Oh, Tige’s home.”  He’d immediately bound up the basement steps and bounce into the kitchen to eat.  When he’d come into the living room to greet us, we’d pick him up and put our noses into his fur.  He smelled like the cool, fresh outdoors.

     I often wondered what kind of adventures Tige had, whenever he wasn’t at home with us.  What fields he scrutinized, and what yards and roads he crossed!  He may have merely found a nice place or two to snooze in.  One of his favorites was underneath the Japanese maple bush in our first backyard.  I crawled under there one day to see what it was like.  For a small animal, it was a perfect hideaway.

     Having free reign to come and go was convenient for him.  It was not so perfect for us.  One day Mom was surprised to find “Puss Lantz” eating at Tige’s dish in the kitchen.  Tige had taught a neighbor kitty how to use his doors.

     Tige was also an active predator.  At times he would bring home live prey:  birds, mice, rabbits, and at least once, a rat.  Neighbors could tell if Tige brought us a bird whenever they noticed that all of our windows and doors were thrown wide open. 

     Mice, he would dispatch with regularity at the bottom of the stairs you see in our birthday photos.  In the middle of the night, he would call “Mum-wow” from the bottom of those steps.  Mom would get up and shout down to him that he was a good boy for bringing her such a treasure.  Then he would corner the mouse and play with it until he killed it.  He’d eat it in front of the television set.  In the morning, when I’d come down to watch cartoons, there would often be a small stack of vital mouse organs left in front of the set.  Daddy claims that Tige would have left the gall bladder, since it would have been full of bile and have a bitter taste.  But I’ve since known cats who ate the whole mouse.  I think Tige was finicky.

     One day when I was young, I thought Tige’s whiskers needed a trim.  I took a pair of scissors and cut one set down to about an inch long.  But only on one side of his face.  Then I held him up to the big mirror in my parents’ bedroom so that he could admire himself.  He didn’t seem to be impressed.  My mother was, however, whenever the cat trotted downstairs and she got a good look at him.  I suppose I was somehow reprimanded for this infraction.

     Most mornings, Daddy would be sure to pat Tige on the head as he made his way out the door and off to work.  Tige’s head would smell like Daddy’s aftershave for the rest of the day.  I think of Tige whenever I get a whiff of the cologne that Daddy still wears.

     Tige loved to be held, and he was a lap cat.  I taught him to embrace me.  I would lean down in front of him, and he would put his front paws on my left shoulder.  I’d grab the rest of him and stand up, and he was instantly cuddled in my chest.  And he’d purr.  He’d also “drizzle” whenever he was really happy.  He’d close his eyes, purr, and a drop of spit would build up and eventually drip from his mouth.  We thought this was endearing and a sign of pure contentment.

     After the movies Winnie-the-Pooh and the Blustery Day and Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger Too came out (in 1968 and 1974 respectively), we figured that Tige deserved the nickname Tigger.  We then used it interchangeably with Tige and Tigie.

     Daddy likes to ask questions that don’t always require answers.  There were times when he’d look at the dishes on the dinner table in awe and say, “Where’d you get the radishes?” or “Where’d the onions come from?”  Mom eventually got tired of these queries.  One day in exasperation, she quipped, “Tige found them and brought them home.”  From then on, Tige evidently foraged quite a bit on our behalf.  How and why he would bring fresh veggies back from his far-flung adventures, we never considered.

     One night Tige tangled with a nasty animal.  It may have been a rat or a raccoon.  Tige limped home with a torn-up tummy, a ripped ear, and a swollen and infected rear foot.  A veterinarian sewed him up and removed one toe.  After a recuperation period, Tige was good to go, for many years afterward.  One cat life down, eight more yet to live.

     He must have been a ferocious fighter.  Our second house didn’t have cat doors, and Tige had to stay inside overnight.  Whenever cats came around to our sliding glass door in the middle of the evening, Tige would moan and scream and throw himself against the glass.  One of us would get up, turn on the outside light, and say, “Oh, look at the pretty kitty, Tige.  Isn’t he nice?”  And the other cat would run off.  Tige would be left to spit and sputter, probably saying all sorts of disparaging things about us to himself, because we wouldn’t let him out to suitably defend our property.  But he had defended us.  And we got a glimpse of how close we lived to the wildness in an otherwise tame animal.

     We were truly fortunate to be able to share our lives with Tige.  His kitty successors have been Josephine and Samantha for my parents; and Barney, L.E., Sparky, and Squeaks for me.  Our current kitty companion, Maizie Dae Nosentail, looks a lot like Tige, since she too is a tabby tiger.  She has some legendary paw prints to follow.  We’ll have to tell her the remarkable stories of Tige.

1959: The Cousins at Christmas

by Corinne H. Smith

1959:  I turned two years old.  Daddy was 30, and he worked as a research chemist at Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Penna.  Mom was a stay-at-home Mom.  We lived on Hathaway Street in West Hempfield Township.  The #1 song on the radio on my second birthday was “Mr. Blue” by The Fleetwoods.  Mom snapped this photograph. 

     My fraternal grandparents, Elmer and Annie Hosfeld, lived in Pennsylvania Dutch Country.  Their four-acre farm sat at the edge of Macungie in Lehigh County, not far from Allentown.  (I’ll write much more about the farm and its people in the days, weeks, and months ahead.)

     Here they raised three children:  Jeannette (b. 1923), Richard (b. 1925), and Lewis (my father, b. 1929).  These children eventually went off to school, got jobs, got married, and settled down in places that were a few driving hours away from Macungie and from each other.  They also brought about six grandchildren:  Lisa, Eric, Seth, Rich, Cheryl, and me. 

     In their 1950s, separate-but-equal, living-the-American-dream lives, the Hosfelds decided to reunite at the family farm in Macungie each December, to celebrate Christmas.  From this point on, the schedules of four households were coordinated so that fourteen individuals could successfully assemble in the same place at the same time.  The Christmas gatherings never occurred on December 25th, however.  They usually took place on a Saturday or Sunday before the big event.  Weather permitting, of course.

     When we’d arrive, the grown-ups would either help with the feast preparations, or they would sit and talk in the living room.  (Or in the case of my mother and Uncle Richard, argue loudly over politics.)  We cousins escaped, when we were old enough to know better.  We played in the barn or ran through the pine trees and down to the railroad tracks, where we waved to the engineers riding the Reading Railroad.  Or we’d walk into town.  Anything, to get away from the noise inside.

     This Civil-War-era brick farmhouse was “open concept” before the term was invented.  The dining room and the kitchen had no wall separating them.  For the big meal, all of the grown-ups sat at the usual dining room table.  A few feet away, the cousins sat in the kitchen, around a makeshift table outfitted with random chairs, and within arm’s reach of the sink and the stove.  All of us, that is, except for Lisa.  As the oldest cousin, she always got to sit at the grown-ups’ table.  Little did she realize that most of the talk in our small circle was aimed at her and this perceived injustice.  None of the rest of us ever graduated to that other room.

The cousins in 1959:  Rich, Cheryl, Eric, Corinne, Seth, Lisa

     Chicken was served, since it came right from the coop next to the barn.  Otherwise, the spread included what my father always described as “27 vegetables.”  We handed many dishes back and forth between the tables.  Only Uncle Richard breached the divide.  He’d call over to check on the eating habits of his oldest child.  “Rich, did you try the beets?”  “Rich, did you get enough stuffing?”  Otherwise, we young ones were left to our own devices.  In the end, there was always pie.

     After dinner came the Christmas carol performance.  The music began with Aunt Jeannette on piano, Uncle Richard on trombone, and my father on flute.  Everyone else sang along.  When we cousins got older, we were added to the ensemble.  Lisa on clarinet, Rich on saxophone, Cheryl on baritone, me on flute.  Seth and Eric, whatever or if they wanted to play.  Our grandparents and the in-laws sat and listened and sang.

     As the music wound down, we’d offer presents to our grandparents.  A box of chocolates was always a welcomed gift.  Then Grandpa would hand each grandchild a holiday bank envelope containing a crisp uncirculated dollar bill, or perhaps even a new five.  When Aunt Jeannette began distributing the Dramamine to Lisa, Eric, and Seth, for the ride back to northern New Jersey, we knew it was nearly time to leave.  We said our goodbyes and drove off in three separate directions.  We weren’t likely to come together again as a group for another full year.

     The Hosfeld Christmas reunions came to an end in the early 1980s.  Grandma died in 1980, and Grandpa followed her in 1983.  Uncle Richard’s family had taken over the family farm property.  But by now it took even more planning to gather everyone, since we Baby Boomers had gone off to school and were beginning to get jobs and to get married.  Some of us relocated farther away than a one-day drive from Macungie.  We saw each other only as traveling circumstances permitted, or at funerals.  Or not at all.

     And that’s the way it’s been for us six cousins, ever since.  But we’ll always have the memories of the Macungie Christmases:  the dinners, the music, and the brief time shared together around the kid’s table in the kitchen.  Sorry, Lisa.  You missed most of the fun.

1958: The Blizzard of March 1958

by Corinne Hosfeld Smith

I turned one year old.  Daddy was 29.  He worked as a research chemist for the Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster PA.  Mom was a stay-at-home Mom.  We lived on Hathaway Street in West Hempfield Township.  The #1 song on the radio on my first birthday was “Tom Dooley” by the Kingston Trio.  Mom snapped this photograph.

     Mom used to tell a tale from this year.  We got a late-winter blizzard in March, and it knocked out the power for several days.  The living room in our little brick Cape Cod-style home had a fireplace, and my parents kept a fire burning around the clock.  They put my crib near it and moved the sofa bed closer too, so we could all camp overnight in the warmth.  But our wood supply began to run low.  Mom worried that her brand-new dining room set – complete with large table with leaf, six chairs, one towering china cabinet, and one low but long buffet – would have to be sacrificed for survival.  Daddy somehow went out and found more wood.  Today, he does not recall how or where he managed to drive on the snow-covered streets to get it.  We all pulled through the storm.  So did the dining room set.  It served us well for family holiday feasts for decades afterward.

     Obviously, I have no recollection of this storm.  I was barely four months old.  But I do love snow.  Ask anyone who knows me well, and they’ll be quick to confirm this fact.  I long for the big snows that I feel I missed in childhood, when I was ever subjected to what I considered to be sub-par accumulations.  (Translation:  School wasn’t cancelled often enough for me.)  Southeastern Pennsylvania is rarely in the right place at the right time to receive more than a dusting, or just an inch or two of snow.  I had to move away to get to the good stuff:  to the mountains of central Pennsylvania; to the northern Illinois prairie; and to the dynamic terrain of northern Massachusetts.  Thankfully, I’ve witnessed some sizable blizzards in my adult life.  And some came with power outages, too.  But they all took place elsewhere, and not here, “back home.”

     Being in the midst of a snow storm still energizes me.  I’m more creative as a writer when the flakes are flying past my window.  I've always been jealous that I wasn't cognizant enough to appreciate this blizzard of old:  the one where Mom always played the furniture-in-jeopardy card for retrospective dramatic effect.  She was never above using exaggeration.  But was there truth to her story?  I did some research at the Lancaster Public Library to find out.

     On March 18, 1958, the forecast printed in the Intelligencer Journal called only for a few snow flurries.  No wonder Lancastrians were taken by surprise when 13 to 21 inches of heavy snow fell during the next 48 hours.  By March 20, the newspaper was calling it a “sneak storm” that left 75,000 homes without electricity, with “no estimate of restoration.”  Meteorologists now suspect that this storm was a powerful “nor'easter” that blew up the Atlantic coast.  Milder temperatures at the shoreline meant that larger accumulations came inland.  Philadelphia and New York City each got 11 inches.  But next-door to us in Berks County, Morgantown somehow amassed an astounding 50 inches.  Drivers were stranded on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  In The Pennsylvania Weather Book, meteorologist Ben Gelber labels this one the “Great March Snowstorm in the Southeast.”  Turns out Mom was right.

 our Hathaway Street home, March 1958

     1958 was certainly not part of the Stone Age.  But we were still two years away from the launch of the first weather satellite.  Advance or accurate storm warnings didn’t always reach us.  And it would be decades before networks of utility companies would routinely send battalions of trucks to areas ahead of time, in anticipation of storm-related outages.  Folks had little choice but to sit and wait and deal with circumstances as they arrived … just as their ancestors had done for countless centuries.  In 1958, we were among the lucky ones to have a fireplace and something to burn – even if it did make my mother squeamish about the safety of the décor in the next room.  Everything turned out all right.

     As I post these words, we’re perched in the path between a Midwestern snow storm and another Atlantic nor’easter.  Places where I used to live are due to get several feet of snow over the next two days.  Here in southeastern Pennsylvania, it’s the same old story.  We should expect only one to three inches, or mostly rain or ice.  What I wouldn’t give for a few feet of snow instead!  I’ve got my fingers crossed, and I’m looking out the window for the first flakes of white.  Bring it on!

pitiful Lancaster County snow