Waybac Machine: 1963

 I recently looked for some plastic trailer levels on eBay and found this interesting listing.
(Click to enlarge picture to read description)

As some of you may know from previous posts, I lived in San Angelo, Texas when I was a child. When I was 8 years old and in the second grade, I lived on Linda Lee Drive. Our house literally abutted the elementary school yard. My house was approximately 200 feet from my classroom. My classroom was a building to itself. So was the music room. I don't know why. Although I could walk home in about 1 minute, I ate my lunches at school. I don't know why. 

One day, we were all in the front yard (me, my 6 year old brother, 4 year old sister and my mother). My father had climbed into a tree in the front yard. I don't know why. Over the years, as I remember him being in this tree I always thought it was age inappropriate for him to climb a tree. But he may have had a good reason to do, I don't know. But recently I realized that at that time he was only 23 years old.

As a result of climbing this tree, my father was stung/bitten by something. He didn't know what. So off to the hospital he went (well, actually it was called the infirmary). When he returned, he still had no definitive idea of what it was that had gotten to him but it was suggested that it could have been a scorpion. He was relieved that he did not have to endure getting a shot at the hospital. This was a big problem for him because he always felt faint when getting a needle or seeing blood. 

There came a time in which my brother and I were playing in the back yard and I had made a small see-saw by placing a board over a rock. We put things on one end and stomped down on the other to send objects flying across the yard. It was fun. Then, I placed a brick on the end of the board and stamped down on the other side to send the brick on its journey. Unfortunately, it didn't shoot across the yard; it went straight up into the air and came down and hit my brother in the head. My parents opted not to bring him to the infirmary. I don't know why. In any case, he got a big scar on his head and hair never grew on that spot again. 

On another day, I was whittling some wood or doing something else with a jackknife that an 8 year old probably shouldn't be allowed to do. Not surprisingly, I had a mishap and managed to cut both my right index finger and middle finger in one fell swoop. It bled a LOT. My mother didn't know what to do and my father was on the base. So she wrapped it in a facecloth and that was all the first aid I got. After a while, the bleeding stopped. I have a diagonal scar on my right index finger from that cut that is very obvious and is the full width of the finger. The middle finger got a slice whittled off and there is a half-moon scar on that finger that is also visible. 

The house in which we lived was a very small house. It had 4 rooms: a kitchen, living room and 2 bedrooms. My parents had a bedroom and my brother and sister shared a room. I slept on my parent’s bed until they finished watching the 11:00 news. After that, I was relegated to the couch for the rest of the night.

I remember to things about this arrangement:

1) For some reason I was usually awake for the weather at the end of the news. This is before fancy schmancy computer generated graphics, of course. The weatherman placed cardboard cut-outs of cold fronts, high temps and the like on the map by hand. Maybe they were magnetic. I don’t know. I liked the smiling sun that almost always was presented to show the weather for the next day. It was a safe bet that it would be sunny. It was Texas and it was always sunny.

2) Once the TV went off and I was left on the couch, mosquitoes would buzz around my ears and were very annoying. To fend them off, I would pull the sheet up over my head. But that didn’t work too well because it was often 90 or more degrees out overnight and covering up (even with a sheet) was not comfortable.

Every once in a while, my parents would have me sleep in my brother's bed on a weekend night. I guess his weekday sleep was more important than mine. I don't know why.