I read recently about a woman who was arrested and charged with child endangerment for allowing her ten-year-old son to walk alone less than a mile into town. It was a reminder…
I’m not sure why, but becoming nine years old was a big, big thing for me— kind of a rite of passage.
It was 1945. The war in Europe ended a couple of weeks after my birthday; victory over Japan followed three months later. Adolph Hitler and the only president I had ever known were dead.
The celebrations were huge, but whether it was VE or VJ Day or both, I don’t recall. Church bells rang all over the city. We all went downtown with my cousin Dorothy and her kids; her husband Earl was somewhere far away in the Navy. I don’t know how we got there because all the streets were full of people. There were thousands of folks from curb to curb in the downtown business section.
The headlines in the afternoon Dayton Daily News, Herald, and the morning Journal (we took all three plus the home-delivered Saturday Evening Post) reported that something called the United Nations guaranteed that there would never be another war.
I got my first job that summer: delivering the News to twenty-one customers. (A decade later I had a short-term job as a copyboy at the News.) Mine was the smallest paper route (one more customer than allowed for someone my age) at my branch because I was only nine; I couldn’t get a bigger route (and more money) until I turned twelve.
The paper was delivered in wire-bound bundles of fifty copies to a neighbor’s garage, the News’s “branch office.” The paper cost four cents a day and a dime on Sunday, so thirty-four cents for the week. I think I got to keep a couple of pennies of that, maybe a nickel. Some of my customers paid with a quarter and a dime: “Keep the change.” More pennies, and they were all mine! I collected my door-to-door route every Thursday. It wasn’t unusual for me to have to go back two or three times to collect from some ladies who didn’t have that much ready cash on hand.
The annual Paperboy Day was a couple of weeks before Christmas, and that year I pulled in an even twenty bucks in tips. Not bad! I was rich! I had never before had twenty dollars at one time. Most important, I had money of my own to buy Christmas presents for everybody. And, of course, I had the gifts I had made at school for my folks—usually a potholder for my mother and always a calendar for my father, who every year hung the new one in the coal bin and threw away the untouched old one.
I loved Christmas shopping, agonized over what to buy, and counted every penny, including tax. I saved a dime out to add to the president’s big March of Dimes booth in front of the county courthouse at Third and Main, Dayton’s crossroads. That’s how we thought of it: Roosevelt’s March of Dimes. A man hidden in a booth with a microphone thanked everyone who contributed, and when I slipped my dime into the holder, he said, “Thank you, little girl.” I never again put up the hood on my coat after that.
What I liked most of all was going downtown by myself and wandering through the stores and crowds. Alone. That year I made a huge and expensive blunder. There was a booth in The Arcade where for fifty cents I made a little 78rpm vinyl record. I decided this Christmas would be different from all others because it would include my personal spoken greetings to everyone, not just for that year but for years to come.
I took my precious record home, put it on the turntable when no one else was around, and listened to my first audition. It was godawful. That’s when I learned that I was and still am a lousy speaker without a script. I grabbed it off the phonograph and tried to rip it apart. Didn’t work. Vinyl’s strong. I ended up bending it back and forth and scratching it so that no one could ever play it again and then taking it straight out to the trash can in the alley. That ended my dreamed-of recording career and cost me a chunk of my Christmas cash.
Because I now had a job to do, I got a bicycle that summer, a hand-me-down, dark red Hawthorn, which was a vast improvement over having to carry my paper bag over my shoulder, especially on Sundays when the papers were heavy. I could now stretch the strap over my handlebars and toss my rolled-up papers onto porches while pedaling. That worked well except for one customer who always placed her empty milk bottles on her porch post. I don’t know how many times I knocked them off, but I do remember that I got no tip from her on Paperboy Day.
My fourth-grade teacher when I was nine was Miss Robbins, who had been my father’s teacher. She had a lingering limp from polio. I liked her because she always wore a suit instead of a dress or blouse and skirt. I don’t know why that made a difference to me, but it did. She looked more businesslike and professional to me, more like the teachers I saw in movies.
I had been walking to school alone since about the middle of first grade when my brother Joe finally insisted upon being relieved of his duty. I usually stopped in the next block to pick up my friend Gene Olexio.
Nine was the year I was first allowed to go downtown on the bus by myself. I walked up Fairview Avenue to Catalpa Drive, dropped my three-cent fare into the coin box, and went off to wander through dime stores and department stores for three or four hours. I could buy a thick frosty malt in The Arcade or a Big Little Book or comic book at McCrory’s or Wilkie’s Newsstand for a dime or a cookie at Rike’s bakery department for three of four cents. Rike’s sporting goods department was also a wonderful place to plan a camping trip that would never happen or pretend to live in the room settings in the furniture department. Nobody ever bothered me or asked where my mother was. If I had enough money, I’d stop at Planter’s Peanuts and buy a pound of broken cashews for thirty-five cents to eat on the bus on the way home.
Being permitted to go downtown alone also meant that I could transfer from one bus to another to go to the Dayton Art Institute for a Saturday-morning class. My sister Patsy had attended the class a couple of years before me but had aged out by the time it was my turn. I looked forward to Saturdays that included sketching a painting or sculpture; a scavenger hunt through the galleries, one of which held a Chinese temple, a huge gong that could be heard throughout the building, and live, brightly colored macaws on perches; and a movie in the auditorium.
That was a magic place; it had a recessed ceiling whose perimeter lighting changed colors. It was beautiful; I think I watched the ceiling more than I did the movie. Occasionally one of the macaws would break loose, usually at some kid’s urging, and fly through the galleries. Great fun! The movies were shoot-’em-ups and adventure stories. The director of the museum, Mr. Burroughs, lived two doors down from us on Fairview Avenue, and Joe and I played with his sons Ned and Bruce.
The buses were electric trolleys, and on nearly every trip the trolley poles would jump off the overhead lines at least once, especially at intersections. The driver would have to put on his heavy gloves, get out, and go to the rear of the bus, grab the pole cables to pull them down and then refit them onto the wires above.
I didn’t ride on a streetcar until we moved to Klee Court (a narrow, little street whose name was for some reason later changed to Avenue) in 1947, during the latter part of my fifth-grade year at Fairview Elementary. We moved in May, and so I still had a month to go before summer vacation. Every morning I took the streetcar downtown and transferred to a bus for the hour and a half trip across town to get to school by 8:30.
Streetcars were fun because they were smoother riding than buses, and the operator clanged his bell by stomping on a floor button whenever someone was in his way. Streetcars couldn’t stop quickly; their wheels would lock and skid even when the operator dropped sand on the rails to slow them down.
In the fall, when I was twelve and a seasoned traveler, I started sixth grade at Franklin Elementary, which was about a six- or eight-block-walk down East Dayton’s Huffman Hill. New house, new school, new people, and a whole new, difficult part of my life.
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