Injun-uity

There were stairs from the kitchen that went down to the cellar. It was huge with three distinct areas. One part was like a garage with a big sliding barn-like door. One part had the lawn furniture stored in it and a big upright piano. No one played the piano. Where did it come from? Why was it there? Maybe it was from the previous owners. The rest of the cellar had my father's workbenches and tools. I had a blackboard and would "play school" there. I was going to be a teacher. I also used to play with my Injun Joe cards there. They came in the Shredded Wheat boxes which was the only cereal my father would eat. I, on the other hand, ate Ranger Joe's. Injun Joe, Ranger Joe, who knows? It turns out that the cards were a ploy by Nabisco to get children to eat what was considered an adult cereal and Shredded Wheat as the sponsor for a radio program. I never fell for the cereal part but faithfully collected those "injun-uity" cards. They had all kinds of indian lore and crafts. I didn't remember, but read, that at first Injun Joe's horse didn't have a name and they ran a contest where you could submit a name along with a boxtop. They named him Fury. And so there was Hopalong Cassidy and his horse Topper, the Lone Ranger with Silver and Tonto with Scout and Gene Autry with Trigger and Dale Evans with Buttermilk and Injun Joe with Fury.

You can go home again

All this remeniscing about riding up and down in front of my house got me thinking about that house I grew up in. Well, you know how they tell you that everything is on the internet, you just have to know how to find it. So, I typed in Marshfield Hills, Mass. and started looking. There was a house that had sold in June and it looked somewhat like what I remembered. I googled the satellite photo and matched up the roads from memory and this had to be the house. I went back and found another website where the realtor had posted pictures. The kitchen was a modern wonder with skylights and a stainless refridgerator and a Viking stove. The house that had the most modern conveniences of the time now had them again. Then I saw the living room and could not believe my eyes. Where we had wall to wall carpeting you could see a beautiful wood floor. And then I saw the fireplace. The man who had built the kitchen cabinets had made the built in wall surrounding the fireplace. And there it was exactly the same as when I was a little girl over sixty years ago. I remember the top left cabinet held the record player, a concept way before its time. We had very few records but I remember one was Caruso and one was "Little Jimmy Brown" that I still know all the words to. You can see through the doorway into what we called the sunroom. Children didn't go in the living room or the dining room except on special occasions. The sunroom had the television. I grew up with Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger, Howdy Doody and Clarabelle the clown, Kookla, Fran and Ollie and test patterns when there wasn't anything being broadcast. Now there are hundreds of stations and "nothing to watch". For us, sometimes there really wasn't anything to watch except a test pattern. So don't let anyone tell you that you can't go home again. You can, if only in your memories.