For Esmé, the Princess Blueberry, and her Knights -- part 2

Dear Esme, Jaedin, Ethan, Preston, Greyson, Massimo, (and your little sib-to-be),

Great-Aunt Amy forgot to tell you another thing, which leads to another story. This will happen often.
I apologize in advance.

Your Grandpa Kirk liked to play baseball on the neighbor's flat lawn, since ours rolled downwards like a little hill, which doesn't make for a very good game of baseball. Even the neighbors' lawns were too small for boys and bats and front windows, though.  He also liked to play soccer, but mostly he and the neighborhood boys would walk down to our schoolyard on the weekends and get up a basketball game on the empty court.

Sometimes your Great-Grandma Ardie would join in. She had played basketball in college, and she rode her bike every morning and could keep up with those boys, in her forties. Even though I never liked to play, I would go to the school to watch and play by the trees. Your great-grandmother Ardie loves to exercise. Even today, while she has bad back pain, she texts me and tells me how she is keeping her legs strong. :-)

G'g'ma Ardie IS strong. Maybe it's because she was born a twin! On September 8, 1930, she and her twin sister, Arlene, were born. They were a surprise!! back then doctors and hospitals didn't have sonogram machines and could only guess if a mother would have twins or triplets.

Their daddy had a little church in Sterling, Kansas, where they were born. They lived in Kansas for a few years, and then moved to Grabill, Indiana. Ministers didn't make very much money back then. The church people gave them a house to live in called a parsonage ( parson is another word for minister), and paid him $5 a week. A week. The church people also brought baskets of eggs and vegetables and fruit to the young couple with the new twins. My mother ( G'g'ma Ardie) remembers that her father would have just five cents, a nickel, left at the end of each week, and every Saturday he would take the twins for a walk to the drugstore and buy each of them an ice cream cone for a treat. Two ice cream cones for one nickel!!!

BTW Drugstores weren't like CVS or Walgreens are now. A pharmacist, what they used to call a druggist mixed up medicines and pills for people and also sold other things like candy, gum, magazines and newspapers. A little bit like a gas station now, but without the gas pumps -- and  usually the drugstore had a soda fountain. No, it wasn't a big fountain with Sprite or Pepsi flowing out of it. :-) People could come in and sit at a long counter and have ice cream and root beer floats and other yummy treats.

Ardie and Arlene had a little sister, too, named Marilyn. They all got along pretty well but sometimes the girls got sideways. Once, a very young Ardie pounded on the window of the back door and a piece of glass cut her arm, and she stopped pounding. That scared them all!

editor's note 8/21/14  it was NOT G'g'ma's twin sister who locked the kitchen door on a recalcitrant sister, causing her to bang on the window and cut her hand, but G'g'ma Ardie, who vexed their mamma. Larene was washing the girls' hair, one at a time, in a basin. Little Ardie got squirrelly, and my high-strung Grandma pushed her out onto the back porch to chill out and regain some decorum, dressed only in an undershirt and skirt. Embarrassed, G'g'ma ( Ardie age five-ish) banged in the window, adding insult to injury to herself -- as well as her wounded pride. Tender-hearted Aunt Arlene has absolutely nothing to do with any of that. It was all Grandma. HA Auntie Amy heard the  story forty years ago, and lost a few details along the way. Correction posted.  Aunt Arlene, I so apologize for implicating you for your twin's misbehavior. 

They saved their pennies as they got a little older, and for Christmas one year the three of them walked to the drugstore by themselves. Children used to do that. They'd go to the store or the post office for their mothers and have all sorts of adventures along the way. Cities were smaller then, and stores and post offices and neighborhoods all fit together better than they do now. The girls wanted to buy a gift for their mother. They had about 43 cents. Someday, Esme, I hope you will see a blue china teapot on one of our stoves. The little girls bought that teapot for their mother with just those pennies! and it has been in the family all this time.

The girls used to take their lunches to school in little tin buckets with a cloth napkin over the top to keep them fresh. Lunches in those days didn't have Gogurt or Veggie Straws. They would each have a sandwich and a piece of fruit, and they could clean their hands and faces with the cloth napkin when they were done and take it home to be washed for the next day.

G'G'ma Ardie learned how to drive when she was thirteen years old, out on her uncle's farm, in a car called a Model T. If you look for old pictures of a Model T, you'll see they were on of the first automobiles built in America. and looked sort of like a  fairy tale carriage, except with an engine instead of horses.

They moved from Grabill, Indiana to Fort Wayne, Indiana, so their father could work at the Bible College. The sisters sang in church often, which made their parents very proud of them.

Girls had to behave like little ladies all the time in those days -- and weren't allow to play sports very much. They always had to wear dresses and stay neat and clean and ladylike. Your g'g'ma Ardie loved sports, though, and she and her sisters played softball and basketball on the weekends with their friends.She knew some girls who played on some of the teams in  All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. 

After she graduated from high school, she and Arlene attended Ft. Wayne Bible College where their father worked. Their mother taught second grade at an elementary school, and also ironed lots of clothes for people, for extra money,  in the evening time to help pay for the girls to go to school.

Nowadays we have clothes dryers that we put our wet washed clothes in, and they roll around and get dry and fluffy and then we put them away. Back then, clothes got washed on a big tub with a crank, called a wringer washer. Hot or cold water got poured into it with laundry soap, and then the crank had to be turned to make the clothes get swished around. Dirty soapy water got drained out, and more hot or cold water poured in, and then the crank swished all the soap out of the water. After the water ran clear, the clothes would go through a wringer, in between rollers, and ANOTHER crank got turned ( hard, to push those wet soggy clothes through the rollers )  to s q u e e z e all of the water out. Then the wet clean clothes had to be clothes-pinned to a clothes line to dry --outside in the summer, down in the basements in the winter.  G'G'ma Ardie said it would take her mother all day Monday to do the laundry, and they didn't have very many clothes.

So while they were in college their mother helped other people with their ironing, and they paid her  10 or 25 cents per item to get all of the wrinkles out of those clothesline-dried dresses and shirts and pants. She would sprinkle a little water on the clothes, which seems funny because they just got dry. I know. :-) The electric iron didn't make steam back then -- it just had a flat plate on the bottom that got really hot, so the water sprinkles made the steam and helped smooth out the wrinkles.

One day when the girls were in college they wanted to go outside in the nice spring air and play a game of softball. The college rules stated that all girls were to wear dresses at all times.

The young men were outside playing ball! Why couldn't they? on a pretty day, the pretty girls got tired of being ladylike, and decided to put on some jeans and blouses and go play, too. Halfway through their game, people from the Bible college stopped them and sent them home. The girls received three weeks on not being able to leave the campus except for church, for wearing blue jeans and playing softball.

G'G'ma Ardie finished college and taught PE, physical education, so she could wear shorts every day and play baseball whenever she wanted to. In 1958, she stopped teaching for a while because she had a baby. Your grandpa Kirk. :-)

Today she's going over to stay with your Great-Aunt Alyson and her family, because she's not feeling well, so I am thinking of her and all the stories she told me about growing up as a twin in the 'olden days'.
She and her sister Arlene will be 84 years old in September! I hope she gets to hold you and your cousin-to-be someday. She's pretty wonderful!

Love, Auntie Amy