Those Memory Keys

This morning I was comfortably ensconced on my sofa reading a book, with the TV set to a Christmas music station for background ambiance. My attention was primarily on my book, but I suddenly had a mental snapshot from 1945.

White Christmas was playing, and it was one of those memory keys for me. You know what a memory key is--it could be a sound, a piece of music, a smell, a phrase in a book, a bit of scenery, or a photo. Whatever it is, it immediately keys into a memory and pops it into your mind.

That's what happened to me with White Christmas. Even though I was scarcely paying attention to the background music, a scene from the Christmas season of 1945 popped into my head.


Now for most of you 1945 is practically the Dark Ages. For me it was the year I turned four years old, WWII was winding down at last, our father was in the Army and overseas in the Philippines, and our mother had taken a teaching job in a little one-room country school (which I have previously written about). My sister Terry was in the 3rd grade, my sister Grace was in the 2nd grade, and, having nothing else to do with me during school hours, Mother was teaching me first grade. There were three other students in the school that year, whose regular homes were in the country.

Of course, this is not exactly the model we had,
but it is similar.

For people of this electronic age, it may be difficult to understand our excitement over a mail-order piece of equipment Mother got from Montgomery Ward shortly before Christmas. It was a wind-up portable phonograph (record player)! With it, she also got an album of records. Now records of that time were large disks with one song on each side. An album was a collection of several such disks, which fit into paper sleeves, bound between hard covers book-style. To play a song you wound up the record player, placed the chosen record on the turntable, turned it on, and carefully placed the needle on the outer rim of the record. I do not remember how many records could be played before it was necessary to rewind the phonograph, but I do remember how the sound slooooowed down, making the voices and music change comically, as the turntable moved slower and slower.

It was a magical thing for a four-year-old.

The scene that popped into my head this morning was in that one-room schoolhouse, with that little record player playing Bing Crosby singing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas."



Rose McLaughlin with her daughters, Terry, Michelle, and Grace, outside Teckla School

Visiting the Past

While my feet are firmly planted in the present, I always enjoy the visits to the past that photographs provide. So much would be forgotten without those pictures that freeze a moment of time.

I started re-doing our mother's old photo album over a year ago, because it was falling apart. Most of the photos aren't dated and don't have any name identification on them. Fortunately, I know who most of the people are. They are the people who populated my childhood. I removed the photos from the old album pages for ease in scanning them. The tiny size of so many of the old ones from the 1930s and '40s makes them hard to see detail, especially with my somewhat compromised vision. By enlarging them, I can see so much more.

A bonus to removing the photos has been discovering that Mother had written notes on the backs of a few. They seem to be the ones that she sent to her folks to see and then return and, later, the ones she sent to our father while he was away in the army. I love finding those notes from our young mother--I just wish there were more of them!

Today I will share more of these "noted" photos.



Dorothy Mackey and Rose McLaughlin. It must have been
a Saturday, because Mother has her hair pincurled and
tied in a scarf. This one didn't have a note, but its companion, taken
at the same time, does. This one just happens to be a little better quality.

Take two from that same day in 1945. the note on the back of the photo
reads: "Terry took these of me and Dorothy. Sweetie slipped in again.
Ain't she cute?" (I had to enlarge and lighten the picture to see that I
was, indeed, lurking behind Mother.)

On the back of this one, Mother wrote: "Gracie took this.
See my new shoes." I think this is probably from before
the leaves came out on the vine in 1945.

By the way, if you didn't know it was 1945, wouldn't Dorothy's hair and pants outfit look completely modern?

More From the Old Album--1945

I have written here before about some of the events of 1945. This was the final year of World War II. Our father left for basic training early in the year. He was home on leave after basic and before he shipped out for the Philippines. In September Mother began a country teaching job. That was described in the blog referenced above. I turned four that summer.

Since I have already blogged about the big events from my memories of 1945, I simply include here a few more photos from that year. (If I use some photos I've used before, I'm sorry. I've gone through and sorted out these photos so much that it becomes hard to keep track.)

The original of this photo is very small and dim. I did the best I could with it. I like it because
of Grace's big gap-toothed smile! We are at our grandparents' place.

Home on leave. Daddy is looking very trim and fit after basic training!

Third-Cousin Harry Prochaska and I. Sadly, Harry was killed a few
years later in a car/bike accident.

At the Mackey place. Rose with a young horse; Grace and Terry on the corral railing.
It is too bad the horse came out better than the people!

This was a favorite picture for me--Mother posing in a formal gown of her sister
Elsie's. Then I learned that the formal gown was actually Elsie's nightgown!
I guess they were just having fun; and it was quite a fancy nightgown.

Little Schoolhouse on the Prairie

Spring 1945--Daddy home on leave
before shipping out to the Philippines

In the beginning of 1945, toward the end of WWII when fighting in the Philippines was intense, my father was called up to the army. Daddy was 35 years old and the father of three, a category that would not ordinarily been eligible for the draft. The war had, by that time, consumed so many men that it was necessary to expand the reach of the military. The other soldiers in Daddy's training group were all very young men, so he was nicknamed "Pappy" by them. After basic training, he was sent to the Philippines. While they were on the ship the effective end of the Pacific war was gained, so his group was clean-up crew rather than in the active fighting.

All that background is in explanation of why our Mother took a teaching job for a rural school located only three miles from the homestead where she grew up. This was the Teckla School. It was on Teckla Putnam's land. She was the Postmistress for that area; thus, the Teckla Route, Teckla Post Office, and Teckla School.  This school had three students, two of Mrs. Putnam's grandchildren and a girl from a neighboring ranch. We McLaughlin girls brought the total to six.

I had turned four years old in July of 1945. (I remember that my birthday wish before blowing out my candles was for my Daddy to come home.) Because there was nothing else to do with me during school hours, Mother took me to school with her. She and my young uncle Bob made a little desk for me out of an orange crate (they were wood in those days). Mother taught me to read from the first grade reading series featuring Dick, Jane, Sally, their parents, and their pets, Spot the dog and Puff the cat. I loved reading! Having learned to read at such a young age, I cannot remember what it was like to not be able to read.

Mother with her students: Forest, Terry, Lois, Mother, Michelle, Grace, JoAnne

Conditions were very different in 1945 than they are now. Teckla School was a one-room building, heated by a wood or coal stove. The rest room was an outhouse--no such thing as running water or flush toilets. Water for the school, Mrs. Putnam's house, and the teacher's house, came from a pump in the yard. This was the old fashioned pump that you poured a little water in to prime the pump, then pumped the handle up and down vigorously until water flowed into the bucket.

Grace, Michelle, Terry in front of
the Teacherage

The teacherage that we lived in was a one-room tar-paper shack. I think it probably started out as a homesteader's shack. It was very small. To accommodate her family, Mother created bunk beds from two double bed mattresses. She slept on the bottom with one of us and the other two slept above. The beds took up almost half the space. There was a drop-down table leaf under one window. In order to have any space to move around, this was kept folded down except when we were actually eating. We had a small coal stove for heating or cooking. The inside walls were not finished. Just the bare framework of the building, no insulation. Large nails pounded into the 2 X 4s provided a place to hang our clothes. Such primitive conditions for housing a teacher and her family would be unthinkable today! On photos Mother sent to Daddy she called us "The Rabbits and the Hutch."

That little building was later moved to my uncle's place, where it was used as, first, a chicken house, and, later, a storage shed!

With the war over, Daddy got released from the army and returned home early in 1946. Since he was coming home, Mother resigned her teaching job at the semester break and we moved back to our home in town. I always felt like my birthday wish had come true!