My 2 Decades

 I am in front, my cousin Mary in the back. This is on the Feeley farm in Eastern Montana, and the horse's name was Prince.   As the 60s began, and I entered kindergarten, the makeup of my family was a bit different from most of my classmates. My oldest sister was entering college.   My next sister was in high school, and my brother was in 7 th grade at Holy Family (the Catholic school a few miles away).   My parents were depression kids and World War II young adults.   They were both born in 1917, so survived the flu pandemic and WWI as toddlers.   They were both from rural eastern Montana, and met as youngsters when they lived on adjoining farms. My mother’s family were immigrants known as “Germans from Russia”.   They were ethnic Germans who had settled in Russia a few generations back, only to be driven out by Catherine the Great’s ethnic cleansing.   They were hard working and clannish.   They spoke German and lived in tight-kn...

  (San Diego Zoo late 1950s.  That is my uncle and cousin from Montana on the left, my sister Kathie next to them, and me in front.) We lived in San Diego, home of a famous zoo, beaches, and two bays (Mission Bay, which was recreational, and San Diego Bay, full of Navy ships).   My parents did not go in for recreational activities, so I rarely went any of those places unless we had relatives visiting out of town.   We did go to the Zoo a time or two with relatives from Montana, and took them to the beach as well.   I didn’t start going to any of the famous San Diego places until later in the 60s when my friends’ older siblings could drive and would take us. Bonita Cove was a small inlet on Mission Bay.   It was quiet and felt a bit like our own discovery.   No hotels or restaurants were nearby.   It was directly across a busy street called Mission Boulevard from the ocean.   Our parents were okay with us spending all day at the bay, as it w...

  A child’s world is fairly narrow.   My family, my neighborhood:   it seemed like it held so much yet there was more going on that I only gradually became aware of.   Politically, 1960 was a turning point for the United States.   John F. Kennedy is the first president I remember, and I was aware of him as a young man with a young family who brought “vigor” to the White House.   My brother would imitate JFK saying “With great vigor!” in what we imagined was a Boston accent.   We also imitated the breathy voice of Jackie Kennedy.   Their oldest child, Caroline, was just two years younger than me and someone I could relate to in the First Family.   As far as national or international news, I was aware of things only as they impacted me.   I remember the Cuban “missile crisis” (October of 1962) mostly because my mother’s aunt and uncle (Uncle Dave and Aunt Maggie) were visiting from their farm in Montana, and they got so nervous they le...

  When I was 8 years old, Bambie (next door) was 10 and Candy (across the street) was 6.   The two of them had very little in common, with different interests and a 4-year age span.   I was in the enviable position of being in the middle of an unstable threesome.   We rarely were all friends at one time.   Candy was a kind of a play-inside, dolls-and-hairdos kind of girl.   Bambie was an outdoorsy tomboy.   It was the best of both worlds for me.   (Interesting how both my friends at that time had future stripper names.   Candy was short for Candace, which no one but her mother called her.   Bambie was a nickname given her by her brother, when he was reading the Disney story of that name). Bambie was a little bigger than me, and a little stronger.   She could hold me down and spit in my face, or make me eat grass; luckily, those incidents were rare.   We were both skinny and gangly, often had skinned knees, and endured the “pi...

  Although I had taken to kindergarten (at the nice new school right around the corner from my house) with the greatest of ease, first grade was a shock to the system from which I did not recover for some time.   Holy Family Elementary School was 10 years old in the fall of 1961, but it looked and felt much older.   It gave the impression of a European abbey, certainly not an elementary school in Southern California.   When I watched movies like The Sound of Music, the Roman Catholic edifices in Europe seemed very familiar.   The transition from kindergarten to first grade felt a lot like joining the military, or going to prison.   I got a severe short haircut, was issued a drab, scratchy uniform (yellow shirt and dark green skirt and sweater), and was made to recite the rules in unison with my classmates.   While kindergarten entailed walking around the block, first grade meant a school 3 miles away (a different country, in my estimation).   ...