Fallout from the Shelter

    One day I told my mom that the electrician was coming to my house to replace the garbage disposal switch with a red one.  I was looking out for the safety of my three young children.  I wouldn't want anyone working at the sink to lose a hand because John or Caitlin thought they were turning on a light.

My mom said, "Just take some red nail polish and paint a dot on the switch you have and it will be fine."  I was appalled.  Could she be serious? This was my children's safety we were talking about.  I would have this done right!

This led to me thinking of all the things at our house when I was growing up that were never done quite right…they were fine, but never quite right.   Granted, none of them was ever a safety issue, but chores were always more difficult and a little more challenging at 25 Judson.

Example 1.   The canned goods storage shelves

Before Mom had our kitchen renovated and the original yellow metal cabinets moved to the basement for extra food storage,  all the canned goods were kept on basement shelves under a wooden workbench counter.

Mom took the Cuban Missile Crisis very seriously.  If a nuclear bomb was dropped on our neighborhood, Mom wanted to be sure we had plenty of canned goods stored in the cellar where we would be living.   (Our basement was five steps down from the main floor.  Obviously, our knowledge of nuclear fallout has greatly advanced since then.)

Dad must keep his tie on even during nuclear fallout

Remember this was a time when we were told if a nuclear bomb hit during school hours, we were to get under our desks.  We even had drills for this.

Safety first

Mom didn't like the look of the canned goods on the open shelves.  Who knew how long we would have to live in the basement after a nuclear war?  Maybe weeks!   Mom's solution was to hang fabric,  a very heavy leftover upholstery fabric, from the edge of the wooden countertop to hide our unsightly survival rations.

Thumbtacks (normally used to hang nothing heavier than a vacation postcard) were used to hang our "Iron Curtain."  (Remember nothing was ever done quite right.)  Actually, it worked pretty well.  That is until one of us was told,  "Go get me a can of ____________soup.  (It could be any Campbell's soup product.  We had them all.)

Sounds simple enough, right?  Have you ever tried lifting ten pounds of fabric?  It was like lifting the lid too early on a pot of cooking popcorn.Thumbtacks flew in every direction.  Does losing an eye seem a fair exchange for a can of cream of mushroom soup?

The errand itself took maybe two minutes.  Rehanging the curtain and pushing in all those thumbtacks took half a day.  (Being barefoot had a whole other set of dangers when retrieving those tacks.)

I learned the hard way that you couldn't just leave the shroud lying on the cement basement floor for Mom to discover later.  No one was allowed out of the basement until those canned goods were out of sight!

Think of all the time we could have saved (and spent watching TV)  if open shelving had become popular a few decades earlier.

I don't think canned goods are such an eyesore, do you?

More examples of the difficulties of life at 25 Judson next time.

Keep This Under Your Cap

I have never liked to swim.  I know how to swim.  I just prefer not to.  Over the years, many have asked me why I never go in the water.  I think I have finally figured out the reason.  I used to think it was simply that I don't like to get wet.  As I have gotten older and look back on this,  I think the real reason stems from my childhood.  (No, this is not a therapy session.)  The culprit was the bathing cap!
 It was mandatory that all females wear bathing caps while swimming.  Blame it on the pool filter.  That's what the lifeguards always did.  (I think there was a very powerful lobbying group of bathing cap manufacturers behind it, but I love a good conspiracy theory.)

 I absolutely hated wearing a bathing cap!  My daughters and a whole generation of girls  have  never  experienced the  torture of stretching a square inch of latex over their entire heads, trying to keep the cap in place while  tucking  in every stray hair. Some days  I spent more time putting on my cap than the time I actually spent in the pool.  If your hair was longer than a quarter inch , you might as well give up and hang out at the pool snack bar.  (Which is what I did until my father saw our snack bar bill at the end of the month and he banned me from stepping foot near the place.)
Of course, if the day were hot enough, and I mean heat stroke was imminent,  the dreaded cap had to go on.  Once in place,  you had seconds to run and dive in the water hopefully before anyone saw you.  The bald head is not a good look for anyone,  especially a prepubescent girl!
I have a large head and  had very long thick hair!  A deadly combination when faced with a cap the size of a brussel sprout.
Oh,  the makers of these torture devices tried to make them attractive by adding color and designs (usually petals…as if  a flower on top of a stem wearing a bathing suit was a good look.)  After a time, even they gave up and the decorative bathing cap passed into urban legend.

Notice that none of these girls are smiling.  Warning: If you ever  see anyone
smiling while wearing a bathing cap,  it is because the rubber is pulling
their faces back.  Remove immediately before face freezes that way!

Even fashion models should not wear bathing caps!

This was a blatant example of breaking the rules.
No hair was allowed out from under the cap!

                                                    Oh, the times we lived through.