Driving down a familiar street on a hot summer day, I was hit with a wave of memories of summers past. Once they started, it was hard to stop them.

We moved to Tulsa sometime in 1948. I was about 2 1/2 years old and my brother was a baby. We lived in this house until late summer 1955 when we moved to a new custom home where I lived until I was married. But those 7 years in that first house, when I was ages 2 1/2 to 9 1/2, packed in a lot of memories.

In the summer, we played outside before there was air conditioning. We played in the sprinklers, went high on the swings until we pulled the poles from the ground, played work-up and Red Rover in our big side yard. We looked for fossils in the gravel on the street until they paved it. I learned to ride my bike on that street and attempted to roller skate with the skates that you hooked onto your shoes and tightened with the skate key.

In the evenings, we looked at the sky for constellations before there were so many lights to make the skies not so bright. We caught lightning bugs, June bugs, lady bugs, roly polys and put them in jars with a few leaves and holes we punched in the top. Sometimes there were locust shells to collect and crunch. We walked down the street to the school where I went to play in the creek. There was trumpet vine on the back fence to use for cups for my dolls and honeysuckle to drink the nectar from.

i played with my dolls and cut out paper dolls. I loved Betsy McCall in my mother’s monthly McCall’s magazine and kept all the clothes in a box in my room. I played dress up with the other girls in the neighborhood, raiding our mothers’ closets.

My mother worked in the garden, washed the clothes and hung them on the clothesline in the back yard. I loved the clothespins in their little bag that hung on the line.

In this house, my brother and I shared a bedroom with green chenille Hopalong Cassidy bedspreads and welcomed our little sister home. I think we listened to Hoppy on the radio as we didn’t have a television yet. I loved seeing him in person one year at the Tulsa Horse Show.

When I got bigger, I had my own bedroom at the back of the house with a door to the screened in porch. On hot summer nights, I laid spread eagle on top of my covers in my seersucker babydoll pajamas, hoping for a breeze from the fan and the open windows. We drank Kool-Aid (made with lots of sugar) and waited for Jack the Milkman to come so we could run to his truck for ice chips. Sometimes he would let us get in and ride around the corner with him. And the ice cream truck would bring us popsicles and ice cream bars to cool us off.

We had a patio in the back for picnics and Daddy got a grill to cook hamburgers and hot dogs. It was the 50s as you imagine.

In the summers we went to the library and I brought home stacks of books that I read quickly. There were biographies with orange covers, fairy tales, the Oz books, Nancy Drew mysteries. I read anything I could. One time I wrote a play sitting under the big elm in the front yard. It was about kings and princesses, I believe. I still have it somewhere in a spiral notebook, written in my careful printing. We played cards, spending hours with Old Maid, Crazy Eight, Go Fish. We collected comic books and read them, loving Lulu, Donald Duck, Superman and Batman and all the superheroes.

Time went on and my parents converted our garage into a “family room.” There were big couches and my mother had an artist paint a scene of cute barnyard animals on the concrete wall. And, we had a television there and an air conditioner. It was a new world. We watched tv when it came on at 5:00 with the news. If we stayed up late (10:00), you could watch the newscaster sign off and the screen turn to the overnight screen picture. On Saturday mornings, we watched all the shows. Winky Dink was an interactive show where you placed a piece of heavy plastic over the screen and then used the special crayons to finish pictures or images that were part of the show. We watched Sky King, Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, and cartoons like Popeye.

I learned to cook in this house, making little cakes in tiny pans, first in a toy oven and then in my mother’s big oven. I cooked my first dinner from my first cookbook, proudly serving it to my Daddy, who was always amused by my attempts to be a big girl. That kitchen had a corner booth where we had breakfast and my grandmother would bring us homemade french fries with little cups of ketchup when she visited. We got our first dishwasher, which was pushed across the room where the hoses were connected to the kitchen sink.

School started in the fall and we walked down the street to our school. My parents sent me there because my birthday was past the cutoff for the public schools and, besides, it was down the street.

When the leaves turned, we raked them into piles to jump in and burn in the incinerator in the corner of the back yard. We loved the smell of the burning leaves and watching the embers that escaped and flew into the sky. For obvious reasons, this was banned in the city at a later date. In the fall, Daddy brought his hunting dog home where he lived in his pen in the yard unless Daddy was training him or we were playing with him. Early in the mornings, they would head out in search of quail which Daddy would bring home to eat later.

When school started, so did our Brownie troop meetings. My mother was one of the leaders so we often met at our house where we learned to give tea parties for our mothers, how to sew on a button, how to sell cookies and took fun field trips.

For Halloween, we donned cheap costumes purchased at the dime store or dressed as hoboes or ghosts and grabbed a pillow case and went for blocks and blocks, trick or treating. When our bags were full of caramel apples, popcorn balls, and full size candy bars, tootsie roll pops and bubble gum, we headed home to dump the load and head out again. We kept our piles of candy under our beds where we would bring them out to count or trade or eat.

In the colder weather, we lit the floor furnace, which we quickly learned to step over so we didn’t burn our feet. The bathrooms were heated with little gas furnaces on the walls to keep us warm after our baths.

In the cold weather, we had fires in the fireplace in the living room where we listened to 78 records on the big record player and toasted marshmallows and drank hot chocolate. For Christmas, we hung our stockings and waited for Santa. My favorite gifts, maybe ever, were the Madame Alexander Alice in Wonderland doll in her blue trunk with other clothes and my first puppy, a red dachshund named Mr. Schmidt. We also got sleds for the small hills in our neighborhood and made snowmen in the front yard and had snowball fights with the neighbors behind the forts we built.

With spring, we planted zinnias in the back yard and dyed Easter eggs. We found baby chicks and ducks in our Easter baskets along with eggs to hide and hunt. One baby duck used to follow me everywhere until he died even though I tried to keep him warm and well. I’m sure our back yard had many graves of turtles, parakeets, chameleons and other little creatures we brought home from the dime store or the fair. We didn’t mean to be rough with them.

I had many parties for my friends at this house. There were birthday parties and slumber parties. This must have been my last one there and everyone seems to be happy with our comic book collection. I remember the noise and the giggles and the patience of my parents.

This was the house where I lost my first teeth and the Tooth Fairy left a dime under my pillow. This was where I had chicken pox, the measles and mumps. Those diseases were no fun and I can remember days in bed, the calamine lotion all over me with chicken pox and not scratching so we wouldn’t have scars (I only have one) and staying in the dark with measles so we wouldn’t go blind. Our pediatrician, Dr. Reece, would arrive at our house, driven by his chauffeur, wearing his dark coat and hat and carrying his medical bag. He walked up the steps to check our hearts and lungs and look at our tongues. He was one of the last of that kind of doctor.

In the living room, there was a little room/closet for the phone. In those days, you had to call the operator to make a long distance call. Calls were billed by the minute so they were kept short and you waited until after 7 to make calls when it was cheaper. When I was 8 or 9, I wanted to talk to my grandmother, so I snuck into the little room and called the operator as I had heard my parents do. I can’t remember if I knew her number or just gave the operator her name, but I got to talk to her. I felt very brave and grown up and sneaky. Did I get in trouble? I don’t think so. Daddy probably didn’t realize I made the call, unless my grandmother told my parents. She wasn’t one to tell on me though.

One time I was mad at my mother, so I packed a peanut butter sandwich and an apple in my little suitcase and ran away from home. Was I 6? I made it to the other end of our block and sat down to eat my sandwich. I really didn’t know where to go, so I turned around and went back home. Home wasn’t that bad.

Were those the “good old days” of my life, the years in that house? They were definitely good for us, but they were just a part of my life. I’ve lived long enough to have perspective and to have learned history. Those days were good for us, but they were unrealistic for both my parents. Women had few rights and men had unbelievable expectations. And we were white. Needless to say, the world wasn’t fair then for so many others. I’ve met people from different backgrounds who lived at that time and shake my head at our ignorance and ability to not see what was in front of us. We also didn’t understand the lives of those around us who were dealing with infidelity, substance and alcohol abuse, spousal and child abuse. These things just weren’t talked about, much less dealt with. I was one of the lucky children.

I’ve lived most of my life within about a square mile, so it was easy to drive by the house now and then. It was updated through the years, but it was still the house. A couple of months ago, I happened to turn that way and arrived just as the last piece of the house was demolished before my eyes. I was shocked, but shouldn’t have been surprised. Such is the world.

Here is the house being built there now.

It isn’t the worst it could be, but there is no side yard for playing and I’m sure the back yard is a carefully planned outdoor kitchen/patio. It will be a nice home and I hope that the families who live there make special memories.

For me, I have the memories of my years there that helped to make me who I am today. I’m basically still that little girl with the big imagination and the urge to explore and hoping to be brave enough to jump off that wall.