More birthday stuff

The photograph below is one that was taken In Lacoochee. My two friends, Wayne and Melanie, and I spent a lot of our time playing war. With wooden guns we were going to take care of keeping America free for democracy. After the war was over, my mother and daddy moved to Bradenton.My mother and daddy both worked out of the home. My mother worked at a drug store downtown Bradenton, and I spent a lot of time there. Because we lived inside the city limits, I wasn't eligible to ride the school bus, so I would go with my mother every morning to the drug store, eat my breakfast there, and then walk to school. I sat at the lunch counter with many notables in town. I don't know if you have a Beall's Outlet where you live or not, but the original Beall's Department Store was downtown, and old Mr. Beall ate at the drug store where my mother worked.

As I said before, I was in Brownies and Girl Scouts, and for my ninth birthday, I had a big party. All the troop was there, along with some neighborhood friends. I'm the one in the hat. My Girl Scout leader is to the right.
About the time I turned 9, I became a latch-key kid. My parents both worked on Saturday, and they decided that I was old enough to stay home by myself on Saturdays. I'd sleep in, then get up and listen to the radio (no, we didn't have a TV yet; we didn't even have any stations in Florida). It was during this time that I began to gain weight and by the time I was in sixth grade, I had become a fatty, or obese, as we correctly call it today. I guess a lot of my eating was out of boredom. On Saturday afternoons, however, I would the bus into town, and go see the western that was showing. There was usually a double feature and a serial. It cost all of 9 cents to get in. Mother would give me 15 cents, enough for a ticket and a candy bar. I look at high schoolers these days and think how young they look. Yet, when I look back on our days, we thought we so grown up. Looking at the picture above, I'm reminded of the many dresses I made; in fact, I made most of the clothes that I wore. My mother had always sewn for me. When I was little, she made dresses out of flowered or patterned feed sacks. I'm sure that some of you can identify with that.
After high school, I went on to university and graduated with a degree in elementary education. My goad was to be a missionary and teach missionary kids. I went to Cincinnati and taught in a Christian school for two years, then worked in the public schools for three. During that time I got my Master's degree from Miami University in Ohio, and then I was off to Haiti.

I will save Haiti for another post. All of my pictures are slides, and I need to figure out how to scan them and save them. Also, I don't have any pictures of my father here. I have some hilarious ones of him when he was young. That will also be a post for another day.

Thanks again for your kind comments. Today is also my blog birthday. When I was looking back at my first post, I saw that I had first posted on September 20.