Dolls - Livin' the Good Life

Dec. 10th, 2014

09:44 am - Dolls

Grandma Honey posted an old picture of herself, and also one of her mother, carrying their dolls. It inspired to me post this picture of me. According to my mother, my dolls were my most important possessions. Mom said, "She always had a doll under her arm". Going to the market? Gotta go get my doll!When I was older (about 10 here, in the center) I still loved dolls. For Christmas, my girlfriends and I all got baby buggies. So glad my dad thought to take this photo! Note the Southern California weather and attire on Dec. 25th. I don't think I owned a coat.These girls, Melanie Lodge (rt), Nancy Miller (left), and I were next door neighbors, and Nancy and I both wanted Melanie's undying love and devotion (I still have a few "love letters" from Melanie... with lingering perfume..... to prove it! Girls! So dramatic.) We were dressed in our Sunday best, walking down our street named Adelaide Drive, a cul-du-sac, in La Canada. We played on this sleepy little street, all day every day on the weekends and in summertime. Half the lots on that street were vacant, so there was plenty of land to roam and trees to climb.You'll notice the cliff alongside the road. That was the edge of a piece of vacant land that I explored to the point that I felt I knew it intimately. I created grassy paths all over it. When I was playing horses, I often jumped off the edge of that cliff onto the street below. When I was a horse, I thought I could do anything. My girfriends' mothers wouldn't allow them to do this, and I'm sure the girls were glad, because they were scared. I think I believed I had super powers "as a horse" and I never got hurt. Plus, my mother didn't seem to worry about me getting hurt. Was she ever even watching? I have no idea.By the way, don't bother to look this street up. It was long ago bulldozed away to create the 210 freeway in 1966, one year before I graduated from high school. So I lived there from 2nd grade through 12th grade, and I have my happiest childhhood memories there.

Comments:

What gorgeous curly hair! Your Mom must have had lots of fun with that. So you are the middle girl in that 2nd photo? Your waist looks so teeny tiny. Girls often wore dresses back then. Probably because we had to wear them to school everyday so that's what we had in our closets.

My favorite toy growing up were dolls, no doubt. I think you were the same. A few years before my Mom died she gave me a baby doll for my birthday. She said it reminded her of my childhood. I gave it to my granddaughters, but I wish I would have kept it.

Each time I gave birth and my mom would come over to help me, she would always say the same thing: "I don't think I gave you enough dolls when you were little." She was referring to the fact that she thought I never put my babies down….I was always holding them.

I honestly think my hair was straight, and my mother curled it. She was really into that kind of thing. I know lots of my pictures show curly hair, but just as many show straight hair. Once my mom told me I had "wavy" hair. At any rate, my mother loved hair and makeup and clothes and pretty things. And her hair always looked lovely. I think my hair was more difficult to manage.

I was always thin. In fact, when I was in 6th grade, the nurse kept sending notes home to give to my mom saying I was underweight. (In those days they weighed kids at school twice a year.)

The next year after I graduated, they changed the dress code. Girls could wear pants to school after that. I only wore pants to play in at home.

See how straight my hair was in the older picture? That's how I remember my hair. And that hair style was called a "duck tail" and was very popular for a few years. It was the easiest style to care for! You'd comb the hair back like a duck's tail, and that was it. No long hair to wash. But, after that, I grew it out and never wore it short again to this day.