A Child of the 70's

My husband and I in Paris, 1978

I was a child of the 70's.

I wore bell-bottom jeans and embroidered, gauzy blouses, often with long beads around my neck.

I wore granny boots and tie-dyed t-shirts.

My hair was long, blonde and straight (the only decade where my thin, straight hair fit in), until I had to chop it off (see photo) when it was ruined by going in a swimming pool with too much chlorine. (It turned my hair green!!)

I often wore dark eyeliner and purple and blue eye shadow, but very little lipstick

I listened to the soothing sounds of Jim Croce and the Carpenters, and sang along with Carly Simon and Carol King; played John Denver and Bread on my stereo.

I also went to my share of rock concerts, most notably Chicago and Carlos Santana. We listened to Donna Summer and did the "Hustle".

It was the decade of "cool." My teachers were cool, too. They were hippies abroad, traveled extensively, were probably liberals in today's sense of the word, and taught us History and Social Studies against the background of yesterday's battlefields.

I loved the 70's. I graduated from high school in 1976 while living in Germany. It was a small DOD school for military dependents. Life was simpler then. We didn't have electronics. Unless you count 'boom boxes'. People actually called you on the phone. I took "Bookkeeping" in High School, an archaic subject nowadays. I also took Typing. At least that skill stayed with me.

I wanted to be a lawyer in the 70's. I love Law, Government, Politics, History, Philosophy, etc. I love a good debate.  My first job after High School was in a bank, so I became a banker instead.

I met my husband in 1977, in the Spring. It's funny how this time of year brings back those memories. We took little weekend trips to Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, etc.
We sampled the local wines in the villages along the Rhine River. When our daughter was born our landlord gave us a bottle of wine as a present. He owned a vineyard.
The 1970's were cool. After I had written this post I thought of all the sweet memories I had. And no wonder that Spring is a bittersweet time because I met my husband in April and lost him in April, too.
What decade brings back memories for you?

Blessings,
Anita

The Houses that Built Me

In the country song, "The House that Built Me," a young woman visits her childhood home and takes a trip down memory lane. It is a poignant song and reminds us that we can't go home again. I don't think I was ever attached to our temporary homes, but more to the sense of place, at that particular time.

Growing up in a military family we didn't have one particular house that we could call home. We lived in a series of rental houses and government quarters (apartments) until I moved out on my own at the tender age of 19.

There was the two-bedroom house on a country road in Tennessee that had a leaky roof. The landlord farmed the acreage next door and gave us free vegetables. We had a beagle, "Pee-Wee" and a German Shepherd, "Lady". The school bus picked us up at the end of the long driveway. My mother watched "General Hospital" on the black and white television , and we went shopping once a month, because the military only paid you monthly.

When my father went to Vietnam we lived in another two-bedroom house near my grandparents in middle Tennessee. I was ten, and my mother had just given birth to my baby sister. She had five children to take care of and a husband at war. I helped wrap the Christmas presents that year, after picking out my own gifts.
My father came home safely from the war. A taxi dropped him off, surprising us all.

The next house was in Oklahoma. I was eleven and we were studying Oklahoma history in school. I loved the musty odor of the history books and loved the Indian culture that we learned about. I had never seen prairie dogs before, nor buffalo that roamed on the nearby refuge. The house had a crawl space that we would hide in during tornado warnings. It was scary.

When we moved back to Germany we were assigned a four-bedroom apartment on the third floor of government housing. Each stairwell had eight families. At suppertime we could smell what other families were having for dinner and hear footsteps running up and down the stairs with children coming in from the playground. We walked to school, and walked home for lunch, and then back again. We spent the next four years there and we saw many families come and go. I remember in particular one cute Hispanic boy who had played one of the children on "The Flying Nun." His parents drove a fancy car and had a car phone, something unheard of in 1970, so we were in awe of his celebrity status. His name was Ruben.

We moved back to Alabama for the second time when I started high school. The one thing that I remember about the rental house was how it withstood the tornado of 1974. Our family took shelter in a small hallway when we heard the storm pass over, sounding just like a train. When it was over our neighborhood looked like a war zone, with trees and power lines down and several homes damaged or completely destroyed. We were fortunate.

When my husband retired from the Army we wanted our two daughters to grow up in one place. I wanted them to have roots and close relationships with their relatives. They would have their own childhood memories, of course, and not experience the itinerant childhoods of their parents. But there were times that I would get itchy feet and wish that I could move again. My children would say, "Mom, you were so lucky to see so many things and visit all these places." And I was. The houses that built me gave me so much more than four walls.

Memories In Black and White

I only have a few photos of my German relatives. The photo of my grandparents wedding is the only photo I have of my grandfather. He died when my mother was nine years old, in East Germany. They had been separated after the war and my grandmother and nine children became refugees, travelling by train from Czechoslovakia to West Germany after the war ended. I know very little about my grandparents, Karl and Anna, so I cherish the few photos that I have.

The next picture was taken of my Aunt Marianne's church wedding in the 1950's, when she married an American airman. My aunt was beautiful and reminded us of a movie star when she came to visit us in her convertible, with a silk scarf wrapped around her blonde hair. She was also my godmother. Sadly, we lost her at the young age of 37.

The last picture was actually an old, old black and white postcard that I had enlarged. It is the Cinderella castle, or Neuschwanstein, home of King Ludwig. No, he wasn't a relative, but I loved the picture of the castle!

Childhood Memories

This is a picture taken near the little town in Germany where I was born. I have very few photos of my place of birth. I found this on flickr, quite by accident. It is exactly the way I remember it, a picture postcard view with hills and valleys. The little town where I was born is near Giessen, which is about an hour's drive from Frankfurt. The views in the wintertime were breathtaking with clusters of houses nestled on the neighboring hills and everything blanketed in snow.

I lived with my Oma until I was 6 years old. Even as a little girl my grandmother would send me to the butcher with a note and a Deutsch mark clasped in my hand to pay for the purchases. We lived in a tiny, duplex apartment, with no hot running water. We  had a wood stove for heating. Oma's house didn't have shutters, so in freezing weather the window panes would freeze over, on the inside! Oma would put a hot brick under the featherbeds to heat the bed at night. She tended a large garden and kept a large bin of potatoes and root vegetables and apples down in her cellar. The woodshed was stocked for the winter with wood that my uncle chopped. She washed her clothes in a big galvinized washtub, which also served as a tub for bathing. Once a week the tub would be dragged upstairs and the water heated for our baths.

The baker would come around and bring fresh farmer's (bauern brot) bread, still hot from the oven and dusted with flour. That bread, smeared with real butter and homemade jam was the best there was!

Oma had a hard life. She lived through two wars and she and her children were refugees after the second war, forced to leave their farm and everything behind in the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. My grandfather died right after the war, leaving her a widow with nine children.

Here's a picture taken of me right before coming to the USA. I didn't speak a word of English, but picked it up quickly.