Tennis In The 50′s
When I was a kid, tennis wasn’t a sport that was in the forefront like football and basketball. Very few kids learned how to play tennis, because no one taught tennis in those days. I was lucky enough to have grown up in a small town in Indiana, with a wonderful parks system, full of recreational facilities, and two…yes…two tennis courts. During the summer, my high school biology teacher gave tennis lessons at the park, so my sister and I were fortunate enough to have taken a full series of lessons from Mr. Jenkins. Looking back, I have to say he was a kind man with lots of patience, because none of us knew anything about the game of tennis.
I’m proud to say, my sister and I became good enough at tennis to have won several tennis tournaments, during our high school years. I thank Mr. Jenkins for that.
I grew up in Brazil, Indiana, a small town in central-western Indiana, during the 50′s. The 1950′s were a wonderful time to be a kid. Television hadn’t been around that long, so we weren’t bombarded with all the ugly news of the world. Instead, we were carefree and able to enjoy life to the fullest, without all the woes of the world coming down on us. Our favorite games in those days, didn’t require batteries, and involved interaction with other kids in the neighborhood. Our games of choice were Kick The Can, Hopscotch, Marbles, and a game I thought we invented then, but found out later, we hadn’t. We called the game Prisoner Of War, but I
think in other parts of the country, it had several different names. The idea of the game was to choose up sides and draw a line down the center of the yard with dead sticks or something that would divide the two sides. One team stayed on one side of the line and the other team, on the other. Each team had a pile of sticks that were stacked up, toward the back of the playing area. Players were suppose to sneak across the line and “steal” one of the sticks, then take it back across the line to their side. If the opponent tagged you while you were on their side of the playing field, you were “captured” and became a “prisoner of war”. The team that ended
up with the most sticks at the end of the game, was declared the winner. I know that probably sounds like a game that would bore the youth of today, but back then, it was one of our favorite games.
Every 4th of July, my hometown would bring a carnival to the park, a highlight of the summer. There were tons of rides like the tilta-whirl, the proverbial ferris wheel, dodge-em cars, a merry-go-round, and all the usual rides carnivals brought to town in those days. Games of chance were bountiful, and they were always my downfall. I was so naive, I thought I could actually win some of the “fantastic” prizes they offered. I went through money like water, trying to win teddy bears, watches, and other prizes that would have been less expensive to purchase if I’d just gone to the five-and-dime. The excitement, though, was winning them, so I shot at little
ducks floating in the water, threw rings over prizes stacked up on wooden blocks, and slowly made my way down the midway until I had tried just about every game of chance at the carnival. Needless to say, I hardly ever won anything, but the hope was always there.
Later in the afternoon, the Brazil Concert Band would give a performance in the park’s bandshell, of rousing Sousa marches, and Broadway show tunes. This was one of the highlights of the 4th of July afternoon, as it afforded everyone somewhere to sit down and relax and enjoy some of America’s most memorable music. I still think of my hometown to this day when I hear a Sousa march, and drift back to a less stressful time in my life, when people actually enjoyed the company of others.
Almost everyone was “poor” in the 50′s, my family not excluded. As a kid, though, I didn’t know we were poor, and never really wanted for anything. My parents were able to put a roof over my head, and food on the table, although I know it was a struggle many times to do so. I never went hungry, though, and never had to sleep on the street, so we made it through the rough times, a lot better off for the struggles, I’m sure. Since we were so poor, we rarely ate in a restaurant, so our occasional trip to the “big city” of Terre Haute, Indiana, was quite a treat for all of us. My mom, my sister, and I would take the bus to Terre Haute, and mainly window
shop, since we had very little money. The highlight of the day was lunch at Woolworth’s Five-And-Dime store. We always sat at the lunch counter, and I would order the same thing every time….a hot roast beef sandwich, with a mound of mashed potatoes and gravy, and a side order of peas, with a Coke to wash it all down….ecstasy! I loved Woolworth’s. It had a toy section to make a kid’s eyes sparkle…and mine truly did. I wanted everything I saw, but, of course, couldn’t afford, but it was all right. Just being able to see all the great toys lined up like soldiers in a parade made me feel rich. Sometimes my mom would buy my sister and me an inexpensive
toy to commemorate our trip to Terre Haute, and you would have thought she bought us the moon. We were always very appreciative, because we didn’t get that many toys, an act that would instill character in us for the rest of our lives.
During the summer months, my mom and dad would plant a garden in our backyard, to keep our food bill down, and my mom, my sister, and I would trample through the woods behind our house to pick wild raspberries and blackberries, which my mom would make into jams and jellies….if they made it back home before we ate them all. My mom would also can the vegetables from the garden, so we would have them during the winter months when my dad’s work would drop off. My dad was a house painter, and business was never good during the winter months, so we had to budget even more. One year, my mom and dad decided they would try to
raise chickens. Now, keep in mind, they were not farmers. My dad was born and raised in California, and grew up in a fairly large city. My mom, although from Indiana, graduated from college and became a schoolteacher, so she was a career woman, and never raised chickens in her life. This would be the experiment to end all experiments. Mom and Dad purchased 50 baby chickens from a local farmer, and put them in a pen my dad built in the backyard. We fed them, and watered them, and nurtured them, until the day came to kill one of them, which my mom did. At dinner that night, she served the chicken, and we all looked at the plate of freshly cooked
chicken, and none of us could eat it…including my dad. That was the end of the chicken raising experiment in my house, and it was back to the grocery store to buy chicken that someone else had killed. Sadly, during a rainstorm one night, all of the chickens drowned. I was devastated, and give that incident credit for my becoming a vegan, which I remain to this day.
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