Sixteen days without posting here at Across the Way?
On the blog that is supposed to get my attention every few days, unlike at the Window where infrequent posts are a given?
There's nothing like a bad case of flu followed by nasty bronchitis to throw up a blogging roadblock. Other than wishing I'd bought stock in Kleenex and watching episode after episode of Midsomer Murders, about the only other thing I managed was to flip listlessly through pages in my vintage magazine collection.
Finding this cover from The Progressive Farmer magazine of February 1951 of a square dance in progress brought back memories of the square dance I went to as a child with my parents and two younger sisters.
This square dance was the genuine thing. Given by a Nashville farmer that my father bought produce from for the Middle Tennessee Kroger stores, it was held in a huge open-air shed. Big troughs along one side held watermelons in icy water and brown bottles of beer, something I wonder about now as Nashville was surely a dry county at the time. Maybe beer was okay?
The band was large, I remember, not just a few fiddles and banjos, and that big shed was packed with dancers. The dance was a birthday party for our host, Pap Sante, a man I remember chiefly for the large roll of money he carried in his pocket.
I remember that the band made a point of playing a special song several times in honor of the birthday man. It was Too Old to Cut the Mustard, a song I haven't thought about in decades, but when I checked on Youtube, the Ernest Tubb/Red Foley version sounds like what I heard that night.
I was in charge of keeping an eye on my little sisters when Mama and Daddy were dancing and we danced along with other children on the sidelines.
Some guests were dressed much as those in the picture above but the majority of the men were dressed in overalls, or overhauls as they were jokingly called. But I remember my own parents looking more like the following picture, a Kodak ad in The Saturday Evening Post from October 27, 1051.
Daddy had grown up in a farming family and liked farmers and was at ease with them, but I think that his training as an Air Force officer had given him a more sophisticated air than when he had enlisted, just as it did his older brothers who also served during WW II.
Mama was a small town girl who had also seen a whole different world as she followed Daddy from base to base, with me in tow, and who always had a touch of glamour about her.
So they were both a little more uptown at this square dance than many of the others. It may have been the beginning, though, of my parents' music interest expanding from big band songs to include the music of the Grand Ole Opry.
After all, in our neighborhood we were surrounded by Grand Ole Opry stars, Roy Acuff living one street over on the Cumberland River and Little Jimmy Dickens a street over in the other direction, Jim Reeves next to our church.
These two magazine pictures reminded me also that we had square dance lessons at elementary school during physical education time outdoors, first beginning with folk songs for the beginning grades--put your little foot, put your little foot, put your little foot right in...
As I thought back to the square dance I wondered if I could find a photograph of my family at that time and was lucky to find this one from 1951 that had to be that same year.
I'm the tall awkward child on the left, my little sisters, cute as buttons, next to me.
I look at my father and mother, our neighbors' house behind them, ours much like it and both built post war, and it's like it was yesterday. Our '48 Chevy shows barely and the slightly newer Ford must have belonged to someone in my mother's fun loving family who were there visiting.
Sometimes those days are sharper in my memory than what I did yesterday. I welcome the memories of my wonderful young parents and my grandparents, and many aunts and uncles.
Most all of them have promenaded on before me, leaving my three younger sisters--another one added about five years after this photograph was taken--very precious to me.
Two of them my square dance partners from the past.
