Burlington, Vermont

Burlington, Vermont
Sarah was almost a year old when Daddy was finally transferred back to the states from England. First he had a month of leave which we spent in the same small apartment in Pampa, Texas and a quick trip to Cortez, Colorado to see Daddy’s parents and family. He was the oldest of ten children, several of them where still at home at this time. Robert, my dad, and William, Emma, Gilbert, Lorella, Jeanette, Joyce, Butch, and George. There was a girl that died when she was about three, whose name I don’t remember, between Lorella and Jeanette, I think. She died from some sort of fever. Apparently they didn’t realize she was as sick as she was. I know that Grandma was always very sad about it. The youngest, my Uncle George, was only four years older than me. There is the story that Grandma, Daddy’s mom; Dorothy (Wells) Barnett was in the hospital having George at the same time as her oldest daughter, Emma, was having her first child.




Ethan Allen Air Force Base, Burlington, Vermont

Daddy had orders sending him to Ethan Allen Air Force Base outside of Burlington, Vermont. So that is where we went. It must have been a long drive up there and was the first of many cross country car trips that our family would make. I don’t remember it.
Daddy worked in the motor pool at Ethan Allen. He took care of the cars, truck, buses, and other vehicles that are the big fleet that all military bases need. He did minor work on them and drove vehicles when needed. I think he was a driver for some of the officers of the bases at various times.


Since neither Mother nor Daddy had ever been in this part of the United States they did make several day trips around Vermont. While on one trip I can remember that we got way of the main roads onto a dirt road where Daddy did some target shooting with one of his handguns. For the first time he let me actually shoot the gun. I was thrilled. I had always known that there was a handgun under Daddy’s pillow in his and mother’s bed. I also knew I was never, under any circumstances to touch it. It was for adults only. I also knew that it was a secret and I was never to tell anyone else that the gun was there, and I was to never let my little sister touch it. If she did I was to tell my mom or dad right away. I was not to try to take it from her. I knew all of this and I always obeyed. I may have been a brat and did other things I wasn’t supposed to but when it came to the gun I realized it wasn’t to be ever touched or taken. Maybe watching Papa kill those rats had taught me something after all. I knew guns could kill.
I think if more children were raised to understand that a gun can actually kill there would be fewer accidental shooting. My sisters and I never even thought of playing with a gun. My parents and their parents had and used guns and there was never a problem. Lee was brought up the same way and I don’t think there was ever a problem in his family either. Lee was out hunting with a 22 rifle by the time he was five to help provide food, usually squirrels, for the table. We raised our son, Dustin, the same way. He knew where the guns were and how to use them by the time he was in grade school. Dustin doesn’t hunt and Lee doesn’t hunt as much now as he used to.
During the summer that I turned six I swear my sister tried to kill herself. Not on purpose but it seemed like it. It would have been the summer of her second year. For what ever reason Mother and Sarah were at the top of the stairs in the house and I was at the bottom of the stairs. No one knew why but Sarah fell from the top and rolled over and over down the stairs. It was a long, narrow staircase with about twenty stairs. When she fell, she rolled into a ball and rolled down landing at my feet. It startled me but what really scared me was the fact that Mother screamed. It was the first and last time I ever heard her scream like that. A real scream like women do on TV or the movies. She screamed loud enough that the woman who lived in the other half of the duplex came running to see what had happened. As soon as she had screamed Mother came running down the stairs as I was running to Sarah. Of course Sarah was crying loudly but it turned out she was more scared than hurt. The only thing we could find wrong with her was a small burse on her forehead.
The neighbor who had run over to help was named Paulette, and she was from France. She and her husband had a boy my age named Johnny. I guess you could say that Johnny was my first boyfriend. Johnny even kissed me while we were on the merry-go-round at the nearby playground one day. When my birthday came around in August Johnny wanted to give me a birthday present. He and one or two other kids were invited over and Mother had made a birthday cake. I don’t remember what the other kids gave me, but Johnny gave me a little nightgown. I think he had picked it out with his parents help. Turned out his dad had given his mom a nightgown for her birthday. Everyone seemed to think it was cute that was what he wanted to give me, too, instead of some sort of toy.
My parents bought me a bycle for my sixth birthday. I got to go with them when they bought it. Daddy wanted to get me a red one but I through a fit and even though I wanted one desperately I insisted I wouldn’t ride it unless I got a blue one. I got the blue one with training wheels. I rode it up and down the sidewalks around the neighborhood but as soon as the snows came it went into a storage room and I didn’t see it again for about a year. At about that time I was also given a pair of used roller skates. The old kind, which clamped around your shoe with a special key depending on your foot size. I still have those old skates but never did learn to skate.
The second accident Sarah had that summer was on a weird little toy horse. It was sort of like a rocking horse but on four little wheels. She would sit on the seat and push herself along with her feet. She must have hit a rock, a crack in the sidewalk, or just tipped it over but she hit her mouth on the sidewalk and pushed her two upper front teeth back up into her gums. She screamed like only a hurt two year old can scream. I’m not sure what Mother and I were doing but we weren’t that far from her and were with her in seconds. The blood was pouring down from her mouth, over her chin, and down her clothes. Mother grabbed her up and ran in the house. Seems liked she grabbed something, maybe a towel and held it to Sarah’s mouth while at the same time calling Daddy. In minutes he was there taking all of us to the hospital or clinic or whatever it was where we went. I believe Sarah was kept overnight and they removed her two upper front teeth. I am sure with in a week or so she was back to normal except that until her permanent front teeth came in she didn’t have teeth in the front. Until then we frequently sang the song about ‘all I want for Christmas is my two front teeth’, but I think it might have been a lot of embarrassment for her.
Even though Vermont didn’t come close to the heat we had been used to in New Mexico and Texas it was hot there. I remember that we went to some people’s house that we went to church with that lived in a more rural area. They seemed to think that it was really odd that we drank ice tea almost year round. They drank it cool in the summer but didn’t even put ice in it. I think everyone drinks ice tea now. With ice in it.
Back then was the days that DDT was used for mosquito control. The misquotes must have been thick on the base. Every so often the DDT truck would come through spraying DDT everywhere. It is horrifying to think of them doing that now. The truck had some sort of siren or horn that they used with a megaphone that someone would holler “DDT Truck” as they came through an area. I and all the other kids were taught that we were supposed to go inside when the truck came through so that we wouldn’t get the spray on us. But sometimes we were to far from our home or a friend’s home and couldn’t make. We really didn’t think too much of it. The truck driver would just laugh and wave at us as he went by. I know I got sprayed several times that summer. I wonder how much it has contributed to the health problems I have now.
That summer I, also, got a puppy. Who knows for sure what kind of dog he was but memory says he was mostly some kind of terrier, maybe fox terrier. Seems like Daddy said he was sitting in the office at the motor pool and someone walked through and dropped a puppy in his lap saying it was the one he had said he would take. Of course Daddy swore he never agreed to a dog. I don’t think Daddy ever liked Skippy as I named him. My dad did not ever care for dogs that much. He preferred cats, while Mother preferred dogs. We didn’t have a yard and I don’t guess Skippy was ever tied up. He roamed all over the base, as I recall he became sort of like a base mascot. He visited all over, including the commanding officers house frequently. Seems like the only time Skippy came home after he was a couple of months old was to eat and sometimes to sleep.
Sometime while we were in Vermont we got a television. Most military families made enough money to have one of the new fangled gadgets my now, which was about 1957 but Daddy was always one of the last to get any thing modern. We had always had a radio and that was good enough. There must have been something on TV that Daddy wanted to watch as he wouldn’t have got one for just us kids or Mother. Maybe it was wrestling as he always liked to watch it or maybe it was for the baseball games. Regardless I thought it was so I could watch Captain Kangaroo, cartoons, and best of all Roy Rodgers.
We didn’t really have yards with the duplex houses that everyone lived in and there were a couple of playground areas for the kids so that was were we hung out. Seemed any child that was over two years old was always at the playground. I really liked riding on the small merry-go-round that was there, just as I had at the park in Pampa, Texas. But one day one of the other kids asked me to ride the teeter-totter with him. He was going up and down faster than I usually did but it was fun. Then I think his mom called him, and without saying anything to me he just jumped off. I was up when he jumped and came down fast and fell off hard onto my back. It knocked the breath out of me, but of course I didn’t know what that was and thought I was dying because I couldn’t breathe and it hurt so badly. I can still remember how my chest hurt trying to breath and unable to. After struggling there on the ground for a few minutes I was finally able to sit up then to stagger to my feet and finally get to the house. Mother told me I had the breath knocked out of me, plus I had bumped my head and for several days had a headache.
I watch the bull riders on TV now and how they frequently come off the bulls hard enough to get the breath knocked out of them and wonder how they can be so nonchalant about it.
While in Vermont I started school. No kindergarten for me, it was right into first grade. I was able to walk out the front door and got on the bus right at the edge of the street. Our school bus’ weren’t the traditional yellow busses but where blue busses supplied by the base. Oddly when the regular driver couldn’t make it, it was my dad that drove the bus, which made me feel very special that my dad drove the bus.
I didn’t like school right from the beginning. I was shy, painfully shy. I refused to speak in class, and had a hard time leaning. My mom helped me quite a bit or I would have never learned anything. She had already taught me the alphabet and to write my name which was a big help but I couldn’t get over being so shy I couldn’t talk in front of the class or to the other children. I think all of these kids had been together the year before in kindergarten and was used to the classroom conditions but for me it was horrifying event. I quickly leaned to fight going to school. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay home in my safe little world of mom, Sarah, and me. But Mother wanted me to go to school. She knew I had to, and needed to learn, and she was pregnant again.
One weekend that fall we took a trip to Santa Claus Land. It was either called that or The North Pole, I don’t remember which. It was a tourist place that had a big toy shop beside of a small village setup for children to play in. There were a series of small houses and a larger one where Santa Claus would talk to the children letting them sit on his lap. It was open year round but of course it got more business as the Christmas season got near. It had a rural setting and a petting zoo. There was even several reindeer that pulled a sled or wagon, depending on the season that you could pay to ride in. My penny pinching parents refused to let me ride in the wagon on that day. For a long time I was very upset with them for not letting me ride in the wagon pulled by the real reindeer. Mother took pictures of it for me but it wasn’t the same thing. I remember I really didn’t care about anything else on the trip, but Sarah, now two years old had a great time playing in the small houses.
It was to be a long winter in Vermont for Mother and for me. The snow came and came and came. And never left. We had never lived anywhere that the snow didn’t melt off between snowstorms like it does in most of New Mexico and Texas. Even when there had been a bad snowstorm one winter in Pampa, Texas to the point that we were snowed in and the neighbor had brought milk and food to us for about two weeks, the snow had melted off shortly after. This snow stayed and didn’t melt. It was cold and the cold never seemed to let up. Every morning I had to get up early to dress, eat breakfast, put on a heavy jacket, and snowpants over my dress, then a pair of snow boots, and a hat and mittens. I had to get on the bus and go to school and then take off the hat, mittens, jacket, and snowpants. At noon the snow clothes came on again so that I could catch the bus and go home for lunch. There was no cafeteria at the school and we couldn’t take sack lunches to school. Mother would help me take off the snow clothes, eat and put them on again to catch the bus and go back to school where the process was repeated again for the afternoon. After I was grown I remember Mother saying that the teacher said all she did was dress and undress a roomful of kids. I don’t remember how many where in the class. Is it any wonder I hated school?
And to top it off Mother was very pregnant. We had a two story house with the bedrooms, and bathroom upstairs. So dumb for a pregnant woman with two children. You had to know a man designed it. The doctors told my parents that due to this Mother was to stay upstairs for the first several weeks after the baby was born. How were they to manage? Daddy hired a woman with two small children about my age to stay with us during the day and help Mother with the baby and do the cleaning and cooking. Sounded great, but was a disaster. The woman didn’t clean and her kids ran wild. They took all of mine and Sarah’s toys and refused to let us play with them and broke most of the breakable ones. The woman didn’t help Mother much with my new little sister, Janice Laurel, and was very lax in getting food to Mother. Apparently it wasn’t fixed very well either.
One day I had an argument with the other kids over the toys and was spanked for it by the woman Daddy had hired. I took Sarah to the top of the stairs and sat with her crying. Mother must have heard or her mother’s instinct had kicked in. Anyway she heard us and took us into her room with her and the baby. I’m not sure what happened but the next day the hired woman didn’t come back.
Against the doctors orders Mother went up and down the stairs a couple of times a day. In the morning Daddy would try to take her everything she would need for the morning, get me ready for school, see me off, take Sarah to Mother and go to work. At noon Mother would come down with Sarah and Janice, met me at the door, feed all of us lunch, see me off to school and go back upstairs. After school I took care of myself and Sarah, and fetched and carried for Mother. Daddy would come home and fix supper and most of the time I think we ate upstairs which was strange to me as we were a family that always ate at the table. I think I got to stay home several different days and help. For some reason I thought that part of the reason the woman left was my fault but I really knew it wasn’t, that the woman and her kids just weren’t our kind of people. I was more than willing to run up and down the stairs to help anyway I could. I think it was at that time that I started playing “mommy” to my younger sisters. My Mother always said I “mothered my sisters” all my life. But then I think she did a lot of that with her two younger sisters, too. Like me she was the oldest of three girls, spaced out about the same. Catherine, Elnora, and Wanda.
Janice was six weeks old when we left Vermont. It was the dead of winter with snow piled up about six feet along the side of the house where Daddy had shoveled the path to the street.
Mother must have been very thankful that Daddy had enough rank now for the government to send in a moving company to pack and move all of our furniture and things. In later years it was to be quite a game to see who could guess which moving company was going to move us or a friend. People who work for moving companies like Mayflower, the only one I can think of off hand, they pack anything and everything in each room as they go through or they did back then. If there is trash in a trash can they will pack it; that trash will still be in that can when you unpack it. Everything goes into big boxes. Some of them are big, big boxes. It is amazing what all they could put in a box. Everything except the larger furniture. Each item in your home is wrapped in paper and put into the boxes. Hopefully they wrap it well enough it won’t break if it is breakable, like dishes and nick knacks. Most moving companies will unpack it for you but we usually just had them unload the boxes into the house and then we did the unpacking as we had a chance. As Mother and Daddy said we would have to put everything a way anyway as they just put it where ever they unpacked it. And it gave us girls something to do. It was kind of fun to unpack and remember all of our things. And the boxes were always fun to play with. We would make all kinds of forts, ships, towns, cabins, with them and maybe a sheet or blanket. They were great playhouses.
Our things might have been going on a moving van but there was us and the dog to consider, as well as the car. Wish I could remember what kind of car it was. And it was winter, a bad winter, and my baby sister; Janice was only six weeks old. Daddy decided that he would drive down to Pampa, Texas with the dog, while Mother, and the three of us girls would fly down, being met by Gram and Papa at the airport in Amarillo. I don’t think Daddy, who had flown several times, being in the military, realized just how terrified Mother was to fly to Texas. Especially with three small children to care for. And since Mother was terrified so was I and I am sure Sarah was, too.
I don’t remember what airport we left from but it was a short flight to an airport in New York city. We were to chance flights then but I don’t think either of my parents had realized that we had to chance airports, too. And it was to be with in a short time of landing. As soon as we got off of one plane we had to run to catch a bus that ran between the airports. Mother was carrying Janice, her purse and another bag. I had Sarah by one hand and my green tote bag full of toys in the other hand. Mother had told both us to hang onto her skirt real tight and to not let go. We tried, but we kept lagging behind. I was so afraid that we would get lost from Mother. There were so many strange sights, and people, and it was so crowded. We managed to get on the bus and to the other airport but it looked as if we would be late to catch the next plane. Mother said that a man in an airport uniform came up and asked if she needed any help. She said yes and explained where we were going. He took her bigger bag and picked up Sarah. Now Sarah had a horrible habbit of screaming at the top of her lungs every time a stranger even looked at her let alone picked her up. I held my breath and expected her to scream and I am sure Mother did, too. I guess she was just too scared because she didn’t scream. The man didn’t ever realize just how lucky he was not to have her screaming in his ear. Several people had been horrified by the screams my sister could make when she didn’t want a stranger to touch her. Anyway he led the way, with Mother following and me holding to her skirt. With seconds to spare the helpful man got us on board our next flight. I know we were always grateful to him but I am sure he just considered it part of his job. There has been the though in Mother’s and later my mine that with the uniform he had on he might have actually been a pilot, instead of just an airport worker. Anyway he was the ‘pilot’ or angel we needed that day.
I wasn’t to take another airplane flight until I was eighteen and flew from Phoenix, Arizona to O’Hare airport in Chicago, Illinois and then on to Baltimore and a bus to Bainbridge, Maryland for Navel Bootcamp when I joined the Navy. It was also the first time I got back to the eastern United States.