By Jim Gassensmith
Trading Cards & Bicycle Spokes
As kids we all collected bubble gum cards with baseball stars on them. We’d trade them to try and get your complete White Sox team of Minnie Miinoso, Nellie Fox, and whoever the other ones were. We weren’t smart enough at that time to become collectors where they could have been valuable someday. We used to put them in our bicycle spokes with a clothespin. They made the bicycle wheel sound like a machine gun when it spun around. You’d buy the bubble gum and you’d get the bubble gum card free. They were on cheap cardboard, much like a cereal box.
Breakfast Table Traditions
Cereal box tops were also collected and sent away for various treasures like a decoder ring, Yukon compass, etc. I grew up eating cereal for breakfast: Wheaties, Post Toasties, Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, Puffed Wheat, and Shredded Wheat. Nothing was sugar-coated back then, so you’d put a couple spoons of sugar on the cereal before you ate it.
As you ate, you read the back of the cereal box, not the list of ingredients. They never showed you that like they do today, but something interesting—like how Puffed Wheat was shot from guns up in Battle Creek, Michigan, or how Jack Armstrong on the Wheaties box was an “All-American Boy,” whatever that meant. As far as I was concerned, I was an All-American boy. Rice Krispies couldn’t be eaten until you put your ear to the bowl and listened for the snap, crackle, and pop.
God, we were easy to entertain in those days!
Everyday Life & Making Do
I never knew what Eggs Benedict were until I was about 26 years old, married, and on vacation at the William Joyce summer home in Wisconsin. Dad would sometimes have bacon and eggs, but Lucille, Gene, and I ate cereal and fought over the box for reading material. Since Dad worked the second shift at the E.J.E. Railroad and never got home until after midnight, he wasn’t always up and eating breakfast with us. We didn’t have one of those modern families where Dad did the Sunday breakfast and Mom took the morning off.
Everyone in our house had their work assignments: Dad cut the grass, shoveled the snow…Can shoes had a way of tearing up your regular shoes, as did the puddle-stomping and mud-wading. Some of the lucky kids had cowboy boots, but I don’t have any memory of owning any myself.
Mom used to paint her legs up to her knees with a pink tanning lotion that was supposed to look like she had nylons on. Nylons were either too expensive or were scarce because of the war. If she had nylons, there was always a big disaster when they got a “run” in them. I never knew what a “run” was or why getting one would bring tears to her eyes.
Mom worked a lot during our growing-up years—probably not in the first or second grades, but I know she worked out at the Joliet Arsenal by Elwood, IL (now the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery) when we were in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. Mom and Dad used to budget their money by putting money into various envelopes for the various necessities like food, clothing, etc. I don’t remember wanting for anything during those years, but as I look back now, we didn’t have a lot. Of course, no one else did either.
