Part of this I have already written about, but it was so long ago, and many of the people who currently read my work weren't on the site at the time, so I have left it in. Apologies to those who have read it before.

(1950 - 1953)
 
I did well in school as Judy had taught me all the first grade work before I went and I had done the second grade work in my combined class. So when it was time for me to go into the second grade, Mom was asked if she'd like me to skip the second grade and go into the third grade with Judy. But Mom didn't think that would be fair on Judy as people would assume that she had failed a grade if we were together. Judy was already jealous of me for being taller and having bigger feet than she did. When we came home from the shoe shop on the day that my shoe size exceeded hers, she cried and cried.

So I stayed in the second grade and had Sister Norbert who was a very good storyteller, and very interesting person. But most of my time was spent out in the freezing hallway helping  the slow learners to read.

We got up early on school mornings because we went to Mass at eight, having met at school first and marched over with our classes. Most of the children went to Mass every school day although it wasn't obligatory. If you didn't however, you were made to feel that you didn't think enough of your religion. But we didn't feel it was any hardship and we enjoyed going to church. We took it very seriously. We were taught religion by the nun teachers and the priests who came round once a week, and we learned our prayers almost before anything else.

When Monsignor Feehan came into the classroom and asked us who would like to be priests when they grew up, all the boys raise their hands. And all the girls said they would like to be nuns. We felt the sisters and priests were a race apart, somewhere better than men, but not quite up to God. Nearly, though.

Sister Norbert told us a story about children whose parents took their shoes away so they couldn't go to church because they had to walk miles to church in the snow. We believed every word. I thought she was a saint. I couldn't criticise her for anything she did, but in retrospect I realise how bad a teacher she was.

She had very difficult circumstances to contend with as she was a young nun - not more than 25. She had 65 children in her classroom, and several with severe learning disabilities. Many others were very badly behaved. We were divided into tables according to abilities. The bright children, at Table 1 worked at their own pace. The sixth table children were such dullards that they just interrupted the class. So Sister Norbert took masking tape and put it across their mouths and some were restrained with string into the chairs.

This didn't happen everyday but often enough for it to be not considered unusual. There were several to whom this happened repeatedly. There were sisters, Cheryl and Carol, among these who were suffering from some severe nutritional deficiency disease. They had pop eyes and were very much smaller than the rest of us - like dolls almost but not pretty ones. They were hyperactive and they couldn't stay still.
 
Certainly the class was easier to teach when the difficult children were tied up. But Sister made her mistake in tying up one boy called Joseph Zerbes who was not subnormal, just full of mischief, because Joseph told his Dad who promptly came to school the next day to have it out with Sister.

We were coached well before he arrived. If he asked if Joseph has been tied up, we were to say "No, he wasn't" and we all did it. We didn't realise that what we were doing was compounding the wrong doing of our teacher, because to our way of thinking, she couldn't do wrong. We had to protect her. So Joseph's Dad went away thinking that his son was a liar as well as being badly behaved. I expect he was severely punished, and when all he did was reveal the truth that the rest of us concealed, without, at the time, feeling in the least guilty about it. I checked with Judy to see if a similar thing happened when she had Sister Norbert, but she said no, and I don't think she really believed me.

Our school was only in the next block so we easily walked there and back, and came home again for lunch. Lunch at home was always soup, and sandwiches, usually of cold meat. Just across in school was a little grocer, Mr. Hewlett's shop. Mr Hewlett was Dad's good friend and we always bought groceries there, although it no doubt was more expensive than going to a supermarket would have been.

The playground at the school was covered with gravel and many times we cut our knees and got scraped and dirty from falling down during recess. We played softball at school or a sort of chase game called Red Rover or "Pump Pump Pull Away, Come Away or We'll Pull You Away," another chase game.

Judy had a lot more friends than I did and a much more diversified group. One of her best friends was Karen Dybdal, who went to another school, and was a year older too, but had the same sorts of interests as Judy.


Each spring, the Squires, a Catholic boys organisation would have a Talent Show in our grade school. Judy and I entered on Mother's insistence to play a piano duet, Little Donkey. We started out okay but halfway through one of us got out of step. I can remember saying,"You're doing it wrong" and she said, "No, you are" and when everyone laughed we suddenly realised that the audience were listening to us. We decided to start again from the beginning and this time we got it right. We won third prize.

Judy had sore throats frequently. Mother would forcibly paint her throat with iodine which she hated and fought to prevent. When she was seven, she went into the hospital, St. Alexius which was right across from our school, and had her adenoids out. She was only away from home for two nights, and she was very much improved after that.

Once when I was ill with a very bad sore throat, the doctor was called in and he diagnosed me as having "pharyngeal adenitis" which I thought was most impressive, and he gave me a shot of penicillin in the rear end. I loved working those words into conversations so I could sound clever.

Mom spend a lot of time sewing for us. Some of our clothes were made over from things of hers or Kathleen's or one of her sisters. But she made them beautifully and we never felt like we were wearing second-hand clothes. But she insisted on buying top-quality shoes. We all had narrow feet, and narrow shoes were hard to find, and very expensive. But she thought it was worth the extra money to make sure our feet weren't ruined by bad shoes. She seldom sewed for herself. She liked to go to the best quality dress stores and pick out one good dress a year, rather than have three or four cheaper ones for the same amount of money. We had charge accounts at many of the Bismarck stores and paid towards them each month.

When we went into the shoe shop as children, there were some seats shaped like animals, and if we got Buster Brown shoes we get a comic to go with them. We had our feet x-rayed routinely to see how well the shoe fit by a special machine in the shop. Those machines were later outlawed as they were thought to be extremely dangerous, but by then we probably had had hundreds of x-rays of our feet.

Once in awhile Jack and Ceal came to visit, Mom's brother from Jamestown and his wife. Jack and Chet went out hunting and shot lots of pheasants and ducks. I felt so bad to see the dead birds. I refused to eat any and felt quite sick as people kept picking bits of shot out of the meat they were eating.

Mom made me a pale blue coat for spring. I wore it on the day of my First Communion. I had not felt at all well the day before that Sunday when my class were due to make our First Communion, and I had had a fever, but on the day itself I begged to be allowed to go to church. So rather than letting me walk in the cold air, Mom and Dad drove to church and I joined up with the possession at the door. I had worn my blue coat, and Mom took it from me to show off my white dress and veil, which were Judy's old ones.

My partner was my good friend,Mary Tschider, and it was all very exciting and everything went well at first. I remember after we went up for communion Mary whispered to me, "Mary Feist (who wasn't very bright) took the Host out of her mouth." Such a thing to happen.

Then suddenly I felt very odd. I knew I was ill, but even though I sat down, I didn't feel any better. As my parents come back from Communion and looked over at me, I said, "I feel sick, Morna." They told me to come to the end of my pew, and we went out of the church. As I reached the door, I fainted and luckily Dad caught me and carried me to the car. Then I was bundled back to bed and by that evening I had broken out in measles. So I missed having any First Communion pictures taken.

Besides my illness, another thing that might have contributed to my fainting was that in those days, no one was allowed to eat or drink anything before Communion from the midnight before. Not even water. We of course held strictly to this rule, as we did all the rules of the church, thinking there was a good and just reason for it.

But each morning all this community of children (8 grades, 2 classes for each grades, 65 children per class = 1040) would come to school not having had any food or drink. We were able to buy chocolate milk and doughnuts after Mass in the school auditorium if there was enough time, and also if we had the money. But most of us were hungry for the morning of each day of the school year.

Mom took great pride in the dresses she made for us many of which were identical. One set were striped in pastel colours. They were lovely and had spaghetti straps and little pink bolero jackets. When we had outgrown them, Mom donated them to the school's rummage sale. The next week we saw a girl wearing one of them, and we felt so bad because it hadn't been washed or ironed for a long time and looked very different from how it had looked on us.

Saturday evenings we always had the same menu. Dad made hamburgers to his own recipe. He added spices, which kind I don't know, and an egg and breadcrumbs. We had buns from Coxes bakery. We would then put mustard and dill pickles on the hamburgers. We always had fruit salad with whipped cream on too.
(I'm sure my defense of McDonalds has something to do with my childhood thrill of eating hamburgers).

On Sunday's we'd have brunch of some sort which meant waffles, scrambled eggs, sausages or bacon, and home-made jam and then in mid-afternoon we'd have a big meal which was pot roasted beef or fried chicken as often as not. And in the evenings we had sandwiches from the left-overs from lunch, and ice-cream from the Okay Confectionery. The Okay was on the comer near Bismarck Hospital and they had their ice-cream in bulk containers. We often had maple-nut or rainbow ice cream, but the vanilla was very good and we had hot homemade chocolate sauce to go with that, and chopped walnuts on top.

Weekday suppers were usually meat, potatoes and vegetables. We seldom had dessert, except after Sunday dinners when we often had pie. We hardly ever had fruit. Judy and I were picky eaters. I had a bunch of things I wouldn't eat and Judy couldn't stand things which were mixed together. But when we went to other children's houses we ate whatever they offered and often found we liked the food after all. Macaroni Cheese was a case in point. Neither of us would eat it until we ate it at the Fitterers and after that it was a favourite.

For drinks we children always had milk with our meals. Dad had milk too, as well as coffee which he had with cream and Mom had hers black. In the evenings, Dad and Mom drank beer. We had wine only on very special occasions like Christmas and Easter and we always got Mogan David Wine, which is a very sweet fortified wine. We children were allowed a very small glass even when we were quite young and sometimes added Seven-up to ours which we felt improved the flavour.

Judy and I listened to Dragnet, a police story, and The Shadow, a detective story on the radio which often gave us nightmares thinking of the ending for the Shadow programme, "He he he, the Shadow knows, he he".

On Sunday afternoons, our parents got and completely read the Minneapolis Tribune and Fargo Forum Sunday newspapers, and then napped.

Judy and I went out with our friends. We sometimes met at the little park on 17th Street. It was about two blocks long and had swings and slides. One section was a wading pool in summer and an ice skating rink in winter. We always had skates and but I was never very good at it and I got so cold my feet would be nearly frozen. Five hours afterwards they had stopped tingling but thawing out was a slow and painful process.

On Saturday afternoons when there weren't any ball games on, Dad sometimes took Judy and me with him up to the K C Club which was then located on 5th Street, above Johnnie's Bar. We'd play pool in our own way- and had great fun drinking orange crush, served by John Runge, the barman, while Dad had his beer and talked with his friends. Dad loved to socialise. His greatest fun came from his club life - both the Knights of Columbus and the Elks - the latter more so as we grew older. He took it all very seriously and went through the chairs - which is what they call the steady progression of the officers from the lowest to the highest ranking position. He took part in initiations and attended all the meetings and went to committee meetings extra. In fact he spent most evenings in one or the other of his clubs. Mom went him to the occasional dance or ladies' night, and dreaded going although she always seemed to have had a good time when she actually got there and she loved dancing.

Dad was very proud of our achievements and bragged about us to his friends. We were always rather embarrassed as he made us sound so much better than we really were. He himself wasn't very musical but his speaking voice was beautiful -slow and musical. He loved to have speaking parts in the various club functions, and everyone thrilled to hear his voice. He was very emotional - and wasn't ashamed to have to clear his throat or wipe his eyes when he'd be talking about his friends from the Elks who'd died during the previous year or some such.

One of Dad's greatest friends was Doctor Priske - our dentist and also a KC and an Elk. Anyway Doc Priske had 4 children who were all clever, and his girls were pretty and popular. But Dad was so very pleased when one night Doc Priske told him how much he envied Dad his girls. He said, "How did you do it? How did you raise your girls so that they caused you so little trouble and heartache?" I expect that the difference was in that the Priske's had money - and we didn't- yet didn't seem to feel like we were worse off for the lack of it.

At the end of our block was a huge house made into lots of small apartments, all rather run down and dirty looking. In one of these lived a girl called Marlene who spent the school year in Grafton at a school for those with special educational needs. Marlene was a lot older than we were, perhaps 16 to Judy's 9 and my 8. She was a big girl - fat and tall and strong and also rather unattractive. Her IQ was about equal to a 5 or 6 year old. She knew she was retarded because she told us she was, but she didn't know what it meant.

We saw a lot of her for one or two summers - not from choice but because she was always around and we couldn't think of a nice way of telling her to go away. Mom was worried that she would hurt us, but she was always very nice with us. She valued our friendship a lot.

I can remember Marlene coming downstairs in our house with us once to see if she wanted to borrow any of our babyish books we'd long outgrown. She used to go to the library regularly and could read simple books - but soon she was banned from the library because she had hit one of the librarians.

Marlene told us she had been approached by boys who wanted her to buy cigarettes for them so she'd go into the 16th Street store and buy them and give the cigatettes to them. She also told us how they tried to take other liberties with her, which we didn't really properly understand, but only knew enough that she should not do what they told her they wanted her to do. She swore that she didn't let them.

On Judy's birthday she would give her a present - some soap I think it was, and say, "I hope you don't think I stole this." We immediate did then of course. For my birthday she gave me a hanky and then said more or less the same.