Installment # 62

Who knows where we get some of our attitudes?  One that I brought with me to California, though I don’t know where I got it, was “waste not, want not” when it comes to food.  I don’t recall that being a big deal during my upbringing.  If Mom or Dad did teach that, it must have made so much sense to me that I didn’t see it as something I needed to be told.  For example, the first time I slept over at Sandy’s parents’ house and looked for toast for breakfast, I was startled to find more than one loaf of bread open.  In fact, there were 3 or 4 partial loaves open.  We had never opened a second loaf of bread before finishing the first one.  I think it had to do with freshness and not letting a partial loaf of bread go bad.  Sandy explained that her mother liked to have variety available.  Who wanted to have the same kind of bread every day for toast, sandwiches, etc?  Again, I was startled.  In never occurred to me that people needed variety in bread.  We just ate it.  What difference did it make what kind it was? 

One of Sandy’s favorites was sour dough French bread, which in all fairness did not (does not) exist on the east coast, so there was that factor.  My favorite bread was whatever was available!  Also, perhaps the use of preservatives had become prevalent during my time away from Long Island, which would enable people to keep open bread longer.  Sandy’s parents were Bob and Doris Moulton.  The girls (Sandy, Pam and Kathleen) called their dad “Poppa” and that became his name as a grandfather, too.  I also called him “Poppa” as a term of respect and affection.  That may be something else that has changed, culturally.  My sons-in-law call me Tom, never “Dad” or “Poppa”.  Again, it may be due to the fact that they were in their 30s when we met.  I was 21 when I met Poppa, and he was around 51.  I recall being completely unable to relate to him, except as someone from a completely different era and circumstance.  It is interesting, because I feel like I have always been able to relate to people in their 20, even as I have gone through my 50s and 60s.  I can’t imagine that they see me in the same way as I saw Poppa back then.

When Michelle learned she was pregnant with her first, Ryan, her method of telling me was to ask whether I preferred to be called “Grandpa” or “Poppa” or something else.  After rejoicing over the exciting news, I said I wanted to be “Grandpa,” which I am to her kids.  However, here in San Jose, Brianna insisted on calling me “Poppa,” and that became my name among Bobby’s kids, too.  At first I thought Brianna simply couldn’t pronounce “Grandpa,” so said “Poppa” instead.  But when she was old enough to explain, she said that she associated “Grandpa” with an old person who would die soon, and she didn’t want that for me (I appreciate that!).  That idea, in turn, came from the fact that her dad, Jimmy, was very close to his grandmother when Brianna was little; and “grandma” died when Brianna was little, so she associated the terms “grandma” and “grandpa” with old people who died.  So I became “Poppa” to the 5 grandkids in San Jose, and when Bob Moulton died, I was much honored to be called “Poppa.”  It was like a mantel being passed on to me, except that they spell it Papa.

In the home where Sandy and her sisters grew up, Bob and Doris liked to hang wrought iron trivets with amusing sayings on them, such as the Dutchman saying, “Vee are too soon olt, und too late schmart!”  On one of the first occasions that Don and Audrey visited, Don was looking at a trivet that said, “A plump wife and a big barn never did any man harm,” and he looked around and asked, “Where is the barn?”  I don’t know whether Doris caught that or not.  She had lost a significant portion of her hearing at an early age.  But the rest of us thought that was pretty funny.

When I first met Sandy she was working a summer job for Host International at the employee cafeteria at the San Francisco International Airport.  In the fall she went back to San Jose State to begin her second year.  She lived off campus with three other girls (no coed housing in those days!).  I would visit just about every “weekend” (my days off were usually during the week, based on my limited seniority).  Anyway, the girls had made a huge amount of turkey soup from Thanksgiving leftovers and thought there was no way they could eat it all.  It seems I demonstrated a trait that I would have to this day: Rather than buy fresh food, I would consume as much as I could every time I visited, and told them to please don’t throw any away, unless it went bad.  I guess they froze some from week to week.  Sandy marveled that I didn’t get tired of it, but kept eating it week after week until it was all gone.  Having eaten Sandy’s cooking virtually all my adult life after the military, I have learned to appreciate variety, but I still have no qualms at all about eating the same leftovers for several days.  She usually finds another way to incorporate leftovers into another dish, knowing that variety at least provides a better balance of vitamins and minerals, but taste-wise I wouldn’t care if I ate the same exact thing four or five days (lunch) and nights in a row.

It was during one of those visits that I first heard about refried beans, a favorite in Mexican restaurants.  I thought they were talking about reheating leftovers.  I was incredulous to think that a restaurant would emphasize the fact that they were serving leftovers.  The girls got a big kick out of that bit of confusion.  That scene also reminds me of how incredulous I was to learn that there was practically nowhere for guests to park that didn’t require “feeding” the parking meter with dimes.  I would walk many blocks, even in bad weather, to avoid putting coins in the meter, just on principle.  I was just young.  I hadn’t lived long enough in civilian society as an adult to realize that land is valuable and that it cost money for the college or the city to maintain the streets and sidewalks, the lighting, etc.  Now I don’t mind at all doing my fair share to keep things nice.

It has been my observation that less educated people are less inclined to cooperate in general.  I am thinking of young men, who shall remain unnamed, who, for example, will not take the trouble to recycle things because it is too much bother, or they suspect that the collection service is unduly benefitting from the system.  I am thinking of someone who will have a fire in his fireplace on a “spare the air” day, because the police are too short-handed to enforce such a thing.  When the water district announced the future effective date of a 20% cut back in water usage, where voluntary cut backs would become mandatory because of a severe drought that we are all aware of, some people started using more water than normal, even wasting water, to get a falsely high “normal” so that when their 20% reduction was calculated it wouldn’t affect their actual desired water usage.  In other words, they started using more water instead of less, making the situation worse for all of us, so that the restrictions would not affect them personally.  Broadly speaking, these are situations where “if everybody did it” we would have a catastrophe; and these individuals know that most people will go along with the program, so they don’t have to.  They sort of “laugh up their sleeves” and think the rest of us are dummies.

Mom and Dad certainly needed to be frugal and thrifty, and I don’t think we wasted much, but I don’t recall eating the same thing for two days in a row.  Again, if we did, it was so sensible to me that I didn’t even think about it.  Although we had very little, I remember the era of the care package, where Americans were encouraged to provide something for hungry, starving people around the world (and I guess in the U.S., though I don’t remember the details).   This was in the 1950s.  The March of Dimes was big in those days, too, and they meant actual dimes.  Someone would walk the neighborhood and leave the empty booklets, and we would try to fill them up with dimes.  I don’t recall if the same person would come back around and collect the booklets (the honor system!) or if we would bring the filled booklets to a more formal collection center (a more formal-looking honor system?).  The March of Dimes is still around, of course, but they are not too excited about literal dimes, and of course people write checks.

Speaking of frugal, the most expensive thing we did at birthday parties was play “Pin the Tail on the Donkey.”  A kit was very inexpensive to buy, but the game could also be set up with materials already on hand.   We also played a game where we tried to drop clothes pins into an empty milk bottle from a certain height.  The smallest kids had hands that hung down closest to the top of the bottle, so this leveled the playing field somewhat.  We also pitched pennies, shot marbles and flipped baseball cards at birthday parties – games that could generally be played with items that were already in the home.  Birthday parties took place in the homes; there was no going out to a special venue or event for a birthday party.  Party favors were also unheard of.  A child might go home with a balloon, but that was about it.  And all that was served was cake and soda.  It might not be fair to say that this was all people could afford, but this was the standard people expected.  No one was competing or trying to outdo the last birthday party.

We had two board games that I can remember, Monopoly and Clue.  But Dad also showed us how to amuse ourselves with what might be called “Table Football,” played on a Formica table.  Starting from around your own 20 yard line (about 20% of the way across to your opponent), you moved a coin-usually a nickel-across the table by flicking it with your finger.  To score, you needed to have the coin end up hanging over the opponent’s side of the table, but not so much that it fell off the table.  You only got 3 flicks, and if you hit it too hard on any of the flicks, and it went off the table, you had turned the “ball” over to your opponent.  The best approach was to get fairly close on the first flick, then very close on the second flick, then carefully nudge the coin so that it was hanging over the side on the third flick.  We experimented with kicking field goals, but it was too difficult and could put somebody’s eye out.

I remember Dad trying to invent a board game in hopes of selling his ideas to Milton-Bradley or one of the few other makers of such games.  It is not as easy as it may sound, without using ideas that are already out there.  Dad had also made his own chess set. He machined all the pieces in silver or gold colored metals, probably at Morey’s or his ZKZ Machine Co. and the board was black and white tiles with a wooden frame.  It was quite heavy, of course.  I also remember the Christmas he tried to make his own large 5-point star to set on the roof, all lit up.  I don’t recall if he succeeded.  I certainly don’t recall any neighbors exclaiming about it. 

We also had a friend of the family who knew how to cut hair.  Once per month or so he and his family would visit and give us all haircuts for less than the going rates in the barber shops.  When Sandy and I were first married I told her that it made a lot of sense to me for her to learn how to cut my hair.  I even went out and bought a hair cutting kit, but Sandy adamantly refused, so that was the end of that.  Also, since she liked to sew, I showed her how Mom used to stick a light bulb in a sock in order to darn it.  Darning socks was also met with, “Absolutely not.”  In this case, at least, she explained to me how uncomfortable the thick threads would be to walk on, and how unnecessary.  Socks just weren’t that expensive.

S&H Green stamps were big back in my growing up days, and actually they still were during the first years of our marriage.  I remember Sandy collecting the stamps, pasting them into booklets, and redeeming them in whatever store would accept them.  One time we read about where we could redeem them for cash at an S&H Redemption Center.  We had an address on El Camino Real, with no phone number to call and ask about major cross streets or even what town they were in, so off we went one day, hoping to get lucky and find the address not too far away.  Unfortunately El Camino Real is about 50-60 miles of traffic lights and shopping congestion.  We spent a few hours driving around to no avail, then gave up and came home.  I hope the amount of money involved was potentially more than the gas we were burning, but I wouldn’t swear to it.