Remembering a ’60s Housewife
September 4, 2018
Seldom have I felt as comfortable in anyone’s presence as I did with Lynn and her family. To her, they were probably only ordinary years. But she had such a benevolent sense of life and projected such cheerfulness and optimism in her voice and her demeanor that those two years were a high point in my life.
ALAN writes:
ONE DAY last March, I was looking for a newspaper death notice. I did not find it, but I found something I was not looking for: The death notice for a man whom I had played with when he was a baby in 1963. He thus became one of the few people I have known and seen make the journey from birth to death.
It was in 1963 that I first heard the 1930s’ ballad “Deep Purple.” Missourian Jane Froman recorded it in a beautifully arranged version in the 1950s. Its tone and melody remind me of good friends of ours who are now deceased but who live in the deep purple of my memories.
On ordinary days in the spring of 1963, we became friends with a young married couple who were also our neighbors in a residential area of south St. Louis, less than a mile from where sheep grazed in fields behind a Catholic high school in the 1940s and where my great-aunt could look out the back window in her home and see a farm in the 1930s. I will call them Ken and Lynn. She was a housewife and he was a factory worker. Color slides taken by my mother show them to be a handsome couple in the prime of life. Their son was born that spring. I played with their young daughter in our backyard.
Our friendship blossomed throughout that year. We shared many happy days and evenings. We went for Sunday drives to state parks in the Missouri Ozarks, to Clarksville, Missouri, overlooking the Mississippi River, and to the town of St. Genevieve where we walked through old French houses. We visited the newly-opened St. Louis Planetarium in Forest Park. We dined in the restaurant of a popular neighborhood bowling alley called Western Bowl.
Sometimes we met Lynn in the basement as she was doing her laundry. The house where we lived was built in the 1920s and stood on a rise above the street. There were laundry chutes on the wall in the hallway leading to the kitchen. Her family and ours each had a black telephone on that wall and we always left home without it.
Ken and Lynn seemed always to be in a happy frame of mind whenever we visited. Yet there were volatile moments in their marriage. Ken had a temper and occasionally permitted it to override his good judgment. I remember one time when Lynn was wearing a black eye. The details were none of our business and she did not dwell on it. She was not angry or upset. Whatever preceded it was something out of the ordinary, and she accepted it as part of the price for a marriage that seemed otherwise to be solid and stable.
Late on Sunday morning, Nov. 24, 1963, we left home and drove to a high school nearby to get the oral polio vaccine that was being offered to St. Louisans that weekend. When we arrived back home less than thirty minutes later, we were astonished to learn that we had missed seeing Jack Ruby shoot and kill Lee Oswald on live TV. I remember sitting in Ken’s tan recliner chair in their living room while reading newspaper articles about the murder of President Kennedy.
Ken often worked the afternoon-evening shift at an automotive assembly plant. Lynn and her two young children and my mother and I would take leisurely walks through the neighborhood after supper on indescribably-serene evenings in 1964. The children were delighted whenever my mother or I played with them. A color slide shows Lynn’s young son investigating the canned goods and jars of baby food on shelves beneath a window in her kitchen.
When I graduated from 8th grade in 1964, twelve people sat around a table in our backyard to mark the occasion. Ken and Lynn were two of them.
The playpen she kept in her kitchen so she could keep an eye on the baby; riding in their car one evening and stopping at a donut shop; walking to a mailbox a block away; the barber shop two blocks away; seeing the brilliant planets Venus and Jupiter in the pastel twilight sky from the walkway alongside that house; walking with my grandfather up the nine steps in front of the house when arriving home in the evening after visiting aunts and uncles; the serene quiet of winter days and watching snowflakes falling outside our living room window; listening to Christmas records by Johnny Mathis and the Percy Faith Orchestra; how my mother would take a plate of Christmas cookies to the elderly widow of one of my uncle’s railroad friends who lived next door; the day I walked a mile along railroad tracks between industrial companies on one side and residential back yards on the other; a boyhood friend and I talking with Lynn in her kitchen while songs with uplifting, life-affirming melodies like “Diane”, “In the Misty Moonlight”, and “Under the Boardwalk” played on the radio; and the card games we played at her kitchen table with the darkness and ambient sounds of a summer night just beyond the screen door that opened on to the back porch – such are a few of my memories from those yellow days, golden days.
Ken smoked cigarettes and often carried a pack of cigarettes in the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. He would talk about his brother Marion and sister-in-law Della. Marion was a barber. I don’t recall ever meeting them but I could never forget their names or the sound of Ken’s voice. I remember a moment in July 1964 when a Dusty Springfield record was playing on the radio in Ken’s black Volkswagen beetle as we drove through south St. Louis on the first leg of a weekend trip to Santa Claus, Indiana, where I took pictures as Lynn and my mother and the two young children rode on a colorful carousel.
At a birthday party for her daughter in 1964, we met Lynn’s mother and brother. He was a pilot for a commercial airlines company based in St. Louis. I had no way to foresee that, by coincidence, he and I would appear together on a local television discussion program three years later.
Nothing lasts long, and our friendship was no exception. We fell out of contact in 1965 after first we and then they moved away from that house.
In 2006 I attended a funeral service for her brother and spoke briefly with Lynn, whom I had not seen in more than thirty years. I did not know it was the last time I would see her. Her children were now full-grown and looked strong and healthy. Memories of her brother included a small picture showing him as a boy and sitting on a pony. It reminded me instantly of a similar picture of my mother and my uncle sitting on a pony in the 1920s.
In 2012 I learned some time afterward that cancer had claimed Lynn, as it did her brother before her. I remember sitting there and staring at the notice of her death online and having a sickening feeling of emptiness, followed by regrets and the haunting knowledge that things I should have said to her—expressions of gratitude and appreciation—were left unsaid. Her son then died this spring.
The house where all of us became good friends is still there. It looks attractive and is well-maintained. I have stood outside that house in recent years and could picture all of us there just inside those windows on ordinary days in 1964. The basement windows are now filled with glass blocks. They were not there in 1964 when my friends and I climbed out of the basement through one of those windows. (Because boys do such things for the same reason Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mt. Everest: Because it was there.)
In those years there was a greenway between the walkways between our house and the one next door. It was mostly grass with few if any shrubs and no trees. I can close my eyes and picture myself in their apartment on summer afternoons in 1964 as the children take a nap near a window looking out on that greenway. I see from current photographs that ivy now adorns a side of that house and the greenway is so dense with shrubbery and a tree or two as to block the view to the back of the lot.
The bowling alley closed years ago, as did the high school, a market where we shopped, the soap factory where Lynn worked before her marriage, the factory and automotive assembly plants where Ken worked, the huge warehouse of a shoe manufacturing company, the commercial airlines company, and a nearby dairy with a popular ice cream fountain where we stopped for refreshments during one of those evening twilight strolls in 1964.
That friendship occupied only two years. Seldom have I felt as comfortable in anyone’s presence as I did with Lynn and her family. To her, they were probably only ordinary years. But she had such a benevolent sense of life and projected such cheerfulness and optimism in her voice and her demeanor that those two years were a high point in my life. My mother loved those two children dearly and for years afterward kept a framed portrait of them in her bedroom.
“Too brash and young was I, To know what time could mean…., That world I knew is lost to me…..”
Thus sang Frank Sinatra in 1965’s “I See It Now” in words that could have been lifted from my life. Too brash and young was I to know that such days would not last and would prove to be an exception to all the others.
All the people mentioned above are gone now, except for her daughter, who was much too young in those years to have any memory of that time and place. Only I am here to remember those yellow days and to absorb the bitter, unwelcome knowledge that no one else alive shares those memories.
— Comments —
James H. writes:
I just finished reading Alan’s post. We are about the same age and both from St. Louis. I well remember November 24th 1963. We had just attended Mass and were on the way to get our polio shots at a nearby school when news of Lee Harvey Oswald’s shooting came over KMOX radio – the world growing more sinister and inexplicable with each passing day. My idyllic comfortable parochial life jarred in ways I would only later come to appreciate as merely the first signs of the approaching post-modern apocalypse.
I loved your song, “I See It Now” by the inestimable Frank Sinatra. But few songs are as bittersweet as his “Once Upon a Time.” From the end of the song:
We were young and didn’t have a care
Where did it go
Once upon a time
The world was sweeter than we knew
Everything was ours
How happy we were then
But somehow once upon a time
Never comes again
Once upon a time
Never comes again
Somehow, once upon a time never comes again. Never comes again.
We shall all die strangers in our own land.
Alan writes:
I want to thank James H. for his remarks. As to the song “Once Upon a Time”, I agree completely. I first heard that song fifty years ago on WRTH Radio in St. Louis in the wee small hours of nights in 1968. And I thought it was wonderful, even though I was only 18 and had little experience of life. It was a recording by Tony Bennett. Its tone and melody were ever so wistful. In the darkness of my room, the words prompted me to envision a man and a woman on a hill against a backdrop of a black sky filled with stars.
Fifty years later, the song is even richer in meaning. Frank Sinatra’s version is excellent. It appears with “I See It Now” in his classic 1965 LP September of My Years, an album filled with musical and lyrical gems sung from the perspective of a man looking back on his life. Only after I passed the age of fifty did I begin to understand and appreciate that album; to realize that life held no more mysteries, and to know the feeling of weariness and regrets that anyone who is not an idiot must feel by that age, along with the knowledge that there will be no going back, no re-doing, no un-doing.
Years after he died, I discovered that the songs in that album reminded me of my father: There is just the right sound, just the right combination of orchestration and sentiment and the mature, masculine, confident but no-longer-cocky quality in Frank Sinatra’s voice that reminded me of nights with my father in the 1970s-‘80s. He was then in the autumn of his life. He knew it and I knew it, although I did not understand what it meant as clearly as he did.
At some point in those years I realized that never again would he and I toss a baseball to each other, as we had done on so many splendid summer days and evenings on the grassy fields and baseball diamonds at Marquette Park twenty years earlier; that never again would he umpire a baseball game with boys, or put on his baseball glove, or hit towering fly balls to me on a Saturday afternoon on the grassy field alongside the tennis courts in that park. Those days were now part of that “once upon a time”.
In addition to those two songs, “When the Wind was Green”, “It Gets Lonely Early”, and “It Was a Very Good Year” are gorgeous ballads arranged beautifully by Gordon Jenkins and sung expertly by Frank Sinatra. It is one of the few albums I would take with me to a desert island.
Kyle writes:
My heart warms when I open up The Thinking Housewife and see that Alan has contributed another wistful anecdote. When I read your posts it’s as if I’m flipping through my grandmothers family photo album and it evokes all of my senses–I can almost smell the musty scent of an aged book or Sinatra record that has been stored away in a cabinet drawer or cellar for decades. All of those black and white faces frozen in time, staring back at me as if to invite me to join them in that exact moment in time, if for just a little while, but I know I can never do so. This causes my heart to cramp, too.
I think we can all relate to the pain you feel when reflecting on our lives and those people who’ve touched us along the way. We didn’t know your Lynn, but we all have our own “Lynn”– the people who’ve made a lasting impression and helped form who we are, for better or worse.
The lump I get in my throat when reading your memories is contrasted by the beautiful prose and tender attention to the fine details that make up the ordinary daily life of regular American people from a more sensible time. I’m sorry to hear about your friend and that you weren’t able to speak to Lynn before she passed away.
Laura writes:
Well said. I second your comments.
Here is one of the Sinatra songs Alan mentioned in his comment to James H.
