May 14, 2003

• Wow, Toto, we’re still in Kansas!

  
  

  

  
  

  Almost as soon as school started that fall when I was in fifth grade, I joined Girl Scouts and 4H.  I already knew one of the scout leaders.  Mrs. Santee was a widow who was still running the hardware store on the corner of the next block of Main Street, that she and her late husband had started.  I had met her soon after we moved to Halstead.  She didn’t mind if I hung out there, and hardware stores always reminded me of good times shopping with Daddy.  I’d pick stray screws out of the nail bins and find where they belonged, and she seemed to appreciate my pickiness.

  
  

  Another scout leader either owned or worked at the flower shop that was in a glass-paned greenhouse around the corner behind the variety store at the opposite end of our block.  My love of plants and my meticulous pickiness was usually welcome there, too.

  
  

  In the middle of town was the Scout Park, and in the middle of the park was a stone building with a concrete slab floor.  The scout troops, boys and girls, and the 4H chapter, held meetings there, but my scout troop also met once a week for tea after school in the head scout mistress’s house.  It was like all my worst memories of Aunty Pat’s etiquette lessons and those inflicted on me at Eula Estrada’s house in San Jose, squared.   Stern admonishments about posture and manners were dispensed along with strong, nasty, unsweetened tea and Girl Scout cookies.  I actually liked tea if it had enough milk and sugar in it, but….

  
  

  I had several friends in scouts.  Nancy Small and I used to go to the skating rink in town every Friday night.  Nancy’s best friend Barbara Call wasn’t allowed that much freedom, so I was Nancy’s Friday friend.  My best friend, Sharron Johnston (standing to the right of me in the group photo above) was the only other redhead in our class and since she lived at the opposite end of town from the school and passed by our store on her way home, we always walked home together.  The girl hiding behind Sharron has to be Marilyn Kay Berger, because little Marilyn was always hiding.

  
  

  Marilyn lived on a farm within walking distance of town and I used to go out there and wander the cow pastures with her on summer days.  I recall sticking a prickly pear fruit in my shirt pocket on one of those trips and taking weeks to get all the tiny glochids (little stickers–the big stickers are spines) out of my skin.  I don’t think Marilyn was in Girl Scouts, but she was in 4H.

  
  

  I got in minor “trouble” at my first 4H meeting.  It was fall, the first meeting of the school year, when we planned our projects for the coming year.  They handed out mimeographed checklists of available projects.  Some were impossible for me, like raising a calf or a pig, and I didn’t have a garden plot for any of the agricultural projects, but there were a bunch of things like canning and preserving, sewing projects and such, so I checked all of the ones I thought I could handle.  It was maybe twenty checks.

  
  

  After we handed in the sheets, the adult up front looked them over and laughed at one.  Then he called my name, said, “Who’s this Kathy Douglass?”  I hesitantly raised my hand and he brought me a fresh checklist and said I could choose at most three projects for the year.  Darn!  That really made it hard.  Finally, with the whole group waiting for me to finish, I settled on one canning & preserving project, one sewing project, and a course in judging entries for fairs.

  
  

  I put together an apron for Mama that she seemed to like, but which embarrassed me every time she wore it and bragged to anyone that I had made it.  My sewing skill has improved greatly in the intervening fifty years, thanks largely to a lot of practice when I was in the SCA.

  
  

  I soon learned that completing the canning project would require some kind of food to preserve.  That was a problem because we didn’t have any fruit trees or vegetable garden, nor much extra cash to acquire raw materials at the grocery store.  But I’m good at improvising, I am. 

  
  

  In the back of the store I had found an old mortar and pestle left over from a time when it actually had been a drugstore.  I had previously talked the man at the grain elevator out of a pocketful of wheat one day, and spent many laborious hours trying to turn my wheat into flour.  Then I had discovered that it was much easier to make peanut butter.

  
  

  Each week, Mama discarded the out of date nuts from the hot nut display in the store and replaced them with fresh ones.  I salvaged a bunch of roasted salted nuts and mashed them in my mortar.  Within a few weeks I had a jar of chunky peanut-cashew-almond-brazil nut butter.  I think the major thing I had been lacking there was supervision, and I might have benefited from a little expert advice.

  
  

  When we had our little local 4H fair, neither of my entries won even an honorable mention, but…  I found I had a gift for judging.  When we went to the regional judging contest–Topeka, I think it was–I won!  What better task could there be for a Virgo with OCD?  Sometimes when I’m complimented on my collection of blue ribbons and purple rosettes from the Alaska State Fair, with only a little sprinkling of red and very few white ribbons, I modestly explain that I judge my entries before I take them in.  If they don’t look like winners, I don’t bother entering them.

  
  

  Our Girl Scout troop’s first project that fall was selling cookies.  We were handed order forms and told to mark down how many we thought we could sell.  I had no idea how many I could sell, so I only took one case, 24 boxes.  Most of the girls counted their parents, aunts, uncles and close friends, and put down that many boxes.  I found that out after I’d put in my optimistic order.

  
  

  We picked up our cookie orders, and I spent a couple of evenings walking around town knocking on doors, cold calls, selling cookies.  When I called my scout leader to ask if I could get more cookies, she was happy to comply.  The second and third cases were sold mostly from a little stool I set on the sidewalk outside our store on two successive Saturdays.  I talked Mama into paying for a box for me to use as free samples.  Everyone who took a sample cookie bought a box. 

  
  

  I got a fancy certificate from the state scout council for my extraordinary sales.  It was fun.  I sent in a postcard to a place that advertised in some of our comic books, and got a box of assorted greeting cards “on approval” and started selling them door-to-door.  The system was set up so that I could either keep a portion of the profits, or I could send all the money in and accrue points toward neat things like skates and bicycles.  I wanted a bike.  I think it was Red who pointed out that I could save up the cash and buy a bike quicker than I could accrue the points for one, so I started saving.

  
  

  Red had told me how much a bike would cost, and so when I had that much money, Mama and I went to Newton, the county seat, where there was a bike shop.  There were a couple of bikes there that I could afford.  They were very basic bicycles, no fenders, nothing fancy.  I didn’t like them.  The one I liked was a turquoise blue Schwinn with fenders front and back, creamy white trim, plastic streamers sticking out from the handle grips that would blow in the wind as I rode, and an enclosed compartment between frame members in front that held the batteries for a horn and headlight.  That was the one I wanted.

  
  

  I begged Mama for the extra money to buy it, but she couldn’t spare it.  I worked out a layaway plan with the man in the shop, and went back and sold more greeting cards for about a month, and then finally got my bike.  It was my first 2-wheeler, and it and Spooky and I explored our world that summer.  I’ll get to that next.

  

  • 2:13 pm
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