Summer's almost over

Whenever I see all the ads about kid's clothes and school supplies, it reminds me again of how MUCH things have changed. When school was about to begin back in the olden days, preparations of a different kind went into effect. Living in the country, a lot of our shopping was done by mail from catalogs like Sears and Wards. Amazingly, these companies not only showed available fabrics in nice color pages, but included swatches of the actual fabrics in the catalog.

That's when the fun began! My mom and I sat down together to pick out which fabrics I wanted new school dresses made from. This is the part I have never under stood and still don't. I could pick out a picture of the way I wanted a dress made, and Mother somehow knew how much fabric to order and how to cut a pattern like the picture of the dress I selected. As I recall, I got three new school dresses - can't imagine how in the world my parents paid for them in those hard depression days. And how did she manage to make her own pattern just from looking at a picture??

She was very creative - later, in Junior High School there as a craze to have a white shirt
with names of friends written all over them. You bet I had one, only mine was embroidered. Then for the junior high picnic at the end of school most of the girls were by then wearing shorts which my folks were not too crazy about. So - Mother to the rescue!! She made not only me but my best girl friend a short one piece playsuit with a striped collar and cuffs -And a skirt to match the collar and cuffs with buttons all down the front. We thought we were really dressed up, and had a marvelous time. (Incidentally, this picnic was at Sylvan Beach - anyone out there remember Sylvan Beach?? ) Or Burbank Jr. High?? I had a lot of fun in school and to this day love to smell Crayolas.

I"m sort of mixing old school days like the early grades with later fun of Junior High. We used to get new readers signed out to us and that was always such an exciting day. The big problem here was that I usually had mine all read by the time we had lessons in them . Maybe that is why my house today looks like a second hand bookstore. Oh well, and all of our kids love to read, too!

A funny incident happened when Mother took me to register at Burbank. My mom was little and cute and we waited and waited as other parents went in with their kids, until finally she got up nerve to ask why we could not go in. A very embarrassed student in charge of letting people in, apologized and explained she thought Mother was one of the new students. Lots of memories - - -