Today I saw a commercial on TV with an ice cream truck driving through a neighborhood with a bunch of children chasing it. It caused me to think back on my childhood. I don't remember an ice cream truck coming around the neighborhood when I was a kid. But I do remember chasing the Normal Sanitary Dairy truck and begging the driver for a chunk of ice. He obliged us now and then, as he made his rounds with his milk deliveries to the gray metal boxes with NSD on them sitting by his customers' front doors. He was more apt to chuck some ice at us if there were just a few of us begging, and not the entire block of nearly 30 kids.

Even as kids, we needed some kind of respite on those hot, muggy, summer days. When I was four years old, my three-year-old sister, Joan, and I would play in two big galvanized tubs filled with water, wearing only our underpants. As we got older, we were occasionally allowed to run through the water sprinkler in the back yard. Hey! There was no Fairview Park pool and waterslide or Ash Park pool and slide back then. Most often on soggy, humid days, we simply stopped our activities and flopped down on our backs in the grass on the steep grade of our back yard leading down to Oak Street and watched the clouds drift by, imagining shapes and wondering if kids in China could see the same clouds and imagine the same things. We'd drink our Kool-Aid from jelly jars with cartoon figures on them, meant to be used as glasses when the jelly was gone. It didn't matter what flavor the Kool-Aid was as long as it was RED! Having had some experience with red Kool-Aid as a mother myself, I feel certain there is not another libation in the world that stains as badly. My mother's washday woes must have been significant, what with the Kool-Aid stains and grass stains from her five rowdy kids and the heavy work clothes of her tool and die maker husband.

Washday was quite a production in itself. Mom had a wringer washing machine, and every one of us kids had at least some part of our anatomy caught in it at one time or another. Mom started out every Monday morning, filling the washer with very hot water. First, she washed the white things. That would be all our underwear and Dad's good shirts and pillow cases and sheets. Sheets didn't come in colors in those days, for goodness sakes! Then she'd wash colored clothes in the same water, which had cooled by then. I usually got the job of hanging the clothes on the clothesline and propping it up with a big pole with a notch in the end so the clothes wouldn't drag on the ground. Dad's work clothes and my brothers' jeans came last. My sis and I didn't own any jeans till I was at least in 7th grade. We thought only farmers wore jeans. Up to now Mom did most of the hot, heavy work.

But, if she happened to have some throw rugs that needed to be cleaned, they'd go in the wash dead last, and one of us kids would have to help her put those heavy things through the wringer. That's how we were all christened in one way or another in the surprises inherent in a wringer attachment.

My dad always assigned chores for each of us to do every day. In my teen years I hoped for the sweeping-out-the-garage duty. I'd turn on WLS radio and listen to Dick Biondi and the big rock stars of the day - Fabian, Frankie Avalon, and Paul Anka. Never mind that the garage was small and dust choked me to a point that I had to run outside and get a breath of fresh air and to let it all settle before I resumed. It was WLS and Dick Biondi! The best DJ in the world! I loved the contest he held every summer to predict the first day that the temperature would reach 100 degrees. I would never have won even if I guessed. Any temperature over 75 felt like 100 to me.

My summer chores were not all assigned, though. One summer I elected to go scooting along on my "seater-rumpus" as Mom called it, pulling the grass and weeds out from between the bricks in the sidewalk that ran on the north side of our house. I remember how proud I felt when I had a whole section cleared, and then eventually our whole walk up to the lot line of our neighbors. I didn't want to stop there despite my swollen, throbbing (now arthritic) right thumb and forefinger. I did then (and still do) enjoy seeing the fruits of my labor.

Another summer I decided I was tired of looking at the dusty area outside our back door. It reminded me of the Little Rascals movies, kind of unkempt, dirty and poorly. So I took a spade and dug a trench down both sides of the concrete sidewalk that ran by our back yard. I took all the pieces of sod I had dug out and filled in a big portion of that eyesore dusty area. My brothers were not too happy about it because that was a perfect place for them to draw circles to play with their marbles, the big black one being Jerry Crockett, NCHS's star basketball player at the time. Anyway, I watered that sod every day, and would you believe it, it caught hold! My dad, who had tried in vain to maintain a lovely lawn, with five of his own kids and 25 of their friends constantly trampling it, was thrilled! I don't know where the sod came from, but Dad finished filling in the area, and then it was my chore to tend it. My brothers had to look for a different dusty spot to play marbles - this one was gone!

Well, I see I got off the subject of the ice cream man. It's so easy to let my mind wander to pleasanter days, now that I'm old enough to see the many problems facing our world. But you know, I saw another commercial the other day. It was for Drum Stick ice cream cones. The narrator said that when your child is eating a Drum Stick, he's not worried about drugs or smoking or drinking or war. He's just a child enjoying a Drum Stick. I think there's something to that. So have a Drum Stick. But if you don't mind, I'll go for a lime sno-cone.
Till next time...
Love and God bless,
Judy Kober Hirsch