I had a pet otter for about two years when I was growing up in the dusty farming town of Fessenden, North Dakota. His name was Joe and we played together quite a lot. My best friend, Carol, played with him, too.
I should mention Joe was imaginary. Carol had a bird named Hi-low who never came inside the house but we’d see him passing by the window, flying high, flying low.
My mom’s closet was the home of our pet puma. Thornton W. Burgess told us in The Burgess Animal Book for Children that this member of the cat family was also known as a cougar or a mountain lion, but he called her a puma and so did we. Our pet was large, quiet and kept to herself, but we always knew she was in there.
One day Carol went into the closet to check on Puma and came running back, her frizzy hair bobbing, her eyes wide, and almost out of breath.
“Lucille, you’ll never guess what happened!” she exclaimed. “Puma had babies. Six of them!”
My mouth fell open in surprise.
Now, Carol and I attended Sunday School at the most liberal church in town—the Congregational. Our ministers came from New England and had views that most people didn’t understand. Their children were teased mercilessly by their classmates for their Boston accents, and the tough farm boys stood ready to beat them up because they talked like babies.
And though the Congregational Church was not big on ceremonies, one ritual had made a significant impression on Carol. She looked at me gravely. Her jaw tightened. Had she heard of Hell from some Baptist cousin?
“We have to baptize the babies!” she announced.
She proceeded to put on her imaginary robe and commanded. “Go get them.”
I dutifully went to the closet and brought out each cub, one at a time.
As Carol sprinkled the imaginary holy water on each furry little head, she solemnly pronounced: “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
At which point, she would hand the saved-from-damnation cub back to me, and I would return it safely to its mother in the closet, before picking up the next of the six.
Somewhere around age 10 or 11 we forgot about our animal friends, and discovered that the dime store carried “Teenage paper dolls.” We had played with our paper dolls from the time we could hold a scissors to cut their clothes out, but we had decided they were too babyish, and threw them in a box with our finished-off coloring books.
Teenage! This put a whole new light on it. They cost a quarter instead of a dime, but together we found enough nickels to make our purchase.
The set consisted of three boys and three girls, and the first thing we did was decide who was boyfriend and girlfriend to whom.
When our mothers were not home, the boyfriend and girlfriend had sex. It’s a puzzle to me how we knew about sex. TV had not come to North Dakota yet, and even when it did, the soap operas never went that far. The pharmacist, who carried magazines in the front part of the drugstore, had not heard of Hugh Hefner and would have been alarmed if he had. Even Barbie, with big boobs and deformed feet, had not been invented yet.
Parents protected their children from reproductive topics. The general consensus regarding where babies came from was, “The Stork brought them.” Ample evidence existed to prove that. Question: Why did people who wanted children never have any? Why did people who didn’t want any more children end up with a set of twins? And why did people with five girls who were hoping and praying for a boy have another girl? Answer: The Stork is a DUMB bird.
So how did our paper dolls know about sex? It remains a mystery, but shortly after the boy picked her up for their date, the smiling blonde girl, who kept her swimsuit on at all times, was underneath the boy, with only his cardboard backside showing. He kept his swimming trunks on at all times, too, but we knew what they were doing.
About that same time, a mother with time on her hands started a Brownie Scout troop on Saturdays. Carol called my mother and said, “Be sure to tell Lucille we have a BS meeting this afternoon.” But the Brownies never really caught on. The only thing I remember doing there was carving a squirrel out of a bar of soap, which my mother kept on the windowsill for an incredibly long time. Either she was proud of my artistry, or realized that one handwash would turn the squirrel back into a bar of soap.
Life moved on and we were getting close to being teenagers ourselves. In 1953 we were 12, and “The Wild One” came to the Fessenden movie theater. We fell under the spell of Marlon Brando. Not understanding our feelings, we tried to be him, and started saving our babysitting money to buy a motorcycle. The fund never got past $4.00 so we gave it up.
By the early fifties, TV had arrived to the high prairies. Emil Rust, who ran the radio shop, introduced the miracle in his small corner store. People crowded in, shuffling for a space to stand where they could see the flickering black and white images, and marveled at the fact that pictures could fly through the air. Emil soon found his job expanding to after-hours emergency calls when North Dakota blizzard winds toppled aerials off roof tops and brought snow inside to the TV screens.
In 1956, TV brought more than snow. Carol and I had a favorite radio singer who wanted to be our teddy bear and we heard that he would be on the Dorsey Brothers Stage Show. Luckily CBS was one of the three stations we got on our black and white TV.
Carol and I made a date for January 28 at my place. My parents kept their service station open in the evenings, so we had the house to ourselves.
We positioned ourselves cross-legged on the linoleum floor of the living room in front of the TV. The announcer began, “This young man came out of nowhere to become an overnight star. We think tonight that he’s going to make television history for you. We’d like you to meet him now: Elvis. . . Presley!
And there he was. He strode onto the stage, dressed in a black shirt and dress pants with a white tie and a tweed jacket, his guitar swinging in time with each step.
Dang! He was so cute! We screamed at the top of our lungs. He began singing immediately.
We-lll . . . .
Get out of that bed, wash your face and hands
Get out of that bed, wash your face and hand
Well, get in that kitchen
Make some noise with the pots and pans.
We rolled on our stomachs, our necks bent upward, eyes glued to the TV screen, catching every move. Moves we’d never seen before.
Well, I said, shake, rattle and roll
I said shake, rattle and rolI
said shake, rattle and roll
Well you won’t do right
To save your doggone soul.
We squirmed on our bellies. We pounded the floor with our fists, and screamed some more. By the time his part of the show was over, and he’d finished his third song,
I Got a Woman
Mean as she could Be,
we were exhausted.
We heard my mom coming into the house. Dad was still closing up shop. Mom set the money box on the kitchen table, gave us a puzzled glance, and said, “What’s wrong with you two now?”
How could we answer her, when we didn’t know it ourselves, that imaginary otters and misbehaving paper dolls had become part of the past, and Elvis had just danced us into the next chapter of our lives.
***
Lucy Bell’s 35-year teaching career included over twenty years as a writing consultant. Her latest book, Coming Up, A Boy’s Adventures in 1940s Colorado Springs, combines narrative non-fiction with the history of the black community of Colorado Springs. It features rare historical photographs and the watercolor illustrations of Linda Martin. Release date: October 14, 2018. Her children’s novel, Molly and the Cat Who Stole Her Tongue, published in 2016, is available at Poor Richard’s Bookstore, Colorado Springs and Amazon.
