New Sisters

Don't remember when we moved to Penelope. I was little bitty. And so what I'm going to tell you now is just hear-say from my mom. Daddy was retired Military (Air Force to be exact) and was 27 years older than my mom. Prior to his retiring from the military, he was stationed in San Antonio, married with 3 kids (Bill, Jack & Karen). My mom was married as well to a gentleman that was also in the Air Force and stationed in San Antonio (Kelly AFB, I believe). Long story short (and sparing all the gory details) mom and dad eloped to Seguin, TX on October 30, 1954. Shortly after that, dad got transferred to Ellington AFB in Houston. By the way Mom was from Louisiana and Dad was from Oklahoma.

Fast forward to 1959, since that is really all I know about how and when they met. Not sure where we were living when I was born, but the first house I remember is 10807 Penelope. I have very vague memories of being very little. I can remember the dog we had. Her name was Schatzi and she was a long haired saddled German Shepherd. I remember when Cyndi was born. I guess I must have been so happy to have someone to play with that I drug my infant sister off the bed and into the living room. My mom had 4 girls in 4 years and 2 months, so I couldn't have been more than a year and a half old when I did that. Then all of a sudden there was Mari. And almost immediately after that, I remember Daddy getting all of us up and rushing us next door to Mrs. Bourgeious' house to stay while he drove Momma to the hospital to have Tammi. So in a very short time, I went from being an only child to having to share everything and "be mommy's little helper".

Let me tell you, it wasn't easy being the oldest of four. Our house always seemed busy. We had hardwood floors and every so often Mom and Dad would strip the floors and put new wax down. I'm not sure if there was such a thing as buffers at that time, but either way, we didn't have one. So Mom and Dad would use "buffing time" as "play time". They would get blankets and put 2 of us on one blanket and the other 2 on the other blanket and would swing us around the living room floor. We had a blast, but that seems like a lot of work if you were Mom and Dad. We had a lady that would come in a couple of times a week and help Mom clean. She would do stuff like the ironing, baseboards, dusting & mopping. We had a man named One-Arm-Sam that mowed our yard. I loved One-Arm-Sam. I would sit on the porch on Saturday mornings and wait for Sam. And he really did only have one arm. But that one arm was strong. He would jump up in the back of his old beat up 1952 or 53 red Ford truck and pick up his mower with one arm and sit it on the ground, hand me a piece of candy, rough up my hair and get to mowing.

As close as my sisters and I were, we were all different as night and day on everything from the way we looked to the things we liked. I was brown eyed with reddish hair, athletic and very tomboyish. I was the one who was outside with the horses, dogs, etc. Hated to be inside unless it was to watch football with my Daddy. Cyndi was dark brown eyed with coal black hair, a little on the heavier side than the rest of us and the homebody. She loved to follow mom around in the kitchen and watch her sew. Mari was green eyed with blond hair and the intellect. You could find Mari buried in a book somewhere. And Tammi was blue eyed with brown hair and a girly girl. Didn't like to get dirty, wanted her hair done, loved to dress up and put on make up.

My niece tells stories about how she hates the line on her socks and when she was little, she would throw a fit if she had to wear those socks. Well, she comes by her stubbornness honestly. Once when I was five and in Kindergarten, I got it in my head that I didn't like dresses and petticoats - back then all the little girls wore petticoats under their dresses to make them stand out. A petticoat was a slip type undergarment that had all these layers of stiff, scratchy material gathered tightly to make the skirt portion of the little girls dress stand out, much like a square-dancer's skirt does. Well, I wasn't going to have any part of the petticoat, dress, socks with lace around the ankle or patent leather shoes. I sat on the end of that bed with my little arms crossed and defiantly refused to move from my room until I was allowed to put my overalls back on. My poor mother begged, pleaded, cried, threatened and yelled at me to get up and go to school. I'm not real sure how it turned out, but I'm sure knowing my mother, she won. I'm sure she was just glad that the other 3 were not as stubborn as I was.

Whenever we went anywhere, I'm sure my mother looked like a mother duck with her ducklings. It was always a line at the Commissary. Mom would be pushing her buggy, I would be holding onto her the tail of her dress with one hand and holding Cyndi's hand with the other, then Cyndi would be holding Mari's hand and last but not least Mari would be holding Tammi's hand. That's the way it always was with us. We didn't shop at grocery stores when we were little. Since my Daddy was retired military, we went to Ellington AFB for our shopping - all of it. Our grocery's (what we didn't grow) came from the Commissary. Our clothes and household items came from the PX. Once while at the AFB, we had been all over the base. We had ate lunch at the O.C and I had wandered back to the PX to look at records (way before tapes and CD's). I don't have a clue how long I had been there, but Mom, Dad and my sisters were no where around, so I walked back over to the O.C. Nope they weren't there either, but the man that was working got me a coke and a hamburger and I sat there and ate alone. I went to my locker and got my swimsuit and decided I would go swimming. Sometime later I looked up and my frantic mother and daddy were running toward the pool. For the life of me I could not figure out what was the problem. Daddy jerked me out of the pool and Momma hugged and squeezed me while crying hysterically. Mom took me into the dressing room and got me changed into my clothes and while she was making sure her face was presentable enough to go back outside, Cyndi whispered in my ear, "we left you". I looked at my sister and said "what" and she replied "we left and went home and got all the way there, then Mom and Dad realized you weren't in the car". "Oh". All the way home, I got to sit in the front seat between my Mom and Dad instead of the backseat crammed in between my 3 sisters. Life was good that day.

We went to a small elementary school - J.W. Oates Elementary. So during the school year, it was pretty routine. We would all get on the same school bus. Daddy drove into downtown Houston to work at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and Mom kept house and volunteered at the school and served on the P.T.O.

But summertime was different. We had forts to build out in the woods. Where we lived there was woods all around and we would get lost (not literally) out there all day. We would build little shacks, trails, treehouses, etc. When not in the woods, we would sell lemonade at the street or race the neighborhood kids on our bicycles. No matter what business I had to take care of during the day with my friends, I would always have to bring at least one of my sisters with me. Do you have any idea how hard it is to sell lemonade or have a decent bicycle race with your little sister in tow? Well, I found a solution for that. Rope! That's right, rope. My mother did not understand just how busy a summer day was for me. So, I decided that since I was put in charge of my sisters, I would take care of them AND take care of my lemonade stand or my treehouse or my race at the same time. I went out back to the barn, rummaged through the tack room and found me some rope. I then convinced Cyndi or Mari or whomever it was that day that I was "watching" to stand next to a tree and I would tie them to it. Brilliant idea. They couldn't wander off, they couldn't get into something they weren't suppose to and I could still do what I wanted. I in turn would do their chores to keep them from telling on me. It was a perfect solution. That was until one day, myself, Mike Baker, Karen Knight and a couple of others were having a race. I convinced Cyndi to stand next to a telephone pole and I tied her up. Well unbeknownst to me, Mom had to run an errand and when she came back, we were at the end of the road and Cyndi was standing, tied up to the telephone pole, crying when Mom drove by. She stopped, untied my sister and Cyndi spilled all the beans of my "babysitting" skills to her. We came racing around the corner at the end of the road and low and behold there was my mother standing in the middle of the road with her hands on her hips and that look in her eyes with Cyndi next to her. I hit the brakes on my bike, skidded to a stop and said "I can explain". She whipped me all the way home. The rest of that summer was spent "babysitting" my sisters, in our yard without a bicycle. But anyone who knows me, really knows that I didn't learn my lesson with that punishment. This was just the beginning of me coming up with brilliant ideas and my sisters letting Momma know.

But I did teach my sisters such things as catching lightning bugs in a jar, climbing trees, skipping rocks, sliding in your sock feet across the floor, how to whistle loud and which berries were safe to eat when in the woods.