by Rosie Atkinson
“Put On Your Big Girl Panties and Deal With It”.
That phrase is printed on a pink T-shirt in my closet and I sometimes put it on when life presents it’s many challenges, which lately has become more often than not. Since I have now passed my 79th birthday and am on my way to the big Eight-Oh, I’m actually looking forward to whatever is down the road to be dealt with.
As a small child I had many situations for which the phrase had meaning although my parents would instead use phrases like, ”We can’t afford to get those shoes for you right now” and “Maybe next year when Daddy is working again”.
There was always a reason why we couldn’t go to see a movie, or in some cases why we only had potatoes for supper.
Then came WW2 and my parents’ divorce; another occasion calling for “Put on your big girl….”
The separation of my folks was quickly followed by the whole family being fractured beyond repair. My younger sister and brother and I were placed in the Norwegian Lutheran Childrens’ Home on the outskirts of Chicago and my older brother went into the Navy. Mom was forced to go to work to support herself. Dad came out West to Bremerton to help build wartime shipyard workers’ housing. Those were some challenging years for all of us. I had just had my 12th birthday in 1942 and felt as though my life had come to an end.
There were 150 children in this sprawling institution, most of whom were girls. My siblings and I were separated, the youngest, Larry, four, went to the boys’ dorm, my little sister, Marlene, eight, was placed in the little girls’ dorm, and I went to the top floor and became one of 14 “big girls”, ages 13 to 17.
My new dorm-mates and I referred to ourselves as Home Kids, which is what the “normal” kids at our school, (those who lived in real houses with two parents), called us. Kids were no different back in the 40s. They could still be cruel to anyone unlike themselves.
I never felt abandoned by my parents, especially my mother who came to see us almost every weekend she wasn’t working. She often took us to see our grandmother and out shopping. We got a few letters from our father telling us how rainy it was in his new town. And we got many letters and presents from big brother, Howie, who we all missed.
Most of the other kids were like me, coming from broken homes. Only a few were orphaned.
I cried all night the day we arrived and our matron, Miss Johnson, held and rocked me like a baby until I went to sleep.
They, the staff, kept us all very busy and we learned to like the strange (to us) meals served up the in the huge dining room. We all had chores to do like most kids in normal families, but instead of washing dishes in a kitchen sink we learned to load them into large trays and shove them into big industrial dishwashers. I dislocated a hip during the dishwashing job and was re-assigned to another lighter task.
For three years I learned to do a lot of things most adolescents never were exposed to. But mostly I learned to adapt, (i.e.), “deal with it…”
The Sewing Room Caper
I boarded the big green Children's Home bus after school I had made it through my first month in high school after graduation at mid-term (February) from Ebinger Elementary school in Edison Park, IL. Five of us were Home Kids and I was comforted by the thought that they were having as much trouble as me with these new lessons. My only solution was to read and re-read the lesson for the next day’s test until I could recite it verbatim. After all chores were done I read for a half hour until Miss Johnson declared lights out.
I turned back to my book, which meant turning my back on the matron. BIG mistake. She grabbed me by my hair and jerked me around and shouted, “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
Miss M went on with her lecture and accused me of more than just staying up after lights out. She said, “You remember what I told you about the women who leave a light in their window at night to let men know they are available for sex. You are down here alone with the light on.”
She was accusing me of luring men to the sewing room! Now I was really angry.
There wasn’t much room in there for a wrestling match and I had to go to the bathroom so got up and shoved past Miss M and headed for the head.
This did not sit too well with the angry matron who gave me a punch as I passed her. My arm was smarting from the blow and I reacted as I would have in a back alley brawl. I swung back and caught her on the nose, which began to spurt blood immediately. I also had fists full of her hair as I grabbed and yanked as hard as I could. We stumbled into the bathroom and Miss Meilie landed in the claw footed tub.
“Jeez, Rosie”, said Anna. “You’ve really done it now. I think Miss Meilie’s dead.”
At once Miss Meilie was on her feet, looking daggers at me and trying to stop the blood from flowing out of her nose.
“Not dead, girls, but this will be reported in the morning,” she hissed. “All of you go to bed now” she said to the girls who had heard the fight and came down the stairs in a mob.
I was exhausted from all the activity and felt some remorse for hitting Miss Meilie, but I was mostly scared that I would be kicked out of the Home. Under the circumstances I was the person in the wrong. I was the Home Kid and the matrons were the bosses.
I went up to bed and waited until I was sure everybody was asleep. I carefully and quietly gathered up some of my clothes and my school books and put them in the large bag under my bed and made my way down the stairs to the street.
It was a long walk down to the corner and I was worried that the buses had stopped running for the night. There were no street lights and only a few houses I passed had porch lights turned on. I felt a rush as I neared the bus stop and saw the last bus headed for the city parked at the curb with its motor running. I grabbed the quarter in my pocket and boarded the bus and quickly went to the back seat.
She had called my mother as soon as she let me inside and told her to come in the morning. “It’s late and Rosie will sleep for now.”
(The next day: decisions to be made.)
Three Years Earlier
It was my second week at the Home. I told the girl who sat next to me on the Home bus that the only reason I was there was because my dad was called to Washington on a very important assignment for the government, and that when he got back he was going to pick up me and my younger brother and sister and we were going to go to California to live in a big house with a swimming pool.
Part of it was true. It was 1942 and I had just had my 12th birthday party and the last one with old friends on Dakin Street on the northwest side of Chicago. When the party was over my dad told us (my two younger siblings and myself) that we would be going to live in a kind of private school because he had to go to the west coast (Oh, THAT Washington!) and work on some new houses for people who worked in a shipbuilding yard.
Part of that was true, too. The "school" was private because it was owned by the Lutheran Church. But, the classes held there were in religion and in practical disciplines, such as cooking and cleaning for the girls, farming and woodworking for the boys. The "real" school we attended was five miles away in the village called Edison Park.
The big green bus we were on was owned by the Norwegian Lutheran Children's Home at the end of the Harlem Avenue bus line on the outskirts of town. The area was officially called Park Ridge, but the place in no way resembled the posh suburban neighborhood where rich kids lived. That Park Ridge was off limits to Home Kids and we soon came to know "our place" in the scheme of things.
the Home's setting was beautiful for an institution. Farmlands stretched out for miles over a flat, tree-dotted field. The brick buildings trimmed in white wood were landscaped in traditional grass, shrubbery and old Elm trees and stood out against the autumn colors under a bright blue Indian summer sky. An Illinois October is still one of the most beautiful sights in the land.
The laughter of children could be heard as we approached the white fence-bordered driveway. The beginning smells of supper cooking drifted from the big kitchen. All of the senses were involved and my warm glow was enhanced by the larger than life story I just told my new friend. As we got ready to jump off the bus and race to the dormitory to change out of school clothes and go to the kitchen to set tables for 150 children and staff, I felt the excitement rise in my yet-undeveloped chest. One of the boys in the Big Boys' dorm was also assigned to dining room duty that day.
Porky was one of the cutest guys at The Home and just before he got off the bus, he smiled at me and said, "See you later." I read so much more into that passing remark than he ever dreamed!
Such was the beginning of my three-year stay at The Home. It was war time, my folks were divorced, my older brother was staying with my mom at Grandma's, and my younger sister and brother and I were "stuck" out here living in dormitories, getting up, going to school, marching to the dining room for meals, and going to bed by the huge gong of a big brass bell we called Emily.
My new friends and I lied to each other about the good times that would come "some day soon". The kids in the village who were our classmates never believed the lies. The "normal" kids, ones who lived in houses with mothers and fathers and pets and siblings and had their own rooms with ruffled skirts on pink dressing tables and closets full of pleated skirts and big fluffy sweaters, would laugh at us and call us "Home Kids". Everybody knew Home Kids lied...
But it was okay. We had each other and after the humiliation of going to school on an ugly old dark green bus that broke down frequently, carrying identical brown bags with identical dried up bologna sandwiches with light smears of oleomargarine and an apple for dessert, we could ride home and tell stories larger than life to each other. We could find solace in our own made up stories and in doing dining room duty with boys we had crushes on.
Such was life for a teenager with her first pimple to show off to the other girls in the dorm. Such was the beginning of a life filled with determination to never allow a child of hers to ever become a Home Kid where bending the truth was necessary to one's survival. Such was the foundation upon which one little girl's future was built, who loved to spin wild and wonderful tales, but who knew the truth and tried to make up for all the stories she told as a girl by learning to write the truth as she knew it.
I can hardly believe, as I look back through all the years in between that that little girl was me.
House Rules for Home Kids
After a few days at The Home, which we lovingly called NLCH, we learned there were punishments for such infractions as “sassing” back the matrons, not being in bed ten minutes after the large bell was rung, missing the school bus, or-- a really big sin, wearing makeup!
All of my clothes, some of which were given to me on my 12th birthday just a few weeks before my enrollment, were confiscated. When asked why, the matron in my dorm informed me they were too “ worldly” for a girl my age. That meant the skirt was too short and showed my knees, or the blouse was cut too low: “We don’t want our titties to show, do we?” Miss Johnson would say. In my case a low cut blouse meant nothing because there was nothing to show. I do mean nothing!
They had a lot of reasons why we should dress in long, looser skirts and ugly blouses, (at my age now these styles would be okay only back then we hated them).
Then there was the makeup issue “Only whores wear lipstick,” Miss Johnson liked to say. I hadn’t heard that word before and had to have one of my dorm mates explain it to me.
Our goal in life at the time was to one-up the matrons. Woolworth had a lipstick for 25 cents called Tangee that barely colored the lips and was just a little greasy. So from the time we left the school bus we all got two swipes of the Tangee. No ruby red smackers here, but better than nothing, and by the time we returned to NLCH we had licked it all off.
I mentioned the punishments: Most of mine were leveled because I sassed back almost every time I opened my mouth. My regular punishment was to scrub our playroom floor which was the size of a basketball court. We were required to execute this task on our hands and knees. I have to say that had to be the cleanest floor in the entire complex and I had the knobbiest knees in the entire population at NLCH.
They never caught me wearing makeup, however one of the girls in my dorm was accused of wearing eye makeup. Anna had beautiful long black lashes which she inherited along with other beautiful features attributed to her Egyptian heritage. She had dry eyes and in those days the advice was to brush Vaseline on her lashes and around the lids. Of course this treatment made her eyes sparkle and the matrons were sure she was wearing eye makeup.
That accusation was put to bed when Anna was called in before the Home’s superintendent who bought Anna’s story about using Vaseline to keep her lids and lashes from drying out. Vaseline would have done nothing for my blond lashes. I’d have to wait until I left NLCH this place before I could wear eye makeup.
There was only one place we could wear makeup and dress outrageously: On STAGE!
There was a large gym with a stage in back of the chapel building that we could use to act in plays and perform in musicals, the most popular entertainment at the movies in those days. One of the younger volunteers encouraged us to make up dances and skits to perform on Friday and Saturday nights.
Like me, my dorm sisters were fascinated with movies and movie stars. We liked to think we were as good as Judy Garland and other super musical stars of the day and were always making up our own routines to perform before the captive Home Kids audience.
There were no movies in our little town so most of us had to wait until weekends when our relatives would take us to see the latest movies in one of the Chicago neighborhoods, usually a couple of bus or streetcar rides with transfers away.
Then a few of us would get together during the week and practice our favorite Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds routines in the play room until performance night in the Chapel’s big gym. Practicing putting on makeup alone took many hours. We were scolded by the matrons who witnessed this immoral task and told us we were all going straight to hell.
One of the girls said something like “shove it you old bat” and that’s when you-know-what hit the fan. We were all on floor-scrubbing duty for two weeks. Not that the floors needed it since as the resident-scrubber most of the time, I did my penance better than most. The floors were the cleanest in the complex.
We were tired out when variety show-time night finally came, but we were troupers and “the show must go on” was our motto. We had a great time performing those skits. Even the matrons applauded our efforts. We were big fishes in a little pond and boy, did we know it! (Autographs anyone? Anyone….?)
Chapter 4
(next chapter title goes here)
Next chapter will be continued here.....
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