My First Plane Ride

By Iva Bailey

The other night when Judy, my daughter came home from Seattle, where she works, she was showing me her plane ticket to Hawaii she had gotten that day. She is all excited about taking her vacation in Hawaii this year. It brought back memories of my one and only airplane ride sometime in the 1930’s. I must have been about 15 at the time.

My girlfriend Bernice was a couple of years older than I was and was able to get a job at the Puyallup Fair in a hamburger concession. That was the year there was an added attraction at the fair. A man who had a small plane was taking passengers up over the city and fairgrounds.

The flight started in the parking lot at the fair and Bernice’s concession was close by so the pilot often ate lunch there. Before Fair week was over my friend became acquainted  with the pilot and he offered to take her for a ride. He told her she could take a friend. She asked me to go along.

I will never forget that ride. The plane was a two-seater affair. The pilot sat in the front seat and the passenger in the back seat. There was really only suppose to be one passenger but there was room for two small people if they sat close together. It was all open air and when we started up the wind stung my face and tore at my hair. It seemed as though we were going straight up, it wasn’t so bad until we flew over the Puyallup River and hit a down draft. We dropped so far I thought we would never stop. Looking down the city blocks looked like tiny squares. It was so noisy from the rush of wind and the sound of the motor Bernice and I couldn’t hear each other when we tried to talk so we just clung to to-gether.

Coming down was even more scary but we landed alright and  I was sure glad to feel the ground under my feet when we got out of the plane.

When I got back home, feeling brave and proud at what I had done, I found my dad had a different feeling about my escapade. Until then I thought of it as just another midway ride, maybe a little more scary than most, but to my dad, it was something else. Looking back now I can feel how my dad must have felt. Airplanes were fairly a new thing. They weren’t tested or kept in repair like they are today. Dad had started out with covered wagons and horses. He accepted cars but he never wanted to fly. I guess some of his fear was instilled in me that day because I have always been hesitant to fly again.

When my brother Verle went into the Air Force during the Second World War, only I knew the fear in my Dad’s heart. He never let on to my brother how he felt. I can still see his face pale when we would hear of a plane lost over Italy where Verle was.

My kids couldn’t wait to take their first plane rids.  I watched my two boys take off over the Pacific, Jerry to Korea and Jack to Viet Nam and  I watched them come back again.

Now Judy is going to Hawaii but the plane that will take her there is a lot different from the one I flew in that memorable day and maybe some day soon I’ll say a little prayer and fly away too.

Dance Marathons of the 1930’s   

By Iva Bailey    

While looking through some old pictures the other day, I came across an old picture postcard of a dance marathon held in the old Century Ballroom near Tacoma. The picture took me back to 1936, the peak of the Great Depression. Now it all sounds pretty weird but then it generated a lot of interest and was inexpensive entertainment. There was a kitty you were expected to drop a coin or two into which was to furnished the prize for the winners.

The couples who were in the dance marathons were usually sponsored by some local business establishment for the advertising it would bring them.

The contestants danced for fifty minutes and then had a ten minute rest period. They didn’t really dance but they had to keep moving or be disqualified. They would take turns sleeping, when one was asleep the other had to hold him up and keep him moving. It looked kind of funny to see a girl with a big, tall guy draped over her shoulders, asleep. Some times they would almost fall. That made it more exciting, the audience would clap, stamp their feet and yell the contestant’s name out to wake him before he was counted out.

It was all very exciting to me at the time and I went as often as I could. My dad thought the people, that would be contestants in such a thing, were crazy and the people who would go to watch them, just as bad. I know now, that he was right.

The contest went on for several weeks and one by one the couples would drop by the wayside. As the numbers of contestants dwindled down, the excitement of the spectators rose. The couple seemed to be walking around in a daze and you could tell it was sheer torture for them to keep going.

I’ll never forget how disappointed I was when it suddenly ended and I wasn’t there to see the last couple fall out.

The old Century Ballroom is gone now but the hours I spent there still remain in my memories.

I found this story in an envelope, on it my aunt had written, “my one and only time I got printed but I never got to see it. It was in a Minnesota paper in the 1997.”

Apparently it had been printed in the Eastern Itascan  of  MN in their “Then and Now”column. The story was probably written in the 1980’s.Grandmas Do Wear Pants

by Iva Bailey

Last week-end our young grandsons came to spend the week-end with us. Mike the elder is five and doesn’t miss a thing. The first thing he said to me, “Grandma you got a dress on.” He sounded so surprised and pleased. I hadn’t realized until then that it had been so long since I had worn a dress. I guess in Mike’s young life he hadn’t seen me in a dress very many times.

When I was Mike’s age, woman always wore dresses. Some of the little girls wore coveralls. I remember the ones I had. They were trimmed in red. They had a drop seat that was very inconvenient. I could never button or unbutton them myself. About the only time I wore them was when my Mother wasn’t feeling well and had to cut down on the washing and ironing.

I’ll never forget the time I went to play with my little friend Janie who lived at the end of our block. I couldn’t have been more than five at the most when Janie’s dad saw me dressed in my coveralls, he told her she couldn’t play with me because “nice girls didn’t wear pants.”

My feelings were really hurt and I went home crying. My Mother was upset too when I told her what had happened. I never really liked Janie’s dad after that although later I picked berries for him; I was always a little bit afraid of him.

The next pants I remember having was in the 30’s. My aunt Josephine who worked at the J.C. Penny store in town and was always up on fashion of the day, gave me a pair of what they then called beach pajamas. The ones I had were red and black print material and they had flared legs. I can still see them in my mind. One Sunday we were going on a picnic at Five Mile Lake,  just out of Puyallup.  I proudly dressed up in my beach pajamas and feeling like a movie star, I considered myself ready to go, but my Dad thought I was wearing my night-clothes and told me to go get dressed. I finally, with my aunt’s help, convinced him they were proper attire for the beach.

When the war started in the 40’s and women began working in factories and ship-yards, they started wearing pants more and more. They were comfortable and less hazardous around machinery. But still there were places pants were never worn by women. When my daughter Judy first started to school about 1963, girls wore dresses to school but gradually they started wearing pants. At first I let her wear pants one day a week. Soon she talked me into two days and it wasn’t long before jeans were the “in” thing. A girl wasn’t “in” unless she had a pair of red tag Levi jeans. One time while she was in Junior high a girl tore the red tag off her jeans. She was really upset and I had to sew it back in.

I too, gradually started wearing pants more and more but did wear a dress to church, weddings and funerals.

Now pants are everywhere. No wonder Mike was surprised to seem his grandma in a dress. It has been quite some time since I wore one, but Mike sounded pleased to see me in a dress, maybe I better start wearing them more often. After all I am a grandma. When I tried to get my grandma to wear pants, not long before she died at 96, she said to me, “Oh mercy no honey, grandmas don’t wear pants.”

 Yes they do Grandma but I think I will surprise Mike again soon, and wear a dress.

In this story my Aunt tells how a Model T truck helped keep her family going during the Great Depression. I don’t know if it was the same truck or not but my Dad and Aunt also told of a vehicle their dad owned with wooden spokes on the wheels. When the weather was hot and dry, the spokes would dry out and become loose. They would then have to stop and soak the spokes in water until they swelled and would once more stay in place.

DEPRESSION DAYS

by Iva Bailey

In 1930 the depression had started. The logging camp my dad worked in closed down. It was hard to find a job then. There was a box factory in town that made berry boxes, but it was only working part-time and they were laying off workers. It was the same with the two lumber mills we had. There were fruit canneries but they only ran in the summer time.

Dad decided to start cutting and selling wood. He bought a Model T Ford truck and he leased some logged off land up above Orting on Stony Creek. It was some of the same land he had worked on as a logger. When the loggers went through they had just taken the larger trees. There were lots of trees left that were good enough for wood.

I’ll never forget that Model T Ford truck. It had solid rubber tires. He didn’t have to worry about them going flat they were already that way. It wasn’t the most comfortable riding truck, but it was always fun for my brother and me, when dad would let us ride in the back. We were also the envy of all the kids in the neighborhood.

Dad would start out early in the morning and cut a cord of wood and come back home. If he had an order for the wood he would deliver it, if not he would take it to town and set on  the street until someone came along and bought it. There were others selling wood also so it wasn’t easy to sell. There wasn’t much money in the wood business then. He was lucky if he got five dollars a cord, most of the time it was less.

It was quite a job keeping that truck running.  When dad wasn’t cutting and hauling wood, he was working on the truck. He picked up an extra motor and when one motor gave out he would change it for a good one. Then he would repair the bad one and have it ready for the next time the motor gave out.

One time when he was coming down a steep hill with a load of wood the brakes gave out and he couldn’t stop. He managed to ride it out down the hill without any damage. After that when we kids would go with him, as we sometimes did, he would let us walk down the hill and pick us up at the bottom. He didn’t trust that truck.

Another time a wheel came off when we were coming down the road. He stopped fast that time. He had to unload the wood fix the wheel back on and reload the wood.

The steering gear broke once when we were all riding in the truck. I can remember wondering why Dad was driving down the middle of the road. After he stopped he told us he hadn’t been able to steer it. We were lucky we didn’t have the traffic then like we have today.

That truck was a real challenge to my dad but he managed to keep it running and to make a living for a while. Times were bad and it would be quite a while before they got much better.