More Early Memories--Everyday Life

Most of my very early memories are rather vague, almost dreamlike. So these memories describe what was happening and my feelings about what was going on around me in those early years before I went to school.

Before I went to school, I mainly stayed at home with my mother, brother, and sister. We rarely went anywhere during the week except, on occasion, my mother would take my father to work and we would go to the grocery store. Generally, my father did the grocery shopping on his way home from teaching high school. Grocery shopping couldn't have been a very pleasant experience for my mother, with three small children under the age of 4. On the Sundays, we went to church, and sometimes we went to my grandparents' house or occasionally to my Aunt Elsie and Uncle Bob's house.

I remember visiting my relatives, and I remember going to Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church, the church my grandparents and aunt and uncle and cousins attended as well. I can remember being in the car, riding in the back seat. There were no child or infant seats, and there were also no seatbelts. My mother held the baby in the front seat while my father drove. My mother smoked cigarettes constantly and always leaned her head against the passenger's side window. 

Every day all day, it was my mother, Pat, Joanne, and me in our house in the woods. As little as I was (under the age of 3), I was allowed to go outside alone to play by myself. I suppose my mother was keeping an eye on me while I was outside, but I knew where I was supposed to stay and where I could not go--in the woods or in the garage. There was really no place to go to get lost. I was a very obedient child and did what my parents told me to do and didn't do what they told me not to do. 

In the winter, I was bundled into my bulky snowsuit, boots, hat, and mittens and sent outside. I stayed mostly on our long driveway when the snow was very deep, until my father had made a little area in the snow where I could play. And the snow in upstate central New York State was often very deep. On the weekends, my father would pull me and my siblings for rides on the tobaggan or the sled. I also had tiny ice skates that strapped onto my boots. I loved to ice skate. We all used to love to watch my father plow our long driveway after a snowstorm. He used a put-together plowing trucklike machine that we referred to as "The Doodlebug." It was an open truck with one seat that was rather high, and it had a large wooden board on the front that was the plow. It was a very odd-looking machine, but it did a good job of plowing our long driveway.

I must have been quite a sight in my winter gear when I was very young. I had a red snowsuit with red boots, and wore a scarf and mittens. My cheeks would always turn bright red from the cold. I remember my legs chapping when the snow went down into my boots and my legs became wet and the boots rubbed against them. The best part of my winter play outfit was my coonskin cap. It was made of raccoon fur and skin, covered the entire top of my head, had earflaps to cover my ears, and had ribbons that tied under my chin. It also had the tail of the raccoon that hung down in the back. These types of caps were very popular during the early 1950s because of the movie about the folkhero Davy Crockett, who worn such a cap in the movie. Most of the caps sold were made from fake fur, but my father had this cap made for me. It kept my head nice and warm (and I was très chic). When I was very young, I carried my stuffed toy cat with me even outside. It also went to bed with me. As far as I can recall, it was just called "Kitty."    

My Very First Memories

My first actual memory involves the birth of my sister Joanne. I was 2 years, 19 months old, and I was talking by this time. Pat was only a little over 10 months old and was just beginning to walk. Joanne and Pat are what was called "Irish twins," babies who were born less than a year apart.

Pat was very different from me. He was blonde with blue eyes, whereas I had very dark brown hair and dark brown eyes. Plus he was very much a little boy and I was definitely a very proper little girl.  He was quite round and solid, and always had a scowl on his face. It seemed that he didn't know how to smile. There is not a baby picture that exists of Pat smiling. To me, he was a strange little creature about twice my size, and I didn't feel a particularly close bond with him. I played mostly by myself because he was too young to play with me.

At the time of my sister's birth, my mother went to the hospital. It was June 1952. Pat and I were taken to stay with my Aunt Elsie and Uncle Bob (my father's brother) and my cousins John and Michael (Mikey). John was 5 years old and Mikey was 3 years old. Mikey was 9 months older than me, and we played well together. However, almost as soon as we arrived at their house, all of us children came down with conjunctivitis (pink eye). All of us children, the four of us age 5 and under, were absolutely miserable. My grandmother Rose came over to help my aunt take care of us all. Pink eye lasts several days, so even when my mother and sister came home from the hospital, Pat and I could not go home until we were over the conjunctivitis.

My first vivid memory is of sitting on my aunt's kitchen counter while she bathed my crusty eyes with a boric acid solution to soften and wash off the sticky crusts. I remember crying because I couldn't open my eyes and because the boric acid solution was cold and wet and was running down my face. It felt awful and I hated that I couldn't get my eyes open. I remember my father coming into my aunt's house to check on us, to see when we would be able to come home. All I wanted to do was to go home, because I must have thought that everything would be better at home and I missed my mother and father. I wanted that sticky, crusty stuff on my eyes to go away. I didn't really care about having a baby sister. I just wanted to feel better.

Later in the summer, I was outside playing  by myself in the backyard on the top of the concrete slab that covered our water well when our next-door neighbor, Levina Heilmann, came walking through the yard on her way to our other neighbors' house. She stopped to talk to me about the new baby. She asked me, "What color are the baby's eyes?" I replied, "First they were sort of blue, but now Mommy says they are changing to brown. So I think they must be brown." And indeed, Joanne's eyes did change to brown.

These are the very earliest memories that I have of my life. At this age, not quite 3 years old, I was able to understand adults when they spoke to me, and I could communicate quite well with them and carry on a conversation. That's what one needs to remember things--language.

Alice in Wonderland and Other Movies

This past weekend when we went to see Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" movie, I remembered well the very first movie that I ever saw, which was the Disney cartoon movie version of "Alice in Wonderland." My babysitter Connie Guilfoyle, who was the daughter of my father's supervisor at school, took me to see it, and she also took me to see other movies, mostly Disney cartoons. Connie took me to the movies because my brother and sister were too young to go to the movies and I was just barely old enough, about 3 1/2 years old. I was a very well- behaved child, so people never minded taking me places. But "Alice" was my very first movie. I was a little scared of the Red Queen, of course; who wouldn't be scared of her!? But I loved the cartoon movie; I wished that I was Alice and could have such an adventure as she did. My little life seemed quite mundane, compared to what Alice experienced, even if some of her adventures were a bit frightening. 

I also had a little plastic raincoat, a see-through plastic cape with pictures of Alice and the White Rabbit on it, as well as some of the scenes from the cartoon.  It also came with a rainbonnet and a little umbrella. These also had pictures from the cartoon on them and were made of see-through plastic. I dearly loved my "Alice" raingear and actually looked forward to rain so that I could wear them if we went out. Unfortunately, we didn't go out and about all that often, except to church and to my grandparents' home, but I do remember wearing my outfit to my grandparents' home. It must have been the first time my grandparents had seen it, because I recall my grandmother oohhing and aahhing over how lovely I looked in my raingear. I think I was with my father at that time, and it seems in my memory that Pat and Joanne were not around, so they must have been home with my mother. My father probably was taking a loan payment to my grandparents who had loaned my parents money with which to build our house.

Connie also took me to see the Disney cartoon "Peter Pan." I distinctly remember being very scared at that movie. Captain Hook was a nightmarish character for me, and I was as deathly afraid of the crocodile as Captain Hook was. I remember Connie telling me that I could put my hands over eyes and not look at the scary parts, and she promised to tell me when the scary parts were about to happen. But for the most part, I loved going to the movies with Connie. I felt so grown-up to be going out without my parents and the babies. And Connie always bought me pop-corn, which I loved and still love to this day. Pop-corn is one of my favorite things, and a movie just doesn't feel right unless I have some pop-corn to eat while watching it.

Later when we were older, my mother generally took us to the movies. First, though, she had to make sure that they were on the approved list from the Catholic Church. There was a listing of the movies that were playing and the Church rated the movies as to their acceptability, based on the values of the church. And they were quite strict. If there was any extra-marital sex, for example, the movie was "Condemned" by the Church. So the movie "Tom Jones," a classic book and movie produced in the 1960s, was condemned by the Church. However, I was about 15 when that movie came out and my friend Bridget and I snuck out to see the movie because we had read the book and were curious 15-year-olds. Did we ever tell our parents that we had seen it? Not on your life! Not even when I was older did I ever let on to my parents that I had seen a "Condemned" movie because that was a sin!

When we were in grammar school, I remember some of the movies we saw were "The Ten Commandments," "The Sound of Music," "Johnny Tremayne," and "A Nun's Story." The latter was probably not appropriate for young children such as we were because it had a lot of violence in it--it was about a nun serving as a missionary in Africa during the turbulent times when African nations were attempting to gain their independence from European countries. I did have nightmares after that movie, and decided that I would NOT be a missionary because it was just too dangerous.

But most of the movies we saw were happy-ending, sugar-coated movies. Lots of Disney movies, of course. What would be "G" rated movies today. There were certainly more of them when I was growing up than there are today. It seems as if today even the children's movies have double entendres and show disrespect to parents or other authority figures. And parents today tend to let their children see movies that are beyond their intellectual abilities, movies that they can't (or shouldn't) understand at very young ages. But movies today are so heavily promoted and marketed to audiences of young people, who attend many movies. And parents don't seem to check out a movie or even discuss the values of the movie with their children. There are teachable moments in some of those movies, but the vast majority of parents miss those moments and concentrate on entertainment value for themselves.

Moving to the House in the Woods

When I was about 17 months old, my father and grandfather had completed enough of our house that they were building so that we could move into it. At about the same time, my brother Patrick was also ready to be born. In fact, my mother was painting the back hallway of the house that led from the kitchen to the back door when she went into labor! So she cleaned her paint brush, cleaned herself up, dropped me off at someone's house (either my grandparents' or my aunt and uncle's house) and went to the hospital to give birth to Pat.

This was in the days of oil-based paint that had terrible fumes. The paint took what seemed like forever to dry, but the worst part was that no one wore masks the way they do now, to protect their lungs from the toxic fumes from the paint. So my mother (who smoked heavily as well) had been painting in an enclosed space with no protective equipment as she was pregnant. People today would be horrified if anyone did this, pregnant or not, but people just didn't know any better back then. Oh--and the paint had lead in it! It's amazing that more children were not born with birth defects at that time.

But our new house was "a work in progress," and would remain in that status for quite a long while, because now my mother (the painter) had two small children to care for and would have three within another 10 months--my sister Joanne. When we moved into the new house, only the first floor of the house was finished enough for us to live in. Our first floor consisted of a large (for that time) eat-in kitchen, a living room, a bathroom, my parents' bedroom, and another bedroom, which Pat and I (and later Joanne) shared. It would later become a "den," a sort of sitting room. It was directly across the hallway from my parents' bedroom with the bathroom in between. We had a small foyer by the front door, but rarely used the front door, and then there was the long hallway from the kitchen to he back door, which also led to the cellar stairs.

The first thing that had been built on the land was a huge two-story garage, with room for four cars, but it served as a workspace for my father for large projects. The upstairs of the garage was used as a storage area. In the house, my father worked each night and weekend on the upstairs bedrooms and the upstairs bathroom. We had a full cellar. That meant that the cellar was as big as the first floor of the house. It ran completely underneath the house. In the cellar was a washer ( we didn't get a dryer until much later), large wash sinks, a smaller workspace for my father, and in an space covered by earth (not under the house itself) was a large rootcellar where my mother kept the fruits and vegetables that my father grew in the garden and on the fruit trees surrounding our house and then my mother canned using a pressure cooker so that we would have fruit and vegetables all year round.

That was our cozy little house. The outside of the house was still quite unfinished, particularly the stonework around the twin picture windows. With only one bathroom and our water coming from a water well that my grandfather had located with a divining rod ( a willow stick split partly in two, which the "diviner" held and when the single branch moved downward as he walked the grounds, it "told" him where there was enough water to dig a water well). Since we had to conserve water, my mother bathed my brother and me (later also my sister) in the same tub together. That's how I found out that boys and girls are made differently.  

My Early Years, as Told to Me

Children usually don't have many memories until they acquire language. I think this was true for me. What I know of my very early years comes from stories that were told to me by my parents or other relatives. There were stories about me when I was around the age of one, when I was walking and eating solid food (apparently my mother didn't breast-feed for long, because that wasn't the "modern" thing to do). Some of the stories are funny; some of the stories worry me a little because they make me wonder what was really going on behind the truth of the story. A funny story first: My parents liked Italian food, and Utica had many good Italian restaurants due to the influx of Italian immigrants after World Wars I and II. They would often take me with them to their favorite Italian restaurant, and order me a small bowl of spaghetti with marinara sauce, and when I'd had enough to eat, I would dump the remainder to the spaghetti on my head! I was also in my pajamas. I must have looked lovely, sitting in the high chair in my pajamas with spaghetti with marinara sauce streaming down my hair and face, but it was a good signal that I had finished eating, don't you think?

The next story is not quite so funny. We lived on the second floor (the top flat) of a two-story flat at 1603 Holland Avenue in Utica, New York. In the Northeastern United States, these types of houses were very common; it was as if there were two house stuck one on top of another; each was called a flat. When my father would leave home each morning to go to hid teaching job a few blocks away at Utica Free Academy (where he was a building construction teacher and where he and his brothers had attended high school), I would run down the stairs toward the door after him in my pajamas after him screaming and crying," Daddy! Don't go! Don't go, Daddy!" My mother would retrieve me from the bottom of the stairs, and I would sob all the way back to our flat. And, she later told me, she would cry and I would cry for hours. Apparently, my mother was quite unhappy or depressed. She didn't really know anyone in the city except for my grandparents and my Aunt Elsie, her best friend from Virginia and my two uncles. My mother was a very gregarious person and being cooped up in the house with a baby must have been torture for her. When I was a much younger baby, maybe 3-4 months old, she tols me, when my father left for school, I would cry and she would cry, all day long. She must have been depressed, but in those days, no one talked about depression. She really couldn't call her family in Virginia, because that was very expensive.

My mother never talked to me much about my earliest childhood, but when she did, it always involved her crying and being unhappy and feeling alone and isolated. There were no places for young mothers to go and do things. On the weekends, my father and his father were building our house on Valley View Road in New Hartford, which was just a few miles away from our flat and from my grandparents' house on Storrs Avenue in Utica. It was also near my Aunt Elsie and Uncle Bob's house on Sunset Ave. Later they moved to Thieme Place; still later they moved about 20 miles away to Vernon, NY to be closer to Uncle Bob's work at Griffis Air Base where he was a civilian engineer. The only "outsiders" we visited when I was this young age were my dad's supervisor and his wife, Henry and Jo Guilfoyle who lived down the street on Holland Ave from us. Their daughter Connie babysat for me and took me to the movies.

Usually, whenever, we went to visit someone, I went with my parents. They would bring a big navy blue blanket and put it on the floor, and put me on the blanket. I would curl up on it and go to sleep with my toy cat. When it was time to go, my parents would bundle me up in the blanket to take me home. Later on, that same blanket became the blanket that was used on my bed. That blanket, though threadbare, lasted a very long time. There were some spots that were picked nearly clean through where I had soothed myself to sleep, but the blanket just kept on being used just for me.

The Very Beginning--My Name

I will start this story from the very beginning, or at least my beginning, I was born on a Tuesday in late November in St. Elizabeth Hospital In Utica, New York State, in Oneida County, on November 22, 1949, to be exact, at about 6:40 p.m. If you're really interested in how long I was or how much I weighed, That information is on my "official" birth certificate in my lockbox. I weighed 7 pounds and a little, that much I know, and I was at least 20 inches long. That's all I can tell you.

I was the first child of Floyd Donald Samson and Mabel (Mae) Malvola Tolley Samson. The major significance of my birth to the Samson family in general was that I was the first female born into the Samson family since my father's long-deceased baby sister who was born in 1916. My birth was cause for great celebration in the family. So much so that my father wanted to name me Rosemary, the same name as his deceased baby sister. Daddy thought that this would honor her memory.

Now this presented a problem. My father's mother, my Grandmother Rose, was half Irish. In Irish families, babies are NEVER named after someone who has died an untimely death or died tragically. It is considered to be bad luck. Obviously my father had not been paying much attention to Irish superstitions and traditions when he was growing up. So Rosemary as a name for me was not to be. But my father thought he had a solution. Why not name me Rosemarie? My father really liked Rose because that was his mother's name, and he thought that using Marie was different enough but still had the "flavor" he was looking for in a name. But, alas, my grandmother did not see it that way and felt that Rosemarie was too close to Rosemary to be given to me. My poor father! Back to the drawing board for him. So he decided on Marie. That was just fine with everyone in the family--except for my mother. Her objection was that my father had a cousin whose name was Marie Samson. Even though Marie was engaged and would soon be married and have a new last name, my mother felt that there would be confusion between two Marie Samsons. My father and his family didn't even see the other Marie very often, but my mother wouldn't back down. My mother liked the name Diane, a name she had found in a movie magazine while she was in labor. She felt it was very modern and a very popular name. (Indeed it was popular. In my Kindergarten class of 90 students at St. John the Evangelist School, there were 4 Dianes!) My grandmother protested, because she thought people would call me the nickname Di, (which they did) and because it sounded like an African-American name, Dinah. She also wasn't happy because it wasn't a saint's name. But my father would stand up to mother or go against her wishes, so she won the first of many battles concerning me, and my name became officially Diane Marie Samson.

I have never liked my name. From the time I was little, even before I knew the story about my name, I have never like Diane. I've never seemed to "fit" my name. Diane just really isn't me. I don't know why, but it just isn't. It worked fine for my mother, who would call upstairs to wake us up--"Di! Pat! Jo!"--but it just wasn't me. To my ears, Diane Samson sounds strange. When I was about 3 or 4, I even attempted to pass off Diane as the name of my doll and I would then be Marie, but mt mother would not allow that. Even though one of her own sisters used her middle name instead of her given first anme, she wouldn't let me do that. I think it offended her that I didn't like the name she had picked out for me.

Later, when I was confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church, there is a tradition of adding a saint's name to your name as your patron saint. I chose Catherine, which was my great-grandmother's name (my grandmother Rose's mother's name). I also liked that name because my grandmother was devoted to the Miraculous Medal. Supposedly the Blessed Mother appeared to St. Catherine Labouree and told her to have this medal struck with the words, "Oh Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee." So I chose Catherine.

I finally was able to adopt my middle name Marie as my name as an adult when I was about 55 years old, after my mother and father had passed away and I was living in Texas. I still use both names--Diane Marie--when I communicate with my relatives because they are so used to my name. But when I'm introduced to new people, I always use what I consider my real name--Marie.

Sometimes It takes a long time to become the person you truly are. As you read my stories, you may see this theme pop up time and again. I am still in the process of becoming, I think.

Can She Bake a Cherry Pie, Charming Billy?

When I was around 3 years old, I loved to sing. Love Love Love! I sang along with so many songs on the record player that we had, a Victrola, a tall piece of furniture that had a radio (AM-no FM in those days) in the top and a record player in the bottom. The record player had a turntable on which one placed a 78 rpm (revolutions per minute) black vinyl record (hard plastic which broke easily if you dropped it). Then you turned on the turntable which began to turn (hence the name) and you VERY CAREFULLY placed the arm which held the diamond needle of the record player onto the first groove of the record and then the record would play. The needle would play along the grooves cut into the record and the sound would come out through the speakers. That's basically how it went.
Well, I actually knew how to operate this machine at age 3 all by myself and I didn't drop the needle onto the record, which would have made the needle blunt and dull and chipped the record. I was a very careful child and I loved our records. I especially loved "Billy Boy," the folk song that the Rudder Middle School Intermediate Girls' Choir sang at the end of February 2010 in a concert we attended. Cassie was singing with the Advanced Choir, but I nearly fell out of my chair when the other choir began to sing this folk song, my favorite song from long, long ago.
The song is basically about a boy, Billy, who has met a girl and his friends are asking him questions about her and he responds, but each time adds sadly, "But she's a young thing and cannot leave her mother." The verse I most remember from my childhood is: "Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? Can she bake a cherry pie, charming Billy?" She can bake a cherry pie. There's a twinkle in her eye, but she's a young thing and cannot leave her mother." I think that's the verse I remember so well because I loved cherry pie with whipped cream on top (oh, to have a nice thick, warm slice of my grandmother's right now....). My mom's wasn't so great; her pies were always too thin in the filling department and she worked the crust too much, so it was always tough. But Grandma Samson's pies.... I can imagine Great-Grandpapa Samson and my Grandfather's brother's saying to my Grandfather when he met my Grandmother: "Can she bake a cherry pie, Johnny Boy, Johny Boy?" And I'll bet he answered the same as the words in the song. :-)