In Our Own Sweet Time: A Story of Kids from the Forties

By George Wratney

This amusing tale is a biography, of sorts. For it is a biography not of one individual but of a portion of the generation of kids born in America in the mid-1940s. Their adventures and misadventures, missteps and mischief, and learning and yearning spring forth as they thrive in what many today consider far simpler and happier times. And, in this nostalgic look at part of Americas past, the reader might discover ways to help future generations of children grow into their own sweet time and prevent perils imposed by others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 5, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450045438

George Wratney

The author was born and raised in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is where most of this story occurs. He earned bachelor and master’s degrees in journalism from The Pennsylvania State University. He is a former commissioned officer, United States Marine Corps, and has been a newspaper reporter, a corporate communications executive, and an adjunct professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University. He and his wife, Judith, have two children and five grandchildren. They live in Central Virginia, in an area known as The Wilderness.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Chapter 1    The Hill

Chapter 2    Early Days

Chapter 3    Flying Popsicle Sticks

Chapter 4    First Love

Chapter 5    Christmas

Chapter 6    Snow Days

Chapter 7    Hayrides Can be Good for You

Chapter 8    Baseball Fervor

Chapter 9    Summer

Chapter 10  Fishing

Chapter 11  Flour Power

Chapter 12  Latin at Gunpoint

Epilogue

In memory of my parents,

who helped make it all possible;

to my wife, Judith, who became my love

in 1961 and still is;

and to Christopher and Angela; Kim and Juan;

Nancy; and Nathan, Javi, Stephen, Juan and Elise.

Acknowledgments

I thank my wife, Judith, who encouraged me to continue to follow through with this project, which I first imagined fifteen years ago. I thank her also for drawing the illustrations for this text.

I am grateful to the following individuals who read early drafts with critical eyes and provided significant suggestions for improvement:

arrow-bullet.jpg   John Baer, a long time friend and Philadelphia Daily News columnist

arrow-bullet.jpg   William L. Wilkie, Ph.D., Nathe Professor of Marketing, Mendoza College of Business, the University of Notre Dame, and my friend for more than sixty years

arrow-bullet.jpg   Kim Perez, our daughter

arrow-bullet.jpg   Christopher and Angela Wratney, M.D., our son and daughter-in-law

arrow-bullet.jpg   Nancy Yeager, my cousin

I also thank Sarah Arizala, Charliz Elle, Ruth Gonzaga, Mona Mati, and their colleagues at Xlibris for their thoughtful and professional help with this project.

Cover photo and composition by Bill Buttram Photography, Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Foreword

A friend, who is about ten years my junior, asked, When were you born?

1944.

"No one was born in 1944," he asserted, believing all potential fathers of that era had been off fighting in World War II, a war the United States had to fight.

I told him some fathers had gone and returned, while others, like my dad, had been too young for World War I and too old for the next one. In fact, about 2.8 million babies were born in the U.S. in 1944, slightly fewer in number than in 1943. Another 2.8 million arrived in 1945. Then came the first of the boomers, nearly 3.5 million of them in 1946.

Thus a bunch of us kids showed up in or around 1944 and enjoyed a childhood rich with fun, imagination, simplicity, love, safety, and innocence. It was magical, and this is our story. It is an attempt to funnel highlights from eighteen or so years of many young lives into a narrative that might make the reader smile, remember, reflect, and think about his or her own past and the future.

Our magic began as soon as we kids were really able to recognize and remember good times with parents and chums. It ended in about 1962.

Chapter 1

The Hill

The real trouble most likely began when Wayne hit Marcy on the forehead with a snowball during our walk home from school. As Wayne bent to scoop another round of snowy ammunition, Marcy dropped her books, charged across our little road, lowered her shoulder, and slammed into Wayne.

It should be said that Marcy was a sturdy girl; Wayne was a skinny boy. Force is equal to mass times acceleration.

The impact sent Wayne across a roadside ditch, landing him in a quivering heap on the embankment. Today’s football commentators would say Wayne had been pancaked. Marcy smacked her mittens against each other to dust off the snow, picked up her books, and walked home.

More was to come, but we’re getting a little ahead of our story.

The place we kids lived in became known as The Hill. Actually part of a ridgeline, the area in question was only about one and one-half square miles, largely wooded, and just seven miles north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It provided the center of our childhood merriment for a long, long time. We kids were fortunate to have it.

A once-primitive pair of essentially parallel two-lane roads, McKnight Road and Babcock Boulevard, in Ross Township helped frame our universe as they ran north-south through the valleys below the ridge. McKnight and Babcock were linked by two narrower lanes about two miles apart. One was Siebert Road, and the other was an extension of Babcock. A narrow, two-lane road, Evergreen, paralleled Babcock below the west slope of the ridge and connected with Siebert and Babcock.

At the center of the ridge in this road-framed space was The Hill. It was largely forested, even after a small development consisting of forty-four two-story brick houses crept from Evergreen Road up the west side of the ridge beginning in 1948. These square homes sat atop garage-basement combinations. Some of the garages were accessed from the front of the homes, others from the back. These were single-car garages. Virtually no family owned two cars then.

An elongated S-shaped road, Buehner Drive, served thirty-six of the homes. A dead-end lane two-thirds of the way up Buehner and perpendicular to Buehner to the right served another eight. This was Kipling Road. At the end of Kipling was a large property of fields and forest, part of which was once owned by former Pennsylvania Governor David Lawrence. A house and a small cottage sat on the property, as did a wonderful old barn.

Buehner Drive, paved from where it started at Evergreen, stopped near the summit. From there, for another 100 yards or so, ran a rut-filled dirt and gravel lane that scaled the summit through the trees to reach our home. The road then bent ninety degrees left and bordered the front of our property for about sixty yards.

My parents married and built their home in 1939 on a lot purchased from a scion of the Garrett family, who had farmed the area for a couple of generations. They had stopped farming some years earlier; trees had filled in some of the fields. The Garretts once had two houses: the main house, down the east side of the ridge, and another one built for a daughter of the clan, May, atop the ridge at the end of the dirt road in front of our house.

May’s home was in the Craftsman style: narrow, wood-sided, painted white, with a single roof ridge that ran front-to-back. A porch with four wooden pillars that helped support the home’s second floor ran across the front.

A third house, built in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, stood in the woods to the south, just to the right of our home going up the hill. That two-story house was square, large, in a traditional farmhouse style, with tall windows and flat wood siding painted yellow. It had a large front porch and a smaller one to the side. I knew nothing of the old lady who lived there or any of her family’s history.

Those three houses atop the hill (May’s, ours, and the home of the old lady who lived in the woods) were bordered on three sides by about 140 acres of locust, wild cherry, oak, and maple trees. Perhaps half of the tract stood on the east slope of the ridge between our homes and McKnight.

The remaining woods split more or less evenly; some just to the north, some south. We kids came to count those woods among our best friends.

My parents were born four days apart in January 1905 in what was Allegheny City, which Pittsburgh annexed in 1907. The area was known as the North Side. My father’s father had immigrated to the States from Prague in 1891. His surname was Vratny, which he tried to anglicize by changing it to Wratney as he passed through Ellis Island. At about the same time, the woman he was to marry and who would become my Czech grandmother immigrated from Prague as well.

What caused them to settle in Pittsburgh remained a family mystery. After visiting Prague in recent years and traveling up what was basically a cobblestone goat trail of a road to tour Hradčany Castle, which overlooks Prague and the River Vltava, I sensed my father’s parents must have felt at home on Pittsburgh’s hilly North Side, which had cobblestone streets and a view of downtown Pittsburgh across the Allegheny River.

My mother’s family was of English and German descent. A decade-long ancestral search led my mother to determine that her side of the family could be traced back to the Mayflower and then all the way back to a fellow named Cerdic, first king of the West Saxons, born in AD 467. Why her family ended up in Pittsburgh is equally mysterious.

illus_67343_1.jpg

A once-primitive pair of two-lane roads . . .

helped frame our universe . . .

My family tree has roots so vast

They stretch beyond the sea.

With many limbs I cannot know

Except that they led to me.

My parents met at age twenty. My father, George, gave my mother, Gladys, a garnet preengagement ring for her twenty-first birthday, something to tide her over until he could afford a more proper ring, he said. They eventually married late, at age thirty-four. There was little work during the early years of the Great Depression, and thus little money prevented them from marrying sooner.

My father joined Sears Roebuck in 1938 as a furnace salesman working out of a store in Pittsburgh’s Dormont district, and later on the North Side. A sales call led him to the Garrett farmhouse. He fell in love with the property, so different from the crowded North Side. Trees, wildflowers, songbirds, and air free of Pittsburgh’s steel mill soot lured him to purchase an acre of ground from the Garretts that autumn for $400. Much of it was a potato patch. He purchased an adjoining half-acre for $290 in 1941.

Half of our property was flat atop the ridge, and it contained our home; a large vegetable garden; several pine trees brought from my mother’s relatives’ property in Binghamton, New York; assorted wild cherry, locust, and willow trees; and plenty of grass. The other half, densely wooded, sloped west, down toward Buehner Drive.

Because he worked for Sears, my dad faithfully purchased a Sears Modern Home, the kind a person could order from a catalog. You picked the house, paid the man, and a truck would show up with everything needed to build the house, except for the foundation. My father assembled the house on the land he had purchased from the Garretts. He worked on it on weekends throughout the summer and autumn of 1939, aided by friends who helped him dig a trench for the septic system and assemble the house once the foundation was built. They slept in a large canvas wall tent mounted on a wooden platform on the property.

Our house was modest: two bedrooms, one bath, a living room, a dining room, a small kitchen, a full basement, and an unfinished attic. It had two peaks in front and was sided with composite shingles painted gray, starting from the foundation to just above the first-floor windows. The front peaks and ends of the attic were white. Red wooden shutters bordered the windows in front. Our white, wooden front door, arched at the top, was held in place by decorative black hinges. As a small boy, I pretended it was the entrance to a castle, which in a way was true.

Everything that went into that house, such as a mangle for ironing sheets, or on that house, such as paint, came from Sears. Let’s hear it for employee discounts. As time passed, virtually all toys given to me had passed through a Sears store. So had baseball bats, gloves, balls, and bicycles, most of which carried the J.C. Higgins brand name, a Sears exclusive. Family radios carried the brand name Silvertone, also a Sears exclusive.

I was an only child. My birth nearly killed my mother, I was told. Reflecting on those solitary days, I feel quite confident I would have had a brother or sister, or perhaps one of each, if Sears had offered adoption services.

During the early years, my

Reviews for In Our Own Sweet Time

[librisissimo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well-written, and the plot is resolved at the end (no spoilers given here, in case you haven't seen the tv show or the new movie!).Depends too much on the "mystery" and is more abstract than I personally prefer.

[snukes-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I wanted to like this. Interesting premise, but with an ultimately disappointing lack of revelation. Also, this guy's writing style made me batty. Lack of dialog markers left me frequently wondering who the heck was talking, and while I suppose that probably cooperated with the theme of the story (which, as far as I could tell was "you can never trust anything"), it was awfully annoying. Meh.

Recommended by: Joe K.