It's time to start another place to write short memories that are so easy to forget unless they are quickly written down. It's also a place to write short memories that I may have already written down previously and I forget if, when or where I have written them, so if you happen to read something here and then see it in a previous story just remember that I'm 78 + years old, very forgetful and I ain't gonna get any better so just do like I do, learn to live with it because it doesn't help getting mad.
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When I turned 18, I was able to make decisions without having to ask permission from my parents and what I was going to do after high school was the first big decision I had to make. I knew that I wanted to join the service and the Air Force recruiter had come to our school and given us a test that I did really well on and he wanted me real bad, then I went down to sign up for the draft with a friend who wanted to stop by and see the Navy recruiter while he was in town and low and behold they wanted me also.
Now I had another decision to make that determination was to invite the recruiters over to talk with me and my parents. The night the Air Force recruiter came dad didn't come home till real late. The night the Navy recruiter came dad was home early. When the recruiter left dad looked at me and said " if you needed to jump out of the airplane how far can you fly, I said I can't fly" then he said " if the ship sinks how far can you swim and I said a long ways" - I joined the Navy.
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We didn't walk ten miles both ways in three feet of snow but walk we did. When I was in the third grade, we lived maybe three quarters of a mile from school and therefore didn't qualify to ride the school bus. Pat and I usually had to walk to and from school and do so in all kinds of weather. Spring and fall were not too bad but winter could be brutal, luckily it didn't snow often in Nashville.
Tennessee had four seasons of weather, spring time could be warm and sunny today and freezing cold and snow flurries the next, summer was hot and sweaty. From September till mid November the temperature was generally mild but there was usually frost on the grass when we left the house. January through the first of April was a mixture of snow, rain, freezing temperatures and every now and then a howling wind that would make forty degrees fill like twenty five. Regardless of the weather we had to walk to school except on rare occasions when dad would take pity on us and give us a ride but they were rare occasions.
Consequently our wardrobes had to be four seasons. Bluejeans were a standard often complete with iron on patches covering well worn knees. Long or short sleeve shirts depending on the season, flannel shirts for the cold days, 100% cotton for the warm ones. Grandpa Wade kept us in cowboy / engineer boots until I got into junior high. Heavy winter coats and gloves kept us warm but some days it would be so cold with the wind blowing that there was nothing we could do but grin and bear it.
Rain required another piece to our wardrobe - rain suits. Rain suits of the 1950's were standard in design and color, style was not optional, the main concern was durability and visibility. The standard rain suit color was a bright yellow and consisted of three pieces - pants, hat and coat. The style was taken from rain suits sailors and sea faring fishermen had been wearing for eons.The pants were a standard fair, loose fitting to slide over the jeans and held in place with suspenders. The coat was long and covered the body from the neck to below the knees and sleeves that sometimes hung below the hand, buckles or big buttons ran down the front.
I don't know who designed the hat but it was unique. The hat was designed to have water roll off the back, it turned up in the front and down the sides to create a bill and water channeled down the long tail of the back. The hat sloped towards the back covering the neck and a part of the shoulders so that when water rolled off it wouldn't blow back against the neck, a cloth strap that tied around the chin held it on you head. When not in use the hat would neatly lay flat and fold up for storage in the coat pocket.
It was a good rain suit although it was a bit cumbersome. Looking back, the thing that strikes me as funny was the way we must have looked. Imagine a bunch of little kids of all sizes running around in bright yellow fisherman's rain suits stomping in every mud puddle, what a sight it must have been nobody could tell us apart.
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