Six Days Late or One Day Early

Thanksgiving preempted my blog last Thursday and the ASU game will take up tomorrow night so here it is.

I tried very hard some time ago to write something about the poverty while growing up in Atomic City. I don't think we were poor compared with most of the other families there. My dad was a welder/mechanic and followed construction jobs for most of my siblings' lives. We moved to AC soon after my first birthday (1950) when he got a job at the Atomic Energy Commission site about eight miles north of town and pretty much stayed there except for the time we spent in Lone Mountain Lodge, Montana when I was six.

Mom & Dad never discussed finances with us so I don't know how much he made while working there at the AEC site. I know when he worked in the Australian Outback on a railroad project he made $1,500 a month plus room, board and round trip transportation. Mom figured out he was making $50 a day and said absolutely nobody was worth that much money. That was in1965-66 so I assume he made much less than that at the site.

We were probably middle class compared with the others. We even had the first color TV in town. I remember playing with kids who really lived in squalor. They had no dads and I had no clue what their mothers did to make money. My Mom organized the Relief Society sisters to clean a house one family had trashed only to see it back like it was just a short time later. It seems odd now how normal it seemed then. The kids were just more kids to play with.

It didn't take much to make us happy. We would spend hours having clod fights, playing war, or operating on kangaroo rats with a piece of glass and no anesthesia. I'm rather surprised that I didn't turn out to be a serial killer.

There were plenty of old junked cars around to play in and on. Once we made a vinegar and soda bomb by mixing them in a glass jar, putting the lid on tight then setting it on the hood of an old car. It was supposed to go boom and make a big mess on the car. We wound up throwing rocks at it to make it go boom. It did make a nice mess though.

In the winter we made a toboggan by taking the hood from an old car, tying it to the back of our Jeep and pulling it around. It was great fun until we hit a big rock when I was riding in it and it split in two, pitching all of us into the snow. We tried for hours to jump off the back of our pickup into the snow in slow motion. No matter how slowly we climbed into the truck, we couldn't fall slower. Ok, so we weren't too bright. It was still entertaining. Snowball fights were much cleaner than clod fights.