I know this is very late, but I wanted to remember Teresa’s Birthday on March 20th with this entry.
In the event that all eleven of us were going to the same place at the same time, we had to squeeze into the VW Microbus. Dad drove, Howard was in the front middle and Mom had the passenger seat, which was specially equipped with a mirror to allow her to keep tabs on the back seats. Douglas Paul, Marilyn Ruth and Ronald David got the middle bench seat; Joseph Stephen, Dennis Waldo and I got the rear bench seat. This meant the girls, AKA Teresa Mary and Anna Marie had to ride in “The Wayback.”
This was in the days before the country went "safety" crazy. We played on metal monkey bars stretched over concrete. If you fell and broke your leg, you pushed the bone back in, rubbed dirt on it and went right back to playing. That’s the way it was AND WE LIKED IT!
So what’s the big deal if two small children had to sit on a hard, thinly carpeted platform, with no restraints, perched right over the gas tank? They were HAPPY to sit there in the wintertime with the engine heat and the exhaust fumes to keep them warm. And they got to pretend that the Wayback had magical powers, like the Way-Back Machine in the "Peabody & Sherman" cartoons.
Does it get any better than this?
Happy Birthday Teresa!
1 comment:
"Get in the back--the WAYBACK." That was how we said it. Of course the reason the girls had to get back there was because they were little bitty babies--baby, baby, baby...No equal rights back then. The reason Dennis had to sit in the middle up front was because he was skinny and John was too much of a live wire.
Does anybody remember the car speaker I put in the back of the Blue VW since the radio up front always made dad nervous and he would never turn it loud enough to hear it. Of course there was no stereo FM only AM which was hard to understand anyway.
Happy Birthday Teresa! Glad those car fumes didn't get to you too badly.--Ron
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