FROM WHERE I SIT  COKE TIME  April 19, 2013  Pat DeKok Spilseth

An image of teens swiveling on padded stools at the counter at Setter’ Drug Store flashed into my mind this week.   I got a phone call from Diane Femrite Peterson, my classmate at Glenwood High School.  She worked behind the soda fountain counter filling orders for cherry coke and lemon-limes in short glasses with straws.  Other friends, Janet Holtberg and Bonnie Faulkner, also worked at the drug store.  I worked across the street at the Corner Drug Store with Julian Mortensbak, Marv Dyerstad and young pharmacist Larry Torguerson.   What a crew we were back in 1962!

High schooler kids were lucky to get after school and weekend jobs at stores in downtown Glenwood.  We had a ball working, but we also p earned spending money for those cherry cokes and perhaps a new outfit at Glenwear or going movie tickets at the Glenwood Theatre on weekends.  It sure was nice to meet our friends at the A&W on the hill and buy some fries and a frosted root beer or a curly top cone at the Dairy Queen down by the lake.

After work on summer weekends, we’d grab out swimsuits and head for the beach.  It was always our goal to swim out to the farthest diving tower and meet on the top platform.  Oh, the mystery and tantalizing draw of a dark night, a full moon, and skinny dip swimming with our pals at the beach.  Naturally, it tempting to shed out suits and giggle about skinny dipping in the dark.  We were naive teenager, most of us were shy about our bodies so the darkness helped our inhibitions.  We’d tie our one-piece suits to the swim tower so they wouldn’t float away, rush to climb the cold metal stairs and emerge in all our glory by the light of the full moon.  As quickly as possibly, we’d dive in the water, only to repeat the same procedure again an again.  What a thrill!  Remember, this was 1962.  Our thrills were rather simple in those days.  

Other balmy evenings we’d take Dad’s car out to Halvorson’s Point and have a bonfire on the beach.  Someone might have a guitar; someone might bring a keg of beer to share, and we’d sing and talk into the wee hours.  Most of us had to be home by midnight, even earlier because in those days we had curfews imposed by our parents. Most of us obeyed the rules.  If we didn’t, we paid in one way or another.  I’d get the cold shoulder treatment, get sent to my room to “think” about my indiscretion and ruminate until I’d end up feeling so bad.  Then Dad would knock on my door, come in, and proceed to lament about how bad he felt that I wasn’t respecting his and Mom’s rules.  After all, the rules were for my betterment.  Of course, I bought the story and vowed never to disobey again.  That lasted at least a week until one of my buddies would lure me to another adventure.

We all wore thick, white bobby socks almost reaching our knees in those days.  Rarely did we cuff them; wearing them rolled up all the way was an “in” factor of the day.  Some kids wore black and white saddle shoes...WHY were they called saddle shoes?  They looked noting like a horse saddle.  Many wore white tennis shoes; the “in” crow wore penny loafers.  We bought “dickies” to go around our neck and fastened the collar with a little metal hook & eye or a snap.  Usually the dickie was a white fabric resembling the popular Peter Pan collars of a blouse.  It went with our short sleeved wool sweaters and wool pleated Pendleton skirts or circle skirts with plenty of stiff crinolines underneath to make the skirt stick out fully.  

Girls had to enroll in home economics classes where Mrs. Le Masters taught us how to cook, sew, and walk with good posture.  We copied recipes on file cars and filed them alphabetically in little metal recipe boxes with flip top lids.  The boys had shop classes where they learned how to change oil in cars, made book cases, magazine racks and metal shop where they made oil cans.   That’s what prisoners did at the Stillwater Penitentury.   Elmer, the prisoner paroled to Dad, came with a family picnic table he’d made in prison out of yellow and red metal plus the same little table for my sister Barbie and me.  He also had a leather tooling class in the pen where he made a belt for Dad and a tooled purse for Mom.  Elmer took me to the movie shows when I was a little girl, but when he returned to his home and old friends in Nebraska he got back into trouble.  He died in a high speed chase after a robbery.  Those incidents always led Mom to teach the lesson that “you’re known by the company you keep.”  Also, Dad and Mom believed the guys in jail weren’t bad men; they just made some bad choices.  The jail offered so many lessons for Barbie and me.  A favorite was the to not waste your education.  Our jail friend Blackie had a university degree, but liquor became his choice in life, another bad decision, which Mom repeated often.

Isn’t it interesting what memories are triggered by a phone call from a lost-lost friend?  We reminisced about classmates, our escapades, and our current families.  I did forgot to ask her more about the Bum’s Hideout in the woods above her family home near the tracks.  We found some burnt out cans of beans in a campfire one day when we dared to venture into those woods.  That reminds me of the abandoned rail cars up on the hill where Punky used to race through in his Dad’s collector car, a Model A or Model T.  With a car full of girls, Puny would step on the gas and yell, “OK, you bums, rush us~”  How exilerating those times were!