Neighborhood Friends

(as told by Elizabeth Perkins Buchheit)

I was the only girl in the neighborhood.  There were all these guys in the neighborhood and so to do things with them and be accepted, you had to do it not as good as, but better, than they did.  You know, climb the apple tree higher.  Run faster.  It was a lot of fun.

My friend John Harpham lived next door and he was an only child too so we grew up like brother and sister.  I used to go through a hole in the grape arbor to the back of his house.  I’d yell, “Oh John!”  And then his mother would stick her head out and say “He’s coming!” or “He can’t come out today.”  John and I would usually play at my house.  I don’t think John’s father liked us in his house very much.

John and I loved to play in a sandbox that his father made.  It had very high sides and was in his yard by a lilac tree.  It just was the best thing. We liked it from an artistic standpoint.  We made villages and sculptures. John was a very good artist.  When he got older, married and had kids, he used his basement as an art studio.  He used to go down and paint every night.

I was never one to play much with dolls, except to make up stories and clothes for them and all of those kinds of thing.  My friends and I would cut paper dolls from the Sears catalog and stage murder mysteries in my dollhouse.  The characters from the men’s suit section were the bad guys, the good guys or the butler.  Then we’d have somebody murdered in the dining room.  It was great.

The Wilkinsons lived across the street.  They had two boys and one girl.  I didn’t know the girl very well because she was about four years older than the rest of us.  Our clubhouse was in the Wilkinsons’ attic.   We made a lot of scary stuff up there — like an Egyptian tomb with mummies out of papier-mache.  Really, people were very creative because they couldn’t afford to buy anything.  You’d get ideas and then you’d make the stuff.  It was amazing how creative young people are.  They are to this day.  But now it’s so passive that you never see as much as would be possible.

I remember taking my Montgomery College class camping in one of the National Forests and there wasn’t anybody else there.  It was over Easter.  We went for about three or four days.  My daughter, Peggy, took a friend of hers along.  They had this very nice ranger out there and Peggy and her friend asked him, “What is there to do here? “ You know, they thinking about running into the town.  And he said, “Well, about sundown you can watch the wild turkeys.”  That isn’t what they wanted to do at all.

But during the day we had contests for writing songs.  Everybody brought some crazy thing so we had all these people with guitars and stuff.  Or we’d paint.  It was amazing what turned out.  We were isolated.  We were living in tents.  We had no outside entertainment.