Tuesday 4: My Life Story!

 

Your Life


Welcome... This is Toni Taddeo's Tuesday 4 and boy are we glad to see you!


In keeping with our theme of looking at the past, maybe we can talk about your past life and what it might have been like?

1. What was life like for you as a child of elementary school age? Friends, games, TV, music, food, interests? Tell us about it won't you?

Oh my! Elementary school was a wonderful time! We moved to the little town of Tavares, Florida, in December of first grade.  We had originally moved to Brooksville, Florida from our farm in Pennsylvania, the summer before I started school.  It was a very BIG change for our family of six to move from the freedom and beauty of our lovely big farmlands to a very small two bedroom apartment, where we would live until my Dad could build us a new home in that community. However, the job he had moved there to do wasn't working out very well, and so after six months we made the move to Tavares to a rented house until he could build us a new house there on a lot that some friends who also used to live in PA. sold him.  It was a lovely wooded lot way out in the country, and we were all quite thrilled.  But it would be about a year before the house was built and we could finally be settled into the home where I grew up and where my parents lived until they moved to their heavenly home. 

And so, from the second semester of first grade all the way through 12th grade I lived there and attended the same school for all those years.  

This was my first day of school in first grade!

And here I am with a portion of the 2nd grade class. This was our spring Easter program. I am to the right of the girl in the white cat costume. I have a flat hat on and dark sweater.  Below is a picture of the whole class of 2nd graders. There were two different classes.  I was in Mrs. Sweeney's class. The other kids had Mrs. Bass.  We had many wonderful programs and I have very happy memories of my elementary school years. I made lots of good friends, and I am still in contact with quite a few of them to this day as most of us went all the way through 12th grade together.  It was a small town, small school, and we were a very close knit group of kids.

And this might have been the same year...1957.  This was the Elementary and Junior Sunday School department at the Methodist Church where I attended all my growing up years. This was taken on Easter Sunday. I am sitting on the floor, the fifth person from the left, and again I am wearing a hat! After all, it was  Easter!

This was my 8th birthday, (below) and the only party I remember having with a lot of friends there. I had some other birthday parties with just a couple of friends, but this was the only one with boys invited, and this would have been the first party in the new house once Daddy got it built!

I am on the far right, next to the two boys on the end. I am still in contact with four of the kids in this picture, thanks to Facebook and class reunions.

Gosh, you want to know about other interests too? Games, TV, and stuff like that? Well, let's see. I always loved "I Love Lucy", especially because she was a redhead and so was I, so I thought maybe she was really my mother, since my own mother was a brunette. Ha Ha. (but my Daddy was a redhead just like me).  And I loved all the Saturday morning shows like Sky King, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, My Friend Flicka, so many others we loved to watch. But we couldn't watch ANY TV until our beds were made, we had breakfast and brushed our teeth and were dressed and had finished all our chores.  My job was to clean the bathroom and do the dusting, which was a BIG job! Maybe we did that while watching TV, otherwise I don't know when we would ever have had time to watch those shows! LOL. Oh, and of course my sister and I always had to do the dishes.  Here we are.  It was summertime, can you tell? Yes, this is Florida.  We were barefoot all summer long, and this was before AC...so it was hot and humid all summer long too, hence, we wore as little as possible to keep cool.

And I loved to play outside. Here I am on my "fort", and watch out! I am aiming my wooden rifle at you!  We lived in the country, with lots of woods around us, and I spent most of my time outside when I was home. We didn't have any close neighbors, so I didn't have many playmates who came to my house. But I did go home with friends in town quite often after school since my mother worked until 5:00 p.m., and then she would come pick me up. I often went to a different friend's house every afternoon, probably so not one mother would get tired of me being there...Ha Ha. I was quite "active". LOL!

And here was my 10th birthday party. Left to right: a girl named Kim from our neighborhood, my cousin Becky, me, my best friend Rhonda, and another friend Linda.

You will see that I received my Barbie doll for this birthday, a gift from my grandparents. I still have her today, 61 years later! (She lives in the china closet, where she is safe in her elegant townhome!)

I would be remiss if I didn't tell you about how much fun my cousin Becky and I had with our Barbie dolls especially during the summer months. I would spend the night (maybe several nights) at her house and together we built houses for our Barbies  that were quite elaborate considering our 10 year old skills. I wish I had pictures of that! We spent many a happy day sprawled out on the living room floor of my Aunt Marion's house, playing with these dolls and houses...every summer for several years...I don't think we quit playing with them until we were about 13 or 14...(but probably we didn't tell our other friends as they weren't as interested in dolls as we were!) Becky and I had plenty of other fun activities that we did together. See, Becky was an only child, and just 9 months younger than I was. I was the baby of my family of 4 children, and when I was in elementary school my sister and brothers were in Jr. High and High School, so they didn't have much to do with me.  I was just the bratty little sister. LOL. So Becky and I were more like sisters than cousins, but we lived about 10 miles apart so could only be together during the holidays and summer break and some weekends. We do have some stories to tell about some of our "fun activities", but I will save that for another time.

2. Moving along to the teen years would you mind sharing some of the same things with us? What were you interested in? What did you watch on TV or listen to on the radio? Tell us all about you as a teenager.  

My teen years were filled with school, church, (M.Y.F. = Methodist Youth Fellowship), and friends.  I was a cheerleader in both Jr. High and High School, so that kept me pretty busy during the school year. I sang in the high school chorus and in my senior year we performed at the State Choral Contest and got all superior ratings! That was pretty good for a small town school. 

I went to summer MYF Camp every summer for a week, along with fall retreats. After graduation from high school, I spent the summer working as a counselor at that same camp. It was an experience that totally changed the direction of my life for the better, and I will always be grateful to the Lord for allowing me that privilege to serve there. 

This is a link to that same camp today. It's a very special place.  This is a picture of the floating cross on the lake at what is now called the Warren W. Willis youth camp.  This cross was there when I was there as a teen, and holds a special place in my heart.

As far as music goes, I loved all the music of the late 50's and 60's, and was definitely a Beatles fan. I will never forget that night they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. Yes, I was sitting there in my living room crying and wanting to scream just like all the other girls, but my parents weren't going to permit me to do too much of any kind of  carrying on as that. I was lucky they even allowed me to watch it.  My parents were pretty strict about a lot of things, but I still had a very happy and wonderful childhood and youth, and I am very thankful they WERE strict about the things that really mattered in life.  Because of their strong Christian values I was protected from getting involved in a lot of things that could have also changed the direction of my life in the wrong way. I am very thankful to God for my home, family, and especially for the fact that we were brought up in a Christian home.

3. Would you share your college or young working years with us? Did your interests change or grow in your late teens or early 20s? Did your friends come or go? Did you live at school or home or have a place of your own? So many questions only you can answer.

Well, that's another whole chapter. There's no way to answer all these questions in one post! But I will try to summarize it by saying that my interests changed when I fully accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord in my teens. Yes, I was brought up in a Christian home and went to church from the time I was born, but I still needed to fully accept Christ for myself and not think that just because my parents were Christians and I went to church meant that I was saved from my sins.  That was a personal decision that only I could make, between me and God. When I was in high school I dated several different guys, and even though they were nice enough, I don't believe they were truly Christians.  Their values were not Christ-centered, and to be honest, at that time neither were mine. It wasn't really until I spent the summer at that youth camp as a camp counselor that I fully committed my life to Christ and knew that I wanted more out of my life than where I was headed at that time.  My plan after high school was to go to an airline school to become an airline stewardess.  I had never even been on an airplane before! LOL. Boy was I naive!  But the director of the camp sat me down and had a long talk with me about my future, and he opened my eyes to see that I really needed to reconsider those plans and pray about what God wanted me to do.  I told my parents that I had decided not to go to that school, which they had already paid a deposit for, (thankfully only $100.00, but back then that was a lot of money), and that I wanted to go away to college where some of my friends were going in another state.  They were fine with my decision to not go to the airline school, but wanted me to go to the local Junior College first and then they would see if they could find a way for me to go on to college.  They did not have a lot of money and there was no savings plan for me to go to college, so going away was out of the question at that time.  And so I agreed to go to the local Jr. College that fall, and then I met my "hubby to be" in the first semester...and well, the rest is history! We were married the following summer and he went on to complete his degree in education, and I went to work at an insurance company in the accounting department to support us until he graduated.  And several years later he was called to the ministry...and so on and so on, and that's another whole long story.

To answer the question above about did I live at home or school or have a place of my own after high school: I stayed at home. The junior college was less than 5 miles away from home.  And then I got married the following summer, and went straight to our little apartment in the big city where we lived when we got married.  So, no, I've never lived on my own, unless you can count the summer I worked at the youth camp...but I hardly consider living in an un-airconditioned rustic cabin  (in Florida!) with a different group of teenage girls to supervise every week, sleeping on squeaky bunk beds and doing all kinds of camp labor jobs as a volunteer...yes, that's right, we weren't even paid!...but we got free room and board for the summer!...if you consider that "living on your own", well...let's just say it was a great experience and I'm glad I did it, but it's not exactly "living on your own."   

4. And lately... what are the topics occupying your mind right now? How have things changed in your life in the not to distant past. Are you okay with the changes?

Well, of course we are retired now and life is very different than the way it was for the busy years of our lives.  A lot has changed in the past several years, but again, that's another whole chapter. Just go back and read my blog posts for the past ten years and you can get a pretty good idea about how things have changed. Some good, some not so good. But we are very thankful for our health,  even with its limitations, and we are also very thankful for how God has provided for us in our retirement. We didn't plan very well for retirement and wondered if we would even be able to retire.  Without going into all the details, let me just say that God has been very gracious unto us and is taking good care of us. We don't have much money, but we have enough.  We praise God every day for His goodness and grace and mercy. I really couldn't ask for anything more.

Thanks for dropping by.. come again, won't you?

Well, if you made it through reading this whole post, thank you for hanging in there with me! Now I will try to get around and read each of your stories. If any of you have written as much as I have, it may take a few days!  And thank you, Annie from Cottage By the Sea for coming up with these questions each week.  Now, let's go over to Tuesday 4 for today and visit with each other.