The Summer Of No Shirt & No Shoes
We lived in this house in Gilboa for three years while Dad was town superintendent.
It must have been around the time this picture was taken that I had been reading Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn and had also seen the Tom Sawyer movie. Tom & Huck always wore just coveralls and usually a shirt with no shoes. Huck seemed to always have his pants rolled up in any picture of him I saw.
I’m think that might have influenced me that year and I think I might have been pretending that I was Tom Sawyer when I started wearing only bib coveralls on the nice days of that summer. No shoes, no shirt, no underwear, only coveralls with the legs rolled up. I remember running up the dusty dirt driveway to the house, past the out house with the gigantic lilac bush that surrounded the back and sides of the small two-holer. The lilac bush was a monster and for some reason Dad decided to cut it down. He and we boys worked on it for days, it seemed, before we got to the massive root system and then, because it was so massive, I think we just left it there.
I remember the nice sense of freedom, elation, and the ease of running around with only that one garment and no shoes.
In another memory of coveralls, I also remember a family on our school bus route that was on “relief” and lived in a tar-paper shack on Bull Hill Road just past Ambrozino’s and just before Van Akens driveway. A couple of those boys would get on the bus in the dead of winter, hair buzzed off, with denim coveralls and denim jacket, sometimes with no shirt. They also wore raw hide work shoes with no socks. They carried a greasy paper bag with rolled up pancakes in it for lunch at school. I often wonder what happened to those kids. They only lived in the shack for a short time.
The picture is of Marilyn holding Wayne. Doug and David are sitting beside the stump of a large tree the town removed because of the danger of it falling in the road. I think I took the picture with Marilyn’s box Brownie camera.
We lived in this house in Gilboa for three years while Dad was town superintendent.
It must have been around the time this picture was taken that I had been reading Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn and had also seen the Tom Sawyer movie. Tom & Huck always wore just coveralls and usually a shirt with no shoes. Huck seemed to always have his pants rolled up in any picture of him I saw.
I’m think that might have influenced me that year and I think I might have been pretending that I was Tom Sawyer when I started wearing only bib coveralls on the nice days of that summer. No shoes, no shirt, no underwear, only coveralls with the legs rolled up. I remember running up the dusty dirt driveway to the house, past the out house with the gigantic lilac bush that surrounded the back and sides of the small two-holer. The lilac bush was a monster and for some reason Dad decided to cut it down. He and we boys worked on it for days, it seemed, before we got to the massive root system and then, because it was so massive, I think we just left it there.
I remember the nice sense of freedom, elation, and the ease of running around with only that one garment and no shoes.
In another memory of coveralls, I also remember a family on our school bus route that was on “relief” and lived in a tar-paper shack on Bull Hill Road just past Ambrozino’s and just before Van Akens driveway. A couple of those boys would get on the bus in the dead of winter, hair buzzed off, with denim coveralls and denim jacket, sometimes with no shirt. They also wore raw hide work shoes with no socks. They carried a greasy paper bag with rolled up pancakes in it for lunch at school. I often wonder what happened to those kids. They only lived in the shack for a short time.
The picture is of Marilyn holding Wayne. Doug and David are sitting beside the stump of a large tree the town removed because of the danger of it falling in the road. I think I took the picture with Marilyn’s box Brownie camera.
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