Those Were the Good Old Winter Days at Play on the East Side

All this snow and cold takes me back to my winters growing up on the East Side. I now live in the Pacific Northwest, where we've had a pretty intense winter for this area. It astounds me how hard it is for folks out here to cope with what was normal for my childhood.

We didn't have much for toys in those days. My dad was working three jobs just to feed his growing family, so we got creative when it came to fun. A large sheet of cardboard was all we needed for sledding - or an aluminum lid off a trash can. Mom didn't drive, so much of our hills were either man-made or close to home. Until I was 7, we lived in a duplex on Bush near Johnson Parkway - pretty flat territory, except that there were four steps up to our house from the sidewalk. That stairway was just big enough to cover with snow pushed from the yard. It wasn't much of a slope, but I suppose it was enough to keep three small kids occupied. Plus it was close to the bathroom.

In those days you made sure you emptied your bladder before you went out to play, because once you were all bundled up it was no quick task to get undone if a bathroom emergency struck. Coats and snow pants were either wool or heavily padded cotton, not the quick-dry, lightweight stuff kids wear today. In fact, I think just about everything was wool, except for those uninsulated rubber boots that zipped up the front (well, the girls' boots did; the boys' boots had cumbersome buckles). A couple of extra pairs of socks (plus a pair of my dad's wool hunting socks, as I recall) and Tastee bread bags over your feet cut down on the chill a bit, plus they made those boots fit better. (We always got them several sizes too big so they would last a few years.)

You wore at least two pair of wool mittens (always attached to a string that got threaded through your coat sleeves), a wool hat with your jacket hood over it, and a wool scarf that must have been eight feet long, wrapped several times around your face. Both of my grandmothers were prolific knitters, so there was always a mountain of those outdoor necessities at our house.

Who remembers how wet those scarves got? And the frost and icicles hanging off the front? The more vigorous the play, the harder you breathed and the wetter those scarves got.

Once we came in the house my mom would put down towels on the kitchen floor (boots came off on the back steps and you ran into the house - not an easy task with plastic bags on your feet). Off came the wet layers, which she would scoop up and drape over chairs near the radiator to dry out. I can still remember the smell of wet wool clothes. It was the same in the cloak rooms at school, only multiplied by at least two dozen.

One winter my brother Tommy and I got matching red kids' shovels for Christmas. I think my dad had read Tom Sawyer one too many times, because looking back it sure seems like they were more for enticing us to help him shovel than they were for play. No matter, we thought they were lots of fun, and we chased each other around the yard, flinging snow at one another.

Tommy took a particularly aggressive swipe in my direction with a shovelful of snow and I just laughed when most of the snow went flying elsewhere. Suddenly he looked at me in shock and started to cry. I was laughing and couldn't figure out what he was so upset about. In fact, I was laughing so hard I was crying. I could feel the tears running down on face and dropping onto the snow. Amazingly they turned bright red when they hit the ground...

Tommy went running into the house, not stopping to take his boots off on the steps, screaming, "I didn't mean to do it," while I went running behind him, trying to figure out what all the excitement was. Dad told me later that the drops of red in the snow from the front yard to the back door showed him the exact path we took. One look at my face was all my mom needed to collapse into her chair. (She didn't do well with any kind of emergency.) All I remember was my Dad coming home, just about the time our family doctor, Ernest Sowada, showed up. At that time Dr. Sowada had an office on Arcade and Hawthorne, and his wife was his nurse. But we didn't go to the office much. Most of our encounters with Dr. Sowada were in our home, just like this one.

While my dad held me down on the kitchen table and my mom stood in the doorway holding back my three siblings (her back turned as she couldn't handle what was happening to me), Dr. Sowada carefully stitched up my upper eye lid. I think it took five stitches, and I still have a slight gap in my right eyebrow, 60 years later.

Surprisingly, those shovels were not confiscated, despite my mom's insistence that she knew one of us was going to get their eye taken out. (Just about everything was capable of that, as I recall - scissors, pencils, paper airplanes, all potential weapons.) Tommy and I went back to playing with them and each other in the snow, and I don't recall there were any other mishaps.

Tommy was my favorite wintertime playmate. He was just 13 months younger than me and so it was a natural bond. Besides that, I was instructed to take him wherever I went, even if I was going to play dolls with my friend Linda next door. Tommy just always came along. He was my companion as we walked to the playground with our skates for an afternoon on the ice. He helped me drag our sled with the ice fishing equipment down to Lake Phalen later when we moved to Earl Street. And he was my sledding buddy - until that fateful Palm Sunday day.

My mom's oldest brother did something the others in her family had not done - moved away from the East Side, all the way down to Lakeland on the St. Croix River. It's a bustling community now, but in those days Lakeland consisted of a small strip mall, a few inexpensive newer homes near the road, and a couple of large custom homes like his up on the hillside in the woods. We had taken the long drive out there after church on Palm Sunday to have a large family dinner. In those days - before the interstate - it was quite the trek down Hudson Road to get there.

There had been quite a bit of snow late in the season, and his property was covered with newly-fallen white fluff. While the women were cooking the food, my uncle and my dad took some of us younger kids out to go sledding. Uncle Al had this huge wooden toboggan that must have fit 10 or 12 kids on it. We piled on and off we went down the long hill.

It was quite exciting - we had nothing like that on the East Side. We screeched in delight all the way down the slope. But delight turned to terror as the toboggan headed straight for a large tree. My poor brother Tommy took the brunt of the impact - he was seated in the very front, between my legs. I can still see him lying there, lifeless, in the snow. I don't remember much after that. Dad and Al took Tommy by car to the closest hospital (there was no 911 in those days, and God knows how many hours it would have taken to get an ambulance out there). I think they went to Bayport or Stillwater. I just remember Tommy had to stay in the hospital because had to have surgery for a ruptured spleen.

Strangely enough, my dad must have managed to convince my mom that the likelihood of that ever happening again was slim to none, or I am sure anything capable of being used for sliding in the snow would have been off limits. I don't think we ever did toboggan rides at Uncle Al's again, but I have plenty of memories sledding down various places around the East Side, on various types of equipment. We even pushed my little sister Suzanne down a hill in a plastic dish pan when she was a toddler.

On weekends my dad would pile us in the car and we would go out to Phalen Park or Keller Golf Course. Eventually when we moved to Lane Place, our favorite sliding hill was right alongside the outside stair case at the Arlington Hills Methodist Church off Johnson Parkway. It was quite a steep hill, but having those concrete stairs to climb up when you got to the bottom made it easier than trudging back up a snowy slope.

We spent entire afternoons skating at the Duluth & Case or Lockwood playgrounds. We made more snowmen than I can count. We had sword fights with the giant icicles we broke off the bent gutters on the side of the house. We used paper milk cartons to make snow bricks to build igloos. And one year my dad flooded the patio in our back yard so we could have a rink close to home for my sister who was too young to go to the playground with us.

No, we didn't have a lot of money in those days for things like snowmobiles and snowboards. The only skis I ever had were the old wooden cross country ones that had been my Grandpa Dewall's. But we found plenty of things to do outside in the winter. And I have a scar running through my eyebrow to prove it.