When did the guy with the pony stop coming around to take a picture of you sitting on the pony? We would dress up in a cowboy outfit - it was so cool. He was still coming around in the early 1950s when my brother and I were little. By the 1960s, I don't think he was coming around anymore. My sister never got her pictue taken on the pony. So, what happened that ended one of the most wonderful memory makers for any city kid?
My brother and I are only 13 months apart so we were constant playmates when we were little. We always combined playing house with cowboys and Indians. I'm not sure that we knew there were girl's toys and boy's toys. We wore cowboy hats and had guns and holsters around our waist. Dolls were our children. We used big cardboard boxes to make a fort around our "house" which was a card table with a blanket over it that also served as a teepee when we were the Indians. The rocker with a padded seat was our stagecoach. The curved wooden oak arms of the rocker were our horses. The dolls would sit in the stagecoach and my brother and I would sit on our horses. The harder you rocked; the faster our horses would go. We used string to tie our horses to a post (the doorknob of the front door). In the winter time, the floor register was our campfire. It would get pretty hot when my mother would shovel coal into the furnace. She wasn't real happy when the clay (our food) melted on the floor register. Oh, and the time we spilt chocolate milk down the register - she wasn't real happy about that either.
So, when the man came around and asked if we wanted our picture taken on the pony, we got so excited. Now, we didn't have much money and mother didn't splurge on frivolous things too often, but she ended up saying we could. And, here we are sitting on our pony. This was taken in 1953 at our house on State Street. We were full-fledged cowboys and our pony was the most beautiful and best pony in the world!
Sitting on the pony and playing cowboys and Indians with my brother are some of my most wonderful childhood memories. I'm so glad that we were children in the early '50s and didn't miss the man with the pony.
I'm not exactly sure why I am writing this. I really don't have a story or specific memory to share. I was just looking through some of the old family photos and came upon my favorite picture of my Aunt Goldie, my grandmother's sister. My grandmother was the oldest of five children. Aunt Goldie was the second child born in 1903. This picture was taken when she was 20 years old. The 1920s, one of my favorite decades for fashion and hair styles. I remember looking at this picture of Aunt Goldie when I was a child and thought she was just about the prettiest lady in the world.
