McCall’s magazine, which Mother bought every month, had a paper doll in it. You could cut out cute little Betsy McCall and her themed or seasonal outfits, paste her on cardboard and …voila! A paper doll. We were hooked. Gone were the baby dolls and bride dolls – they only had one outfit (this was before Barbie). Paper dolls became our passion.
Once in a great while Mother would buy us a new paper doll booklet where you could pop out the paper doll and all of her clothes and accessories to play with. But that didn’t happen near often enough to sate our new appetite, so, being young entrepreneurs, we decided we could make our own paper doll clothes – to expand their wardrobes, you see. We became fashion designers! Of course, the only paper we had to make these clothes was our blue-lined notebook paper from school. So, try as we might, every outfit had light blue lines running through it somewhere. Oh, well.
We finally knew we were getting too old to make these clothes when we started adding cleavage to the evening gowns.
Our other passion was comic books.
The drug store in town was the only place we could get comic books, and they were expensive. At least 10 cents each… They had a whole rack! And there would be new issues once a month of all the good ones: Archie and Veronica, Millie the Model, Superman, etc. We couldn’t afford to buy many comic books, but we discovered a way to get them for free.
One Saturday morning, Daddy was making run to the town dump. It was about two miles from our house, but we (at that age) loved riding in his big purple Metro truck. So, we rode along just for fun.
When we got to the dump, we could not believe our eyes. There were PILES of comic books just tossed there on top, pages fluttering in the breeze. All our favorites. Little Lulu, Donald Duck (and his nephews and Uncle Scrooge), Richie Rich, Supergirl, you name it. A veritable bonanza of comics. Mysteriously, they were all missing their covers.
We found out that at the end of each month Mr. Ertel (who owned the drug store) would rip off the covers of each comic and he’d then get credit for those not sold. The comics themselves went to the dump.
Ah-ha! (Picture a light bulb over our heads!)
So that’s where we headed. The first day of each month there would be a stack of unsold, coverless comic books at the dump. Daddy was all for this endeavor (he probably thought of us as little rats anyway) and we stopped begging for comic book money. He’d drive us to the dump and let us load all the comics into a box and take them home.
This mother-load of treasure took up every empty space in our room. We even had comics jammed under the bed, and to our older sister’s chagrin, in our joint closet (often spilling out into her room).
We not only had new comics to read (and we read them all) but we had duplicates of some comics so we could cut out a good picture of Millie the Model, paste her on thin cardboard, cut her out again in more detail, then start making clothes for her. All we needed was scissors, cardboard (shoe box tops were great), and Elmer’s glue. We went through so much glue!
It’s impossible to tell how many hours we spent doing this. The floor of our room was covered in scraps from cut-up comics, paste, and bad attempts at designing clothes. On Saturdays, the day Mother insisted we all clean our rooms, we’d try stuffing everything into the closet or under the bed, but that seldom worked. Sergeant Major Mother would come up for inspection and we would flunk, time and time again. It wasn’t pretty.
But we can’t tell you all that without talking about the Purple Metro, Daddy’s work truck. Well, purple is maybe too generic. It was actually the color of eggplant. The fancy name is aubergine. It had been a laundry truck, but Daddy replaced the hanging clothes racks with bins for plumbing parts. It had a sign on the side that read:
Hillman & Pigg
Plumbing & Heating
(Linda: I liked the truck when I was little. But I came to hate the Metro, as a teenager, when Daddy insisted on driving us to high school and dropping us off right in front when other kids were pouring in. He’d drive it right up onto the sidewalk and laugh at my embarrassment.)
(Cindy: I didn’t care. I loved it. The best part of the Metro was that the engine was inside, so in the winter when Daddy took us to school, we could ride on top of the engine cover and it would keep us warm. The second-best part was that it was purple! And, come on, who doesn’t love a purple vehicle?)
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