Author: Cindy Adams

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.

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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.

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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?)

There are moments in life when the only reasonable response is laughter. I learned this lesson pretty early on. Humor has saved me from experiencing pain, public humiliation, grief, and even facing life-threatening situations. Without doubt, laughter has defined me as a person. 

Growing up on a farm in Minnesota, in a family with four children, a mother who loved practical jokes and a father with a dry sense of humor, laughter was our white noise. Some of my earliest memories involve sitting around the dinner table everyone telling stories of their day, the funnier the better. 

I was clueless that humor wasn’t a part of everyone’s life. Daddy used to tell the story about when I was three years old, at dinner one evening, he unceremoniously plopped a pile of mashed potatoes on my plate, which I guess I didn’t want, and I said “Dam you, Daddy!” And everyone at the table stopped what they were doing, and my father said “What did you just say, Cindy?” And I demurely replied “Thank you, Daddy.” Of course, everyone at the table cracked up. And so it began. Laughter became my drug of choice.

I didn’t realize when I started school that life wasn’t just about creating your own world (let’s call that Life with Linda) or jumping out and scaring people (Life with Mother) so I continued on my merry way, creating my own, often humorous, story as I went.

I made two good friends right away when I started first grade: Jane and Eileen – and we always spent our recess time together. Not long after my first few weeks attending school, I was starting to get bored and figured it was time to stir the pot. One afternoon recess, deep into fall, with the leaves from the maple and oak trees covering the ground, the three of us were walking along the fence that encircled the playground. I found a cockle burr plant, drying up, and the burrs were ripe for picking. Hmmm. So, of course, I picked a bunch of them, stuck them into a small ball, and headed back towards the school. (Did it hurt? Sure, it hurt! But that’s the price you pay for a good, practical joke.)

Jane and Eileen were saying “Cindy what are you going to do with that burr ball?” (Obviously they didn’t know me very well yet or they wouldn’t have asked, and they certainly wouldn’t have followed me.)I sneaked up, real quiet, behind Sister Bernadette (our first-grade teacher) and stuck the burr on her tail. Well, I called it a tail. The nuns wore the traditional black and white nun outfit which included a long, veil connected to their headdress, and flowed down their back. It was cool. Kind of like a cape. (But, trust me, she couldn’t fly.)Once the burr was secure, I walked away. Mission accomplished.

Jane and Eileen were both red in the face, and almost in tears. I thought it was funny too, but not that funny! I am not sure how the burr ball was spotted, or removed, but this little prank just got my juices flowing. The next day when we were taking our mandatory lavatory break, the three of us, and several others, were in the girls bathroom and I showed Jane and Eileen how you could wet a paper towel, squeeze out the water, add a few shots of soap, make it into a ball, and then throw it at the ceiling and it would stick! Now how cool was that?

Of course, they got all red in the face, and looked like they would cry (again, not THAT funny!) as I proceeded to prepare three or four soap balls and stick them on the ceiling. Unfortunately, we had been in the bathroom too long, and Sister Bernadette came in to see what was taking so long. 

“What’s going on in here?”she asked, sternly,

We all stood straight, arms at our sides, looking innocent. Well I was looking innocent, those two were now actually crying. Go figure. As she stood looking at us, the soap balls started to fall: plop, plop, plop. Right on the floor in front of Sister. Needless to say, that time I got caught and had to stay in from recess for two whole days. (Totally worth it.)

The best part of these two incidents was the dinner time story telling. They both got a pretty good laugh. But I had just begun my Catholic school adventures. There would be many more to come, some planned, some not planned, but in the long run they were all worth the effort.

If you’ve ever watched The Little Rascals, you’ll have a sense of what my sister, Linda, and I were like when we were kids. I’m not saying we were ‘rascals’ per se, I’m just sayin’ those little rascals had nothing on us, that’s for sure!



My sister, Linda and I lived for summers. The minute school was out, we were literally free as birds for the next three or so months. To say we were unsupervised is an understatement. If we had died between 8 a.m. (breakfast) and 12 noon (lunch), or between 12:30 p.m. and 5 p.m. (time to get cleaned up for dinner) no one would have noticed. Daddy was at work. Mother was frantically busy taking care of a kitchen garden, our bigger garden and orchard (used for canning and freezing fruits and vegetables), keeping up a one-acre lawn that she mowed weekly, and maintaining several beautiful flower beds. On top of that she had a house to keep clean (I will say spotless, actually), three meals a day to cook for all of us, laundry that she hung on the clotheslines to dry, and watching after our baby brother, Dale. The woman never stopped moving. But keeping tabs on two young girls was not part of her day. She sent us off to “play” between meals, and “play” we did! 

Every now and then our play had unintended consequences.



For example, one beautiful summer day Linda and I headed out to the stable to find something to do. There was an old two-wheeled trailer parked nearby that Daddy would use now and then to haul garbage to the dump, or for some other hauling job. We decided that it would be fun to climb into the trailer and see if we could get it to balance by standing in the middle and inching our weight toward the tail gate (there actually was no gate on the tail) until the heavy end (the end with the coupler, tongue, and hitch ball) was up in the air. 

OK. Maybe not the smartest game in the world, but hey, we were maybe 8 or 9 and bored!

Now this was sort of fun, but then Linda had this idea (it probably was my idea but I will blame Linda). I was going through my “I want to be a trapeze artist” phase, and so she thought it would be cool if we could inch our way toward the open end of the trailer so the heavy part was in the air, then she’d jump off, and the trailer would flip me up into the air and I could do a summersault and land on the ground, and take my bow. Well, it didn’t quite work that way. Let’s just say I broke my arm (again), and Mother spent the afternoon in the emergency ward with me. 


We didn’t really think that one through!

Another lovely, summer afternoon, Daddy came home for lunch (he often drove home from his office/shop in town to eat lunch) and found Linda and me mooning around, complaining of nothing to do (never a smart move around Daddy). Before he went back to work, he called us into the garage where he armed us with two paint brushes and a can of aluminum (metallic silver) paint. He told us that the corrugated metal pump cover around the well needed to be painted to keep it from rusting. We probably didn’t even hear the rusting part of the instructions. All we could see is a big can of shiny paint and two brushes. 

Oh boy! 

Daddy headed back to work, and Linda and I headed over to the well and started painting. It was suchfun. But it didn’t take long, and we sure had a lot of paint left, so we decided to really help Daddy out and paint the pump and the pump handle too. 

Oooh, pretty.

Still a lot of paint left. Looked around and saw the metal flashing around the bottom of the corncrib was kind of rusty looking. So we painted that, too.

What else? Oh, the flagpole. There was a gray metal flagpole in the middle of mother’s rock-rimmed circular flower bed in the side yard. It looked kind of drab. So we painted that up as high as we could reach (not very). But when we started painting Mother’s rocks around her beautiful flower bed, she came out of the house, caught us red-(or silver)-handed and stopped us dead. No paint would besmirch her beautiful big rocks! But by then the paint can was almost empty anyway.

Daddy liked to tell the story that late that afternoon as he topped the hill on the road home, the sun was shining on our little farm, which, in his words “sparkled like a Christmas tree full of tinsel.” He got mad at us at first, then laughed, after he decided it was actually pretty funny. Mother was not so amused. (We had to clean the rocks we had defaced.)


Clearly, Daddy didn’t think this through. Maybe it’s a family trait?

For one whole winter I entertained myself by scaring Mother (see Scaredy Cat), and watching her get fat. By spring, when my sisters finished school, I was more than ready to jump into summer – climbing trees, getting ‘lost’ in the woods, and going fishing down at the pond not far from our house.

Mother would fix us bologna sandwiches and a jug of Kool Aid to take with us for our picnic lunch when we went fishing. My oldest sister, Andrea, would load Linda and me into our little red wagon, along with our lunch and fishing poles and she would pull us through a pasture, lift the two of us, our poles, and lunch across a fence, and we’d walk several hundred feet to the bank of the pond. There was a tree that had fallen in a storm and it overhung the water, so Andrea would sit me in the tree, with my fishing pole (worm included), and Linda would sit on the bank with her pole (worm included). I loved those forays into the woods, bugs and all (and believe me in Minnesota in the summer there were plenty of them).

Throughout the summer months, we watched as Mother just got fatter and fatter. Then, in early August, for some unknown reason, Daddy loaded us all into the car and took us to Grandmother and Grandad Mares’ house in town and dropped us off. Now this was strange behavior. I don’t remember ever having been at my grandparents’ house without Mother being there with us. But it was sort of fun. Grandmother gave us baths (in a tub with running water, which we didn’t have at home). This was our first encounter with a real bathtub, at least in my short memory, and I immediately started hatching plans for how we could turn it into a slippery slide. This would result, several years later, in another run to the hospital and numerous stitches in my chin, but that is another story.

The next day (or maybe two) Daddy and Mother showed up at Grandmother’s house, and they brought with them a little bundle that they called Dale. And, bingo! I had a brother. He was so darn cute I couldn’t stop looking at him. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. Just like me! Both my older sisters had dark brown hair and brown eyes, and continually assured me that I was adopted, but now I had proof that it wasn’t true!

Maple Lake, the town where we attended school and went to church each Sunday was Catholic. Our grandparents lived across the street from the Catholic church. Mother was expected to appear, every Sunday, with her children curled and dressed up for Sunday mass. After church, we would stop in and visit for half an hour or so with Grandmother and Grandad. One Sunday, when Dale was only a few weeks old, we made our traditional Sunday visit. Mother put Dale in the middle of their big bed, and since he was only a couple of weeks old, she assumed he would stay there. He did. I don’t remember this story very clearly, but Andrea, my oldest sister, said we had a nice visit with our usual laugher and silliness, and then we all walked out, got in the car and drove toward home. About half a mile out of town, Linda popped up and said: “Mother, where’s the baby?” Mother made a quick U-turn in the middle of the road and raced back to town to rescue Dale. When Andrea ran into the house to get the baby, Grandmother was sitting in her rocking chair, rocking him. After another great bout of laughter, we headed for home, family intact.

When school started in September, I now had a little bundle of baby to play with while Linda and Andrea were gone each day. Mother was very clear from the get-go that I was not to try and scare Dale (which was a great disappointment because the kid was a sitting duck!) At one point, Mother was changing Dale’s diaper and said, “Oh, he has a boatload here,” which I thought was extremely funny, so I kept my eye on him and whenever his diaper began to sag I’d holler “Dale’s got a boatload, Mother!”

When Dale was about nine months old, he still couldn’t really walk but he could stand up if he held on to something. He had learned to say “bye-bye,” so whenever the Everly Brothers would come on the radio singing “Bye Bye Love,” if we stood Dale in front of the radio, he’d hold on to the end table, butt bouncing up and down, singing “bye bye” until the song was over. Too cute. But I always had my eye on his diaper, just in case.

Dale loved bananas. Mother had to buy them almost every day. She’d peel it down to the bottom and he’d hold it up to his mouth and start munching. He just kept feeding it into his constantly moving mouth until he got to the bottom – sort of like feeding wood into a wood chipper. (Hence the ‘boatload’!)

When she took him for a checkup to the local doctor, Dr. Raetz, she asked him if a kid could eat too many bananas. He asked her how many he was eating. She said “five or six a day.” The doctor was shocked. “A DAY?” – then he thought about it. “I guess it can’t hurt him, but maybe I’d cut him down to two or three.” But it was hard, when he’d finish one, hand her the limp peel, and beg, “More ‘nana, Mama.”

He still loves bananas to this day, but he’s cut it back to one. Or maybe two.

And, just in case you’re wondering I still scare him every chance I get.

Mother loved to play jokes. She was the Queen of Laughter, and I learned early on it was better to be part of the joke then to be its intended victim. In the winter of 1954-55 I was four going on five years old. My sisters, Linda and Andrea, were both going to school and I was left alone at the house with Mother. We didn’t have a TV, so the only entertainment I had was self-made, and at four years old my creativity was somewhat limited.

I was used to playing all day with Linda who is 16 months older than I. We were always looking for something fun to do, and we weren’t too shy about what it might be. One day we decided to sneak into Mother and Daddy’s bedroom (we weren’t allowed in there). Looking around, the only exciting thing we could find was the large double bed. So we climbed up and began jumping. Of course, I lost my balance and knocked their bedside lamp off onto the floor and it broke into a number of pieces.

We stopped jumping.

Silence.

So we climbed downoff the bed and attempted to put the lamp back together. We thought we did a pretty good job. The lampshade was a little low, but we thought when Mother and Daddy went to turn it on they’d think they broke it. We left the room and went downstairs to innocently play with toys in the living room.

What seemed like hours later (probably 10 minutes) Mother went upstairs. And then we heard it: “Linda! Cindy! Come up here right now.” Up we went. When we got to her room she said: “Cindy. Linda. You know you’re not supposed to be in here! And you know you’re not supposed to jump on the beds!”

Linda and I stood there, holding hands, and I said: “But you and Daddy jump on the bed ‘cause we hears you, don’t we Linda?” She stood there, very quiet, looking as if she were chewing gum and just waved us on our way. We weren’t sure why we got off so easy, but believe me we headed for the stairs as fast as we could go.

But, back to my four-year-old dilemma of being bored in the middle of winter, alone in the house all day with just Mother. I think, at first, Mother felt the need to entertain me, so she took to jumping out from behind a door and scaring me. I’d shriek, and run, and she’d chase me, and we’d both end up laughing.

Now, at the age of four I wasn’t very savvy, but I did know that mimicking was a great equalizer. So I took to hiding and scaring my mom throughout the day, every day that my sisters were at school. I got pretty creative at this job. No hiding behind doors for me! Nope. i would bury myself in the laundry basket, under clothes, and then spring up! Or I would hide in the cupboard under the sink, and sit very still until she reached under to get something then I’d touch her arm. Quiet scares are the best. She hated mice, so a soft touch was always a winner.

Really pulling off a good scare takes practice. That winter I perfected my approach, learning all about timing, awareness, and knowing where the victim is vulnerable.

Learning the tricks of the trade early in life has kept day to day living eventful. I’d go on to learn many a bad habit from my Mother, including how to play excellent practical jokes, but much of my trickster nature came from that cold winter, alone with Mother, who had decided the best way to keep her littlest girl happy was to scare the hell out of her.

Today, as I was writing up this memory, I thought how I’d matured (now being 75). But then I remembered, that this morning when I went down to breakfast (we’re staying at a hotel that has a morning buffet) I walked up to the host who seats me every morning. He is a very classy guy. He was so intent on something he was reading that, you know, I couldn’t help myself so I jumped around the corner and said “boo!”  And boy did he jump!

Scaredy Cat.