Fun Day With Charlie And Nancy

Yesterday we all had a really good time. Fran’s Uncle Charles and his wife came to visit from Dallas, Texas. Charles is my mother-in-law’s youngest brother. We had a lot of laughs with teasing each other.  His aunt and uncle talked about old times. And of course, his mother told stories and every one laughed and added some of their own.

Fran’s aunt and I hit it off right away and teased each other like we had known each other for years. It was so much fun.
Marie sang a song in French that she had learned when she was about two years old. It is called Soldier Come Home. It was beautiful. I had been recording everyone singing karaoke and had left the recorder on by mistake, Thank Goodness! Now I have Marie singing for posterity. Here are some pictures

Family History Pictures

I have a lot of pictures with few to little stories to go with them. Today I will post the pictures and you readers post your comments on the comment section to see if you remember these pictures. I will then tell Marie and she will be so pleased.

Fran and I invited her here for Mother’s day lunch. After lunch she sat in front of the computer and read the stories and looked at the pictures and started to reminisce even more than she had originally. I just wanted to let you know how much she is enjoying this part of her life.
I am starting with some easy ones.

Dolls From Yesteryear

My mother-in-law is so talented. She can make something out of nothing. For instance, her son found this little western hat while walking down the street. He gave it to his mom and viola the cutest pin cushion I have ever seen.

In the early seventies Sunbeam Bread had a very cute little girl on the wrapper. She had blonde hair and a cute blue and white dress. You guessed it. Marie sewed the outfits and dressed the dolls. I looked them up on e-bay they classify them as rare. One sold the other day for over a hundred dollars. Marie has one that she makes new outfits for. One is a wedding dress and the other is a blue and white crocheted dress and hat. I am so not talented I cannot see the difference between crocheting and knitting.
I wanted you to see just some of the dolls that she has made.

Green Is In And Has Been For Years

I got such a laugh the other morning when I was watching the news. There is a new craft going on. I about choked on my coffee. My mother-in-law has been doing it for years. Giving them away and teaching other people how to do it.

That craft also helps the environment by using and reusing plastic bags. She makes hats out of the bags she gets at the grocery store and Walmart. That is the first gift she gave me. She also gave me one for my daughter. Marie wears her hat with the little red flower on it every time she leaves for town. She has her little plastic hat on the picture of her and Fran dancing at our wedding. The girl in our kitchen is my daughter, Melanie.
Marie gave me a plastic hat for one of my friends. She wears hers on her boat to keep her hair dry. Good idea!

I just got back from Marie's house. I told her that I had put a story on the internet about her plastic hats. She pointed to a hat that was laying on her couch. She said, "That's my celebration hat." I asked her why she called it that and this is how the story was told: One day in 1959 she walked into a grocery store called Victory Market. She had her plastic bag hat on that happened to be red, white, and blue. Every one almost jumped at her exclaiming over her hat. Several people took pictures of her, wanted directions and patterns and put her picture in the store's newsletter. So you see the days of the plastic bag hat are not new, but over fifty years old. I haven't tried it, but I bet they wash like a dream! Oh just another note, Marie told me that she has even made them for Barbie dolls, how about that!

Marie's Flowers

Marie told me that tending the garden and the flower garden was one of the things that she really enjoyed all of her life. She still has a garden at her house now, but needs some help with it. However, she does not need help with planning what she is going to plant and where she is going to plant it. She orders a lot of her bulbs and plants through the mail in different nurseries and the other day she even got some from Publisher’s Clearing House. She said you just never know!

This year she had given Fran and I a list of plants to get at the greenhouse for her. She wanted cucumber plants, zucchini plants, cabbage plants and some tomato plants. It had been raining so much we had to “mud” them in, but they are doing really well. She stood on the deck and supervised. She told us where to plant them and how close together etc. Actually she was a big help because everybody does it differently.
Roland wanted to get his mom some flowers that come up every year so Fran and I went in with him and got Marie three azalea plants. When I had her go out on the deck she sucked in her breath and went “Oh, my, they are beautiful.”
I thought you might like to see some of her beautiful plants that she has started and then you can enjoy them with her. There are two pictures of flowers that she had years and years ago when she lived in Massachusetts. Those flowers are just a splash of vivid color. She had me take pictures of those so I could put them on the “internet.” Enjoy.

Margaret Lamont's Doll Shop

I have had a request to hear more about the doll shop, so this morning I went to visit Marie to see if she could tell me more.

There were about twenty girls that worked there. In fact her niece, Phyllis worked there for a time. At the time Marie was working there, there was only one shift running. The doll shop’s owners contracted with the Sayco Company in New York. Sayco sent the doll shop all the cut outs and then the girls sewed them together.
Marie said besides the Mary Poppins outfits, they made clothes for Alice Blue Gown doll, Bozo the Clown, Mortimer, Cinderella even christening gowns for babies.

The lady that owned the shop would always look for jobs if the business was slow. One time she got a job for making a lot of teddy bears. The company paid for it with a bounced check. So Margaret’s shop lost a lot of money on that job.
When Marie started sewing for a wage, she sewed at a trouser shop. She stayed there for eleven years. Then she went to a shirt shop that was poorly run for only three months. From the shirt shop she went to Margaret’s Doll Shop for thirty two years. She retired then but found she needed more money than her social security paid her, so she worked for a garment factory called R&M for three years. They made bathrobes, underwear, smocks and a variety of things. She received some back pay from social security that was a surprise, so she then could retire with more comfort.
Can you remember how many months or years you worked for each job that you had.? I think Marie’s memory is amazing. She was telling me today that one day she came into the doll shop and a new chief operator had put all the sewing machines facing the wall. She pretty much flipped out. She said she asked him if he knew anything about sewing. He said no, but he knew about organization. Marie quit her job. The lady that owned the business had died, she didn’t like the son and just decided to go home and be happier, albeit a little broker.
Note: Through the years I have been told about relatives and other folks that worked at Mrs. Lamont's Doll Shop.

The House On 9 Southshore Road

Marie’s boys want me to tell stories about the house on 9 Southshore Road. It is kind of an interesting house, because of it’s history and some of the antics that the boys did at that house.

The house cost $3500.00. It was a small house, but had four bedrooms. Marie and her husband were both working at the time of the purchase. When they bought it in those days there were no “discovery” papers, but they were assured that everything was fine that went with the house.
In February, Marie couldn’t get the furnace to light. She finally got it lit, but it went out. Anyone that has lived in Massachusetts knows that it is cold there in February. Marie called the furnace repair people and they discovered a hole in the heating chamber the size of a grapefruit. She said she was very lucky not to have blown the house and herself up. A new furnace would cost two thousand dollars, almost as much as they paid for the house.
She went to the bank which had an affiliation with her church and they put the cost of a new furnace in with her mortgage and it only raised her house payments six dollars. That made her payments forty five dollars a month. Wouldn’t we all like house payments of forty five dollars a month, however, those payments were in times where the paychecks were a tenth of what they are now also.
To get the loan for the furnace, the papers had to go through a board of directors similar to now a days, and that took two weeks. Two weeks of being cold and having children. I think she said she was getting sewing done for her daughter’s wedding at that time also. This sounds like where the phrase come from, “when it rains it storms.” I might have just made that up!
All the boys tell me about the terrible snow storms they had when they lived there. The stories vary from brother to brother, but in the end they were all full of mischief.
I am going to tell this story my own way and it will have a little truth from all three of the boys. They had had several snow storms of over two to three feet at a time. They had over six feet in one snow storm one time. Any way, snow makes some people upset because they can’t get out of the house to get to work, and other people think, what the heck, let’s have some fun. I have been told a story like I say with different versions of the boys, tying two ladders together so that they were long enough to get to the top of the roof. The reason for doing this was serious, his mother was concerned that the roof would cave in from the weight of the snow. Well, work was done, what would you do, if you were teenagers with a lot of snow to have fun in and your work was done. Jump! Yes, first one then another, then the one that didn’t spread his arms out and had to be dug out in order to get out of the snow bank. That story has been told and told and told, and always with a hearty laugh.