Do you remember sled riding and tobogganing as a kid ?
A Weekly Column By Kathryn Ross
Well, we have had the first snow of the season, and the weather is keeping many of us indoors busying ourselves with activities that won’t take us outside in the cold. Many of us are finding things to watch on television. Hence, I just saw my favorite commercial.
It is the one picturing three older women all bundled in knit hats and mittens and heavy winter coats sitting side by side on a bench at the top of a hill watching kids sledding. In the background the old Beatles song “In My Life” is playing and anyone who knows it is singing along.
It’s an Amazon commercial I first saw a couple of years ago during the Super Bowl. That’s the only reason I watch the Super Bowl, since my favorite team hasn’t played in it since 1994. Go Bills. I like to see the newest Budweiser Clydesdale commercial. My GOAT which is obvious to anyone who knows me.
The Amazon commercial reminds me of sledding with my lifelong buddies Noreen and Gail. Nonie, I’ve known since kindergarten and a Gail came into our lives when we were 8 or 9. Noreen and I attended Washington Elementary School on Hanover Street, now the fire hall, and Gail attended the Brooklyn School, now a tennis court.
Our sledding, baseball, kickball and hiking hill was at the corner of Franklin and Rauber streets. It was a long wide-open field that stretched from a tree at the top of the hill that had been split by lightning, long before any of us remembered, to the intersection. Part of the tree still stood upright and part of it lay on the ground where we kids played. Of course, an Indian was buried there. It was a gently rolling hill with a steeper run on one side and hillock on the other that launched our sleds, flying saucers and skis and imaginations into Olympic downhill trials.
Our flying saucers were silver, metal disks that there was no hope of steering as you spun down an icy slope, unless your dog grabbed your arm, hood or scarf and pulled you off. Our sleds were the old wooden kind with steel runners, the kind you see decorating front porches today.
In 1959, my older sister got married and left home. She left behind a six- or eight-foot-long toboggan that she’d gotten for Christmas a few years before. I was forbidden to use the long dark and light wooden sled. It had a slippery plastic cushion and thick white ropes strung along its length. It was just for big people. My eight-years older sister was fond of telling me that for various things.
When Pat left home, I inherited the toboggan, and Noreen and Gail and I tossed aside our sleds and saucers for the bigger sled that we could all climb on together. Hurrying home after school, I’d bundle up in a knit hat, mittens, scarf and a heavy winter peacoat and drag the toboggan down the street to the sledding hill, where I’d perch on the curl eating snow until Nonie showed up. After she got there, we’d wait for Gail and eat snow; you could do that back then, until we saw Gail coming down the hill. She rode the school bus to the corner of Franklin and South Main and had to walk down Franklin Street hill to her home on Rauber, across from the sledding hill.
Gail had a great winter coat that she wore to school. It was some kind of plastic material. If the snow was fresh, she could sit down on it and slide down the street in the snow at the side of the road. We coveted that coat.
Gail was our toboggan anchor. When we careened down that icy slop on that mammoth sled, three little girls had no hope of stopping it. Gail would jump off the back while clinging to the rope and drag down the hill until the toboggan stopped.
The Amazon commercial reminds me of those days, especially when the older ladies slide down hill on plastic sleds one of them purchased from Amazon, obviously. As they’re going down the hill the kids on the slope are amazed to see them. When the three old women turn into their childish selves, so does anyone watching the scene.
On these snowy days I remember a simpler, more joyous time and I want to say to my pals, “Thanks for the memories.”
Kathryn Ross has written, reported, and opinied in the local news for decades. She pens a weekly column for the Wellsville Sun and can be reached anytime, kathr_2002@yahoo.com
