The Golden Girl: Playing Tiddlywinks

Reflecting on birthdays, wondering about the future

By Kathryn Ross

I feel very patriotic today. I have reached a milestone birthday this semi quincentennial year.

It astounds me when I remember all the miraculous, hideous and wonderful things I’ve seen throughout my life.

I used to think my parents’ generation saw a lot of changes; the way they lived, medical breakthroughs and scientific achievements and historical events. Horses and buggies were still being used when they were young, but they lived to see airplanes that break the sound barrier and men walking on the moon.

I remember the opening scene of the movie “Amelia” the biographical movie about the life of aviatrix Amelia Earhart starring Hilary Swank. It is one of my favorite movies. In the scene a young girl is playing in a field and all you can see is wheat growing from tree line to tree line. Suddenly there is a roaring sound, and a bi-wing airplane swoops out of the blue, skirts the field and disappears into the sky. Supposedly it is the first airplane Amelia ever saw, and it set her on a journey that ended in 1937, starting a mystery that is still debated.

I’d like to think it might have been like that for my mother, Pearl, who grew up on farms across northern Pennsylvania. On our Sunday rides in the Quaker State, we never passed an old ramshackle building on a hillside that Mom didn’t say, “I went to school there.”

She was the youngest of seven. She had five older brothers who did farm work and one older sister. While they were far from wealthy, her life was rich with the adventure of growing up on a farm in the 1920s. Her father trained horses. That’s where I get it. The Depression hit in 1928, but her family grew food, so she was luckier than many.

The son of a blacksmith, my father grew up in the village. That’s also where I get my love of horses. It’s deep in my generational DNA. Unlike my mother, my Dad grew up in a comfortable household. Even though my grandfather was Italian and they were looked down on, called WOPS (Without Papers) and Papists (Catholic), he provided a valuable service – horse shoeing. He was accepted. Back then there were more horses on farms and on village streets than automobiles on the streets and mechanized equipment on the farm.

My parents saw this country change from an agrarian society to an industrial society. By the time I came into their lives their world had changed drastically.

When I grew up in the 1950s television was the big thing, but we had only three channels that went off the air at midnight. Wrestling seemed to be on all the channels. My Grampa John was a professional wrestler and according to family lore he even competed in Madison Square Garden. While that isn’t how he chose to make his living, he did like to watch it on TV. I remember sitting at his feet on Sunday afternoons playing Tiddlywinks while he sat in his easy chair watching the matches and smoking smelly stogies.

That’s what families did when I grew up. They climbed into the Chevy, Ford, Studebaker or Rambler on Sunday afternoon and visited family.  We didn’t lock our doors. I had one uncle who came in when we weren’t home and rearranged all the furniture. There was a closeness then that is a rarity these days.

In my generation much has changed. We listened to old time rock’n’roll, and then heard the revolutionary rhythms introduced by Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys and in the anthems of John Lennon and The Beatles. There are reasons their songs are still revered today. One, they touched our souls, and two, were still singing them.

Like our parents, we’ve lived through war and while many who fought in it lost their lives in more ways than one, many of us fought battles on the streets, college campuses, and in the jungles of the industrial war machine. Our lives changed too.

As I embark on the final voyage of the USS Kathryn, I wonder what I’ll see in the years ahead?

Will I see colonies on Mars?

Will I see women get their human rights back?

Will I ever again see a government I can respect?

Will I see cancer cured, the end of poverty and homelessness, a 30-hour work week?

And will I ever see that flying car I wished for in 6th grade?