British Paintboxes

I can't remember when I wasn't fascinated with color. Like most small children I was mesmerized with fireworks, staring open-mouthed at the sky watching the hues glitter and shift and turn from red to silver or blue to gold. An eight-box of Crayola crayons turned into sixteen, and then to 48. I pleaded with my mother for years to buy me a box of 64s, and she couldn't understand, with the practicality of someone raised during the Depression, why one needed so many more colors. At Christmas finally I began saving up my allowance and buying my own. I'd use them to make my own calendars, but only after I had carefully put the colors in order: black and grey first, then the browns, then the colors of the spectrum from violet to red, finally the pinks, then silver and white. (Gold went with the yellows and copper with the browns.) And they had to be in the correct order or it-just-wouldn't-do.

Really, it was Mom who began the color obsession in the first place. I'd asked for a watercolor paint box for Christmas, expecting a neat set of sixteen cakes of color labeled with traditional color names from red to violet to green. Instead, Mom bought me a big tin of paints, maybe 9x12, the top of which was some type of impressionist painting—a Monet garden, perhaps—and inside there were 108 little cakes of color, like the box shown above. I was dazzled! Even better, this was a British-made paintbox, and the little cakes of color had luscious, exotic names that rolled off the tongue with sensual delight: chrome yellow, ultramarine, lamp black, cadmium yellow, Prussian blue, yellow ochre, raw sienna, crimson lake, cadmium red, rose madder, zinc white, Indian yellow, cobalt blue, viridian, brown madder, raw umber, sepia, indigo, ivory black, Chinese white, and more. I think I was more fascinated by the names than I was by the actual range of colors, especially since I never did get the hang of watercolors and I ruined about half of the fascinating little cakes with the holes you see in some of the cakes above without turning out a decent watercolor for my pains. When I think back on that paintbox and those wonderful names, it reminds me how the most ordinary things like cakes of watercolor because exotic by means of the nomenclature given to them.

I always wonder if they still make paintboxes like this. I imagine myself like Beatrix in the film Miss Potter using the colours—and how much more rich they sound by including that "u"!—to add dainty detail to an exquisite drawing, until I remember I still haven't mastered watercolors. Perhaps it's just as well the ordinary sets of sixteen cakes are available for those of us who still need training wheels on our paintbrushes.

And Of Course...Lassie

You wouldn't have to twist my arm very hard, although it would pain me to answer and have to leave so many beloved titles out: Get Smart!, The Waltons, Remember WENN, Ellery Queen, My World and Welcome to It, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Blake's 7, M*A*S*H, Doctor Simon Locke, Wild Wild West, and, naturally, Doctor Who. But if you buttonholed me, asked sternly, "What is your favorite television series of all time?" I'd have to say it.

Lassie.

Television, especially in the early 1960s, brought children dreams. For most of us, it was a time of big wooden black-and-white consoles that were more furniture than electronics (color television existed, but the price was beyond most parents' reach), Bakelite-based rabbit-ear aerials that helped you pull in your local channels, three television networks plus some independent channels that pretty much ran old movies and black-and-white reruns all day long. And there was no watching your own program in a corner on a small, portable screen; the theater was right in your living room, and you gathered around it the way our ancestors gathered about a fire, to laugh or gasp or cry or hold on with tense fingers. Kids clad in footie pajamas curled on overstuffed sofas, or sprawled on the carpet, or sat on a newfangled stuffed animal called a "TV dog" to watch a favorite program with the rest of the family, softly lamplit with incandescent fire, surrounded by the trappings of the era: patterned wallpaper, corniced windows, layered curtains, Venetian blinds or green roller shades with pull cords, stolid furniture on the floor and shadow boxes filled with knicknacks on the wall.

Fueled by monochrome shadows, we imagined being so many things in our outdoor play: cowboys or astronauts, explorers or spies, superheroes or policemen. And, as we knew from Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and Gail Davis (TV's Annie Oakley), every good hero had a sidekick or a best buddy. This could be a human being, but often our childhood buddies were cartoon critters (Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound, Ruff and Ready, and Rocky and Bullwinkle) or live-action animals (Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Fury, Flicka, Yukon King, Roy Rogers' "wonder dog" Bullet and "golden palomino" Trigger, London the "littlest hobo," Gene Autry's Champion, and Velvet Brown's King). I loved them all, but for all the galloping free or the romance of Rusty and Rinty on the range, it was Lassie who was special.

I can't even conceive of life before Lassie; it seemed as if I had never not watched the series. My earliest memory of television IS Lassie, framed in a hulking box of a fifties' television set, polished dark wooden exterior, a fifteen-inch-screen topping a square of brocaded cloth that covered the speaker, with hard black plastic knobs to change the channels and adjust the volume, and deal with the dreaded "vertical roll" and "horizontal hold," on a very snowy station almost out of rabbit-ear range. With digital TV you don't see "snow" anymore; you either get the station or you don't, but back then if you were desperate enough to watch a certain program, you could attempt concentration beyond the pale picture shot with interference and the crackly sound (if any sound at all). While what I was watching "officially" on Sunday nights on CBS was first-run—what year? who knows? I saw "Lassie's Odyssey" first run, and that was broadcast two months after my sixth birthday; I was a fan much earlier than that—what I had seen amidst the electronic snow were reruns of earlier episodes. I was so young (and the picture/sound so bad) that I didn't realize those stories didn't feature Timmy, and I only "twigged" when, during supper one evening when I was about eleven years old, I told my parents I was going to write stories about Lassie and Timmy when I grew up. They very gently told me about this thing called "copyright," since neither had a notion of anything called "fanfiction." Mom then casually commented that there had been another boy on Lassie before Timmy.

It suddenly made sense of a years' long mystery. The first-run CBS stories I was now watching had Corey Stuart as Lassie's new master, but I was faithfully keeping up with old Timmy and Lassie stories in the afternoon rerun slot, and two Lassie scenes I had embedded in my mind never turned up in the reruns. One was of Lassie and "Timmy" walking down into a field of sheep, and the other was a scene from a story practically branded in my mind: Lassie on trial for biting someone! They were threatening to put her to sleep! And then a miracle!—the defense attorney tosses her the judge's gavel to catch and proves that the teeth marks on the handle did not match the bite marks on the person's leg! "Timmy" in the sheep scene of course was Jeff, and the gavel scene came from from "The Trial." Not until my high school years did a local station start re-broadcasting the Jeff episodes again so that the fragments made sense.

Since Lassie-love knew no bounds, I found other ways to work the collie into my life. One of my first stuffed dogs was named "Little Lassie," despite the fact it was a poodle. Most of the Lassie-branded items were over the family budget, but thank heavens for those 25¢ Whitman book "Authorized Editions," so I could read more Lassie adventures. One of my most cherished possessions was a thin children's picture book, Lassie's Brave Adventure, that had left another image burned upon my brain, one of Lassie high up on a wooden railroad trestle rescuing a colt whose hoof was caught in the tracks. Pens and Crayolas supplied endless drawings of Lassie and as soon as my fingers were able to take pen to paper in a coherent manner, those Lassie stories I swore I'd write were begun. Those newfangled cassette recorders were just a way to record your favorite Lassie episode off the television.

My watershed Lassie moment was "Lassie's Odyssey." Not then, not now, has there ever been a story to equal it, the story against which all other Lassie episodes were judged. For three weeks we watched Timmy wait anxiously back on the farm as Lassie traveled field and forest and river and ravine to return to him. And just as he had given up hope, and is burying all her toys, there is that bark of greeting over the hill... Exquisite drama, all wrapped up in violins and tears. To this day if I need a good cry, "Lassie's Odyssey" will supply it. Even today, when I see railroad tracks vanishing in the distance, all I can think of is Lassie's weary tread between the iron rails.

In Doctor Who fandom it's always said that your first Doctor is always your favorite, and I still do have a sneaking preference for Jon Pertwee. My companion of choice with Lassie was Timmy. Can you blame me?—the ultimate dream of a dog-allergic overprotected girlchild trapped in suburbia: running free on a farm with a collie as your best friend, hopping your bicycle or hiking in the woods or working on woodland projects for school. Even though Corey had been introduced so nicely in "The Disappearance," it was never quite the same again to me. The stories lost some of their drama because they involved adults and capitalized more on scenery and being promotional pieces for the Forest Service (which, if you have to be promotional, is, granted, not a bad thing to be advertising, rather than soap, shoes and Spam). Despite being an animal lover, except for "Have You Any Wool?", which had nice comic touches, I found the innovation of the "all-animal episode" a deadly bore. Lassie was always best playing against humans, I felt, and Lassie trailing/herding/barking at rabbits/deer/whatever for 25 minutes was more my idea of a nap than a suspenseful story.

But due to series' longevity there's a Lassie for everyone: those who started on the color episodes and were touched by the wildlife and the majestic scenery, are disappointed by the farm episodes where life was static and juvenile troubles abounded. There were those who went further back than I and watched the episodes with Jeff first, and never could stand Timmy. (Having been able to watch the series at least once starting from "Inheritance" through eighth season, I could actually understand: growing up with Jeff facing up to the facts he was fatherless, or struggling with growing-up problems, and then switching to pint-sized Timmy and his cutesy fantasy dreams—thank heaven they quit doing that!—must have been quite the letdown; many never stuck around to see him become the self-sufficent, if trouble-prone, boy who was able to return many of Lassie's favors and save her life. As indulgent as I am, even I'm ho-hum about fourth season-post-Jeff and fifth; it wasn't until Timmy was a little older that the episodes really became lively again—not to mention that nothing quite measured up to Ellen Miller's psychological approach to her son's problems; she was the ultimate single mom! Indeed, I get letters from male fans still bristling at the audacity of Clay Horton telling Ellen she needed a man around the house, admiring her self-sufficiency in an age that still expected women to cling!)

I can still sit down with any black-and-white episode of any persuasion and enjoy it. Perhaps the series might have still worked for me if the writing remained the same. So many of the Jeff episodes and Timmy episodes were psychological pieces: will Jeff take the dare, thereby perhaps losing Lassie to Harry? Will Timmy do the right thing in turning over a friend to law enforcement authorities? Will Timmy really give Lassie to Joey for use as a guide dog? Will Jeff learn to use time wisely, but not let it be his master? The older writers had a way of telling a suspenseful tale (or even a humorous one) and sneaking a Important Lesson in the mix to be digested without choking, while the newer scriptwriters wrote the story into the Important Lesson with large dollops of BIG IMPORTANT SPEECHES. I like to imagine those 1970s stories written with 1950s sensibilities, and how it would have made the Holden Ranch boys come alive.

But that's just me; whatever your "flavor" of Lassie, there's always one constant: the clever, gallant collie with a heart big enough for everyone, the one you can always depend on. And, in the end, whether taking place on farm, in forest, or out west, it's all we ever hope it can be.

The Neighborhood: From Trotters to Trolleys

Like everything before it, the old neighborhood at one time was open space, dotted with maples and oaks and sycamores, the brush a tangle of sumac, bittersweet, and aggressive poison ivy, populated by squirrels and rabbits, moles and voles, deer and bear. In spring the buds swelled on the trees and became tender shoots that morphed into green leaves and violets grew in the clearings. In summer, rabbits nibbled under the trees and foxes and mice raised their families in dens among the trees. In fall the sumac turned to waving scarlet fronds and the trees blazed gold and orange as squirrels stored their nuts in hidden caches and the birds headed south. In winter the bones of the trees cast blue shadows against the snow where mice noses emerged, testing for the scent of predators. Then civilization encroached; a factory was built only a few miles away, to utilize nearby water as its power, and beside it the trim white home of the factory owner. The factory prospered, the size of the white house doubled, and it became the home of a governor.

Governor William Sprague found that open space once filled with trees and wildlife a perfect place to exercise his champion trotting horses. In 19th century America where vehicles were horse-drawn, the trotter and his counterpart the pacer were king, and the harness-racing event the biggest part of the annual county fair. That now flat stretch of land next became Narragansett Trotting Park. This sprawling acreage had a grandstand so large that it contained a hotel, and financiers like Morgan and Vanderbilt formed its audience on opening day.

Fortunes come and go, and in the later 19th century the Spragues' 67-acre property became the state fairgrounds, and in 1896 a novelty attraction appeared at the fair: racing cars! These sputtering vehicles—so unreliable that if a car even finished a race it was considered a success—made occasional appearances, and the park was also used for other big outdoor shows: circuses, exhibition trotting races (including an appearance by the great Dan Patch, who held harness-racing records for years), and even Wild West shows, one attended by a small boy who would later grow up and buy a house and raise a family at the edge of the park. He remembered for years afterwards his wide-eyed amazement at the trick riding and shooting, the colorful Native people on prancing horses, and a "stagecoach robbery" sequence, the dust and the smell of horses and popcorn. Trolley cars wended their way down Cranston Street and its extension, Narragansett Avenue, to bring people to the park, men in ties and top hats, women in long skirts and parasols, and as always excited children in frocks or roundabout and knickers to ooh-and-ahh at whatever attraction played at the moment.

Soon the age of the horse and carriage made way for the horseless carriage, and not months before the United States joined the Great War, the park closed and re-opened with what was the first paved and banked oval track, in what was apparently the first super-speedway in the United States. Eddie Rickenbacker, a few years before his flying exploits in France, pushed the limits of automotive speed in the first race, driving a Maxwell motor car. Soon speed became the watchword as other then racing-greats like Barney Oldfield and Louis Chevrolet circled the track. Glenn Curtis, the aircraft designer, raced motorcycles there, and air races were even held around pylons added to the park for that purpose.

As the classic newsreel announced "Time marches on." The trolley cars that squealed and ground their way down the avenue now just called "Gansett" to carry fairgoers were bringing people who wished to live in the suburbs. By the time the 1920s were ending, the fairgrounds had moved out to East Greenwich and the cars to other venues. The racetrack left its mark on the street names—Chandler, Jordan, Overland, Cadillac, Packard and Fiat (Fiat Avenue was the backstretch)—and in the neighborhood's nickname, the Speedway, long into the 1960s, when you could have your hair cut at the Speedway barber and bowl a game at the Speedway Lanes, and when a leftover chain link fence from the Speedway, now separating two back yards, linked the little boy who'd gone to the Wild West Show and the little girl who grew up in the little Cape Cod house turned sideways to fit on the corner lot.

The Little House

I knew I’d grown up in a small house, but I didn’t realize how small until after my mom passed on when we were going through the layered contents of the old steamer trunk that sat in our basement for years. Mom’s wedding dress was carefully folded at the very bottom, yards and yards of heavy ivory white satin with a long train, bureau scarves, the metal cashbox that held emergency money, and various odd things like some rough sacklike pillowcases that I suspected had belonged to my grandparents. The trunk itself was a remnant of my grandparents’ past; it had been used when they packed up the family in 1924 and moved from tiny Lafferty, Ohio (today a few miles off I-70, and still a tiny town when we detoured there in 1978 on the way back from California) to Providence, Rhode Island, where Grandpa had been offered a job in a foundry, and still has the brownish, faded 1924 baggage tag stuck haphazardly to its side. One of the more interesting things found in the trunk were the original 1951 house plans, complete with a notation that a coal bin could be fitted into the cellar, if necessary, as the boiler was equipped to burn both oil and coal. The first floor footage was only 782 square feet.

There were days we each had our cozy corners, Mom under the three-way lamp in the armchair, knitting or crocheting, Dad in one corner of the sofa usually asleep, and me, either at the other end of the sofa, surrounded by my lap desk and pens and paper or a book (you had to do something during the commercials), all watching the square, sturdy GE television that one day morphed into a Magnavox "portable" that eventually, happily at Christmas of 1972, finally turned into a color TV. There were other days of housecleaning or rushing around that it seemed there was never room enough.

Granted, we did some living in other parts of the house. The attic, as previously mentioned, acted as a kind of storeroom. The basement, anchored in the center by a big cast iron boiler compartment, was unfinished at first except for a small northwest corner which Dad partitioned off in Masonite in hopes of making wine like his father did. I vaguely remember a big oak barrel in the little room, but the experiment didn’t last long. Still,  it remained “the wine cellar” in nomenclature for years afterward, keeping the Christmas tree intact (Dad didn’t like putting lights on the tree anymore than I do now), with handmade wooden shelves in one corner as an overflow pantry where multiple sale items were kept for storage until needed: canned goods, paper towels, toiletries. The oil tank was neatly against the wall in the opposite corner where it was periodically filled by my godfather (our oil man), with the clothes washer (and later gas dryer) next to it along the wall that paralleled the driveway. Dad later fixed three quarters of the basement with a drop ceiling of acoustical tile, wooden floor covered in inexpensive linoleum squares, and the 1970s de rigueur dark-brown paneled walls. It was downstairs I had my first ever-birthday party—I was twelve—in which the guests were all kids my age rather than a few friends mixed up with relatives. Later Dad also installed our old enamel sink and the old Glenwood gas stove down there so in the still humid throes of September we could can tomato sauce in relative coolness. Our old kitchen table, Mom’s sewing machine, the aforementioned steamer trunk, and the old sofa completed the turnout. Near the wine cellar I had a little space where I kept two bookshelves of hardback books (some were my mom’s) and shelves on the wall which held my rows of paperbacks, plus the old red-maple child-sized old roll-top desk and swivel chair I’d gotten from my cousin Johnny. Flanking one of the book cases on either side were closets that held seldom used clothes like Mom’s and my dressy dresses, bathrobes in summer and sunsuits in winter.

The house itself was that most ubiquitous of New England structures, the Cape Cod, with a small apron of lawn out front; however, since the lot was short and narrow (the width of a one-car driveway, the house, and a green stretch of lawn and flower bed to the side that wasn’t more than three feet wide), the home had been turned 90 degrees—instead of the front door being on the long end of the house, it was on the short end, opening directly into the living room (we called it the parlor). To the back of the parlor were the stairs to go upstairs, and you exited the room at left through the arch to a short hallway, tiled, like the kitchen, with pale yellow with black accents. Mom and Dad’s room was to the left of the parlor, followed down the length of the house by the equally ubiquitous pink-tiled and -painted bathroom, and then the yellow kitchen. My bedroom was opposite the kitchen, and between my room and the parlor were the stairs down to the basement. In the house's original incarnation, the rest of the rooms were wallpapered. No gayly-flowered 50s fashion for us; the parlor wallpaper was a pattern of curves and pediments that would not have looked out of place in a Victorian home. My room was striped pink, green, and silver, and my parents' room was similarly attired but in different colors. Once the wallpaper came down, we emerged into Mom's "beige era." Oh, all the rooms were a different shade of beige, but there it was—Dad and I dubbed it "everlasting beige" and fought it tooth and nail. Eventually Mom gave in: my room turned a pretty sky blue, their room a golden, dark yellow, and the parlor another ubiquitous 1970s color, terra cotta (which matched the fabric on the sofa and chair). It didn't last long: after fifteen years and Dad's death, Mom went back to "everlasting beige" once again.

Tacked on to the back of the house was an small enclosed porch just big enough for three in woven tape lawn chairs which had begun life as a simple square platform. In winter the winds came skidding from Cooney Field across the street and anyone standing on the porch attempting to open the back door rattled their teeth in the cold as they groped for their keys, so a roof was soon added and then walls and windows. In the wee hours of dark mornings, even in the cold winter over the low grumble of the boiler, I could hear the porch door open and then clunk close as the Hood's milkman made his delivery; in spring with the windows open the clink of the milk bottles would add music to the percussion.

Behind the house lay a small lawn, small enough to be manageable when mowing, large enough to fit a small shed, a full-size clothesline (which for at least one year flapped nearly daily with diapers), and even a small vegetable garden up against the old fence which went back decades to when the area behind our house was a racetrack. Mom's rosebush grew against the fence each summer, winding the chain link with tangled thorny vines  that ended in riots of small red roses. In winter I dug paths along the snow with my feet through the yard and then rode my stick horse through the paths, pretending to be Trixie Belden on her favorite of the Wheeler mares, Susie, or Annie Oakley rescuing her little brother Tagg yet again. And in the spring, oh, in the spring, for a few delicious weeks in May, Charlie's unkempt lilac bush draped its fragrant branches over the chain link fence, dripping with heavenly scented armfuls of pale purple lilacs. I never failed to bury my nose in them, even if later I was punished with the mother of all allergy attacks.

The house I remember best at Christmas, sparkling with tinsel and candoliers at the window, and in summer when the relentless heat brought every orifice open and the sounds of the street inside; the basement was for hot summer days; the attic for memories—but the yard I always remember for those brief weeks of spring and the draping lilacs. Surely heaven smells of lilacs...

It All Started Upstairs... (An Introduction)

It doesn't look like much, especially in this bleak photo where half the items had been stripped away. This was the last time I would see the old attic, that summer that my mom passed away.

As a kid, this was a Magic Place, like my grandfather's house. That empty corner you see at right was once filled with cardboard boxes covered in old sheets, ones that held old photograph albums; a big box of "Reader's Digest" issues (mine) going back to the 1950s (I would pick up old ones at yard sales); vintage books, including what was left of mom's old library; my dad's World War II souvenirs (one a pistol he confiscated from a German officer); Mom's old tatting magazines; and my 1970s "American Girl" issues (not the present magazine; this was a publication of the Girl Scouts). Very dimly at back you can see my child-sized Boston rocker (which I regret leaving behind). There was nothing better on a rainy day or a snowy day (if I could stand the cold like Jo March; as in her garret, the attic wasn't heated) than to creep up the stairs and tug the cord on the lightbulb set in the ceiling, to sit scrunched up on the rocker, looking through the old wartime newspapers my mom had saved, with their maps of the battle lines of Europe, and one stark front page announcing that FDR had died; the newer newspapers covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the old hurricane book the Providence Journal put out in 1954 after Hurricane Carol, comparing the damage in 1954 versus "the big one" in 1938; or the wonderful book sections of those old "Reader's Digests." In other corners were the summer clothes/curtains/bedspreads if it were winter and vice versa; the wicker picnic baskets; the hurricane lamp; the bowling trophies; my kindergarten graduation gown; my school box with old "Bain Bugle" issues and classmate photos; and my old stuffed animals. Everything had a coating of grime and dust, hence the old sheet covers, and I'd have to scrub my hands when I got through, but it was always worth it and I could hardly wait to go again.

For Mom and Dad, I suppose, it represented a disappointment, as it was never intended as an attic. It was actually an unfinished second story, and should have looked like my Confirmation godmother's house upstairs, with the slanting eaves over the beds of my best friend and of her older brother. My parents were hoping for three or four children, and would have put those eaves to excellent use. Instead the place became a time machine I dipped into at will.

Now the time machine resides inside my head, and sometimes a photo online, or a scent, or a book, or a scene will prompt a memory to the fore. I think I'll air them out here once in a while. Just to keep the dust down, you understand...