Third Grade at The Julia Ward Howe Elementary School in Detroit Michigan, 1930

Miss Butzsen was our auditorium teacher. Elegant in her tallness, she had thick brown hair, marcelled and held back with jeweled hair clips. She wore pumps with the highest heels and suits with dainty white blouses showing at the throat. And so it was not surprising to hear her tell us about the Play we were going to put on in just a few weeks (our contribution to the Spring End of School Program..). We sat, the third grade class, in the first six or seven rows of the auditorium as she passed out our play booklet. The play was to be Sleeping Beauty. And so we read the story with all its parts during the next week. I knew I should be the Sleeping Beauty, of course. Never mind that the Sleeping Beauty is asleep for 100 years. After all, everyone else is asleep too, the story says. And then the Prince arrives and the Sleeping Beauty gets to stand up in all her beauty and go off the stage with the handsome Prince with all of the audience clapping and shouting with joy over the Happy Ending. An ending I have helped make as I imagine myself blowing little secret kisses to the village peasants. . . .

The try outs began with each of us standing on the stage and repeating a line or two from the play. Miss Butzsen, standing at the back of the auditorium would call out in her beautiful but insistent sounding voice, " Louder, please, louder." And so we were chosen. I was given the role of one of the twelve fairies; Miss Butzsen assured all of the cast that each of us held the most important part, otherwise the Brothers Grimm would not have been able to tell the story so beautifully. So we happily practiced and suddenly it was the day of the Spring Program.

Miss Butzsen asked if any of the girls had an extra dress, bloomers, stockings and fancy black shoes to offer one of the fairies and I loved offering some of my things to be brought to school that afternoon. And so I hurried home to tell my mother the news. I also announced that I needed a silver star wand and that I wanted to wear my best dress (the green silk dress) . My sister found a smooth stick and my mother very (eagerly? she did it so fast), made the star on a piece of cardboard from the back of the Post Toastie Box and covered it with silver paper from our father's cigarette packages (we saved them, my sister and I, for special occasions) Then my mother got out the curling iron and curled my short hair on each side. When I told my mother about the clothes I wanted to bring for one of the fairies so that she would look fairy-like, my mother just sighed and my sister was sent upstairs to bring down the pink bloomers, white stockings, my second best dress - it was yellow with white daises sprinkled on the hem and very pretty, I thought - and a pair of black patent leather shoes that were a little scuffed up that my sister had outgrown. Everything was folded and placed in a Crowley's Department Store grey cardboard suit box. When I presented the box to Miss Butzsen, her eyes filled with tears and she hugged me and I hugged Miss Butzsen. And so the third grade Sleeping Beauty was presented with all of the characters, including the frog, in place, and everyone remembered their speeches and I didn't mind that I had only to say "I give you riches" as I touched the silver star wand to the baby in the cradle. Everyone praised the cast as we came forward and bowed to the audience there in Miss Butzsen's Auditorium. My mother asked that I bring home the clothes; but I had already told my new friend that the clothes were hers to keep if she liked them (I really didn't want the bloomers back, anyway).

A Father's Day Gift

There was excitement around the house as we were instructed by our mother to observe this event, Father's Day. What were we to do, we asked. "Why, buy a present for your father" she said. We checked our small purses, mine was red leather with a little green alligator embossed on the front and my sister's was blue with a more friendly white poodle embossed on the front.

My sister was ten and I was eight and we suddenly felt very responsible as we examined our wealth and tried to imagine the gift we would buy for our father. And so we went to the Dime Store in our neighborhood; Woolworth's Dime Store was truly a five and dime store long ago in the 1930's, with things like stationary and cards and tin toys and paper dolls; rubber balls and jump ropes and then a few items for kitchens and such. We walked back and forth, wondering if we would find the perfect present for our father when, there it was! A black enameled tin with a scene of a Japanese garden and little bridge painted on the cover. We opened it up and found a clamp to hold something in place. The saleslady explained that it was a case to hold cigarettes. Our father needed this case, we decided. How beautiful it was! We paid our saleslady a nickel from each of our purses and assured one another of our brilliant discovery.

Wrapped in white tissue paper with a brown polka ribbon (left over from some other important present), we could hardly wait for Father's Day to come. We thought we should have filled the case with the Camel cigarettes that our father smoked; our mother said that the beautiful case was enough. We loved hearing our father praise the case and then he opened his package of Camel Cigarettes and shook out the cigarettes, carefully, he said, so that none of the tobacco was loosened, and placed them, one by one, into the case and then, with the satisfaction of someone who has just been given the one gift they had always wanted (cigarettes being messy in the package, he said) he slipped the beautiful cigarette case with the exotic Japanese picture on its cover, into his coat pocket.

We were satisfied that we had given our father the most wonderful of presents for this Father's Day. We always asked him if he had his cigarettes with him when he went off to work. He always did.

THE LAST WORD OF A BLUEBIRD

As told to a child

As I went out a Crow

In a low voice said, "Oh,

I was looking for you.

How do you do?

I just came to tell you

To tell Lesley (will you?)

That her little Bluebird

Wanted me to bring word

That the north wind last night

That made the stars bright

And made ice on the trough

Almost made him cough

His tail feathers off.

He just had to fly!

But he sent her Good-by,

And said to be good,

And wear her red hood,

And look for skunk tracks

In the snow with an ax----

And do everything!

And perhaps in the spring

He would come back and sing."

Robert Frost

The Boy Next Door

The boy next door, Edward Strait, was my hero. I was twelve and he was fourteen. He was a paperboy for The Detroit News, the afternoon family newspaper, and every day after school he would meet The Detroit News truck there on the corner of Kercheval and Marlborough(Marlborough being the residential street where we lived and Kercheval the business street) and scramble for his load of papers along with the other boys. I ran with him and he showed me how to fold the papers into three sections and tuck them into one another, and stack them neatly into his wagon. And then he would begin the wonderful, breathless trip of delivering papers to every house on his route.

His wagon was beautiful; red wheels with great rubber tires and wooden varnished slats all around with The Detroit News in big red letters emblazoned on each side. I watched him in wonderment! He was like a ballet dancer as he ran, not missing a step, dipping down with a long swinging arm to pluck out a paper, sending it sailing with a baseball pitcher's precision through the air to land with a plump, neatly, right on the porch. He allowed me to deliver one or two papers toward the end of his route saying something like 'pretty good for a girl.' I pretended not to hear.

But then and there I decided to be a Paper Girl. My mother and father thought it would be a good way to add to the family weekly income, they admitted. And so my mother supplied me with a long white business envelope and a postage stamp. I showed her the letter I had written and she was impressed. I rode my bike down the street to the mailbox. I dreamed of the wagon and how I would fold and throw the Detroit newspaper onto the steps and porches. I spent the week checking the mailbox for my letter and then, one day, it came. A real business letter in a fancy envelope with a window on the front that my name showed through -Ruth Eva Belton. There it was, addressed to me. They were sorry to tell me that only boys were hired to deliver The Detroit News. Even at twelve, I was struck with the unfairness of it all, and slightly humiliated at being a girl. A helpful suggestion was added - why not try babysitting? Reminders again and again, even though our mothers had to wait until 1920 for the right to vote, we still couldn't be Paper Girls in 1934.