What my mom doesn’t say…part two

A few months ago, I did a blog entry involving the many things my mom never told me. Hidden gems that she’d parse out over the decades, peppering almost any salad-like event with bacon bits full of intrigue

A couple years ago on holiday, she dropped the bombshell that back in the ’60’s in Florida, her cousin Marylou, a singer, who was one night accompanied on piano by none other than Richard Milhouse Nixon. This was at some club where Marylou worked.

I think I was in my 20’s when she mentioned in passing that my father once punched a cop, etc., that type of thing.

The folks were up recently and while gathering (outside) with family, she filled in the rest of her work history from ’53 to ’62. 

Now, I knew she was a nurse’s aide, which was in the mid ’50’s, but what I did NOT know was that she also worked for Ford, in the jet engine section as a secretary. She mentioned how spiffy the foreign guys looked in the division. We thought at first it was the German scientists being relocated after WWII, but no, those were rockets, not jets and these were Brits, not Germans. 

Understandable mistake though, considering my mom was considered quite the hot platinum blonde back in the day, so one might naturally conclude there might be an aryan youth scenario emerging, with foreigners showing up, but no.

Nor did I know she was a hostess at a restaurant or two going into the ’60’s. She started working at McKesson drugs as a secretary in ’62, probably right after I was born. She of course would do that until ’77, until she became a pharmaceutical rep.

Of course whenever talking about the old days, there come reminders. 

Mom has little patience for … anything with today’s social mores and is quick to remind me that she smoked the whole time she was pregnant with me. 

I responded that yeah, I know, things were different back then, they didn’t know better. 

She’s then quick to inform me that they did know better and the doctor even told her to quit smoking. And god bless her, she cut down a bit. Turns out, my father was never a smoker, but that was probably because he was busy being a big drinker. Everyone needs a hobby.

Expanding on 1962’s infant accessories, there were no such things as car seats back then either.

So presumably, infants were either just held comfortably by mom in the passenger seat, or tied to the roof, where wind friction would shear off any residual mucous from the birthing experience. 

You could just lay the infant in the back seat but they’d just bounce around (this was also before seat belts were either used, or encouraged or invented). I can’t remember exactly. Probably because I was all mucousy and tied to the roof.

But of course, this was a different time. Everything was *just* starting to become color after all those millennia of black and white.

THE PAST!