“Hold on!’ shouted the trail guide.

As I grabbed the saddle horn, the horse I was riding (sitting on would be more accurate) jumped over a narrow creek. Judging by the way my stomach lurched, you’d have thought we’d taken a five-foot fence. Far from it . . . I was on a trail ride in the San Emidio Mountains in southern California, doing a news story for a local newspaper.

For a western writer, I have appallingly little experience with horses. I’m not someone who grew up in the saddle.  My first horse was made of plastic and attached to springs.  Does anyone else remember “The Wonder Horse?”  They were made in the 1960s and graced living rooms throughout America. I rode my Wonder Horse for hours, but it was my brother who tested the limits. He managed to bounce it into the wall.

Hobby horses have been around for ages. They became popular in 17th century England, but they’re believed to have originated in ancient Egypt. Carved horses would be placed on four-wheel carts and children would take rides. A few of these toys have been found in ancient pyramids. With a son living in Cairo, I’m fascinated by the Egypt connection.

The hobby horse (or broomstick horse) became popular in medieval times. A hobby horse consisted of a stick, a fake horse head and a child’s imagination. Can’t you just see a little girl naming her horse “Star” and dreaming of adventure? For a boy in medieval times, a hobby horse was more than a toy.  Pretending to ride imitated adult behavior and prepared him for a life of battle. Boys also practiced jousting with horses on wheels.

 Hobby horses eventually morphed from sticks into barrel horses. A barrel horse was made from a log mounted on four legs and had a crudely made head. They didn’t move or rock, but they gave a child the feel of sitting on a horse. As cabinet-making and carpentry skills advanced, the legs of these barrel horses became more elaborate.

The rocking horse as we picture it now came into being in the 17th century. Someone figured out that mounting a toy horse on a half barrel would create a rocking motion. Later the barrel evolved into the wide rockers we picture today. The earliest example belonged the boy who’d become King Charles I of England. 

It was only a matter of time before the rocking horse exploded in popularity. In the 18th century, some were elaborate works of art made by masters of the trade. Only the wealthiest of family could afford them. When the Industrial Revolution took hold, what had been a cottage industry turned into mass production and rocking horses were accessible to the general public. The dappled gray became the most popular model when Queen Victoria presented that style to her children.

 The rocking horse underwent another evolution in 1880 when J.P. Marqua, an American from Ohio, patented a safety stand. Instead of moving on rockers, the horse was mounted on springs in a frame. The safety base made rocking horses more stable than their ancestors, and the toy took up less room as a child played. They were also considered safer. Fingers and toes couldn’t be pinched under the rockers, and the horse was less likely to tip over.  (I can vouch for this. My Wonder Horse made some wild leaps in my imagination, but he never threw me off.)

Up until World War I, rocking horses grew in popularity. Unfortunately, the start of the war led to a shortage of materials and skilled craftsman. The Great Depression further lessened the interest in such toys. They never did make a strong comeback, possibly because of the advent of the automobile.  Instead of imitating their parents on horseback, children wanted toy cars they could pretend to drive.  

Even though interest has faded, rocking horses aren’t gone forever. They’re still made by artisans and loved by children with vivid imaginations.

What about you? Did you ever have a rocking horse?  Do you remember Wonder Horses and stick ponies? Or maybe you were the girl I envied . . . Maybe you had a real horse of your own.  Memory lane, here we come at a gallop!

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Our family is big on games.  We’re “gamers” as they say.  Whenever we get together either with friends or family, we play our fair share of games.

It’s a hoot and a howl and we usually end up laughing our heads off after a few pizzas and beers.  Since our kids are grown and out of the house, we’ve instituted a Once A Month Game day!

Cards are usually the game of choice. We’ll play anything from UNO to Milles Bornes to Phase Ten. We have Phase Ten Tournaments.  My new son-in-law is quite a competitor. He and my hubby are always trying to outdo each other.

Sequence is a board game that you play with a deck of cards as well.  Its sort of like Bingo … but we play regular Bingo too!  

When we have a larger group than the six of us, like this past Easter – we’ll break out Catch Phrase. This is a game like Password, where you are allowed to describe the word in any way possible to your team members.  Once your team gets the word, you pass the digital “board” to your opponent.  A clock clicks off time and if you’re the team left holding the “board” when the timer runs out, the opposing team scores a point.  Not only are we playing a Password type game, but we’re also playing Hot Potato – all at the same time.   

Another fun game for more than four players is Apples to Apples. It’s easy and fun, REALLY, but way too hard to explain on this blog.  Trust me – you’ll love it. 

As I peruse my closet, I see digital Deal or No Deal (but you don’t win any real money), Risk (one time we played this game for 8 hours),  Parcheesi (for oldies but goodies) and Upwords, a board game that’s like scrabble except you can build tiles upon each other.  Of course Yahtzee and Monopoly and Clue are among my all time favorites.   Fun, Fun, Fun!

So what games did they play in the 1800’s?  

The first American board game was created in 1843 by the W & S.B Ives Company called the Mansion of Happiness.  This game led children via their playing pieces down the path of “eternal happiness.”

Would you believe that the The Game of Life as we know it (pictured on left) started out as the picture you see next to it. Invented by Milton Bradley in 1860, The Checkered Game of Life was a board game that rewarded good deeds and punished bad ones. Milton Bradley, once a successful lithographer, had created a portrait of Abe Lincoln without his beard.  When Lincoln grew his now-famous beard, Bradley’s clean-shaven portrait was no longer popular.  Out of desperation, Bradley designed the Checkered Game of Life and its immediate popularity started Milton Bradley on a new career path. 

Milton Bradley

As more and more Americans traveled overseas in the late 1800′s, traveling board games held great appeal. Travelers could relive their trips by playing such games as Around the World invented in 1873 or McLoughlin Brothers’ Game of Round the World with Nellie Bly which was created in 1890. 

Are you a ”gamer” too?  Do you play cards or board games with family and friends?   Which are your favorites? 

I don’t know about you, but I feel sorry for the United States Post Office.

They don’t have a chance against today’s technology, and they admit it.  In fact, they’ve lamented they don’t see any glimmer of hope on the horizon and that technology will slowly and surely squeeze out the average consumer’s need to send correspondence the old-fashioned way. 

The proof is in the pudding.  Postmaster General John E. Potter recently reported to Congress that mail volume will drop an appalling 32 BILLION pieces in less than 2 years. 

Two years?  Yikes!

To battle the sharp declines, the post office is forced to raise rates.  A postage stamp will jump to 44 cents each on May 11th, and we’ll see price hikes every May from now on.  Which, of course, only keeps the cycle spinning – consumers won’t WANT to spend 44 cents and more on a letter, so mail volume will drop and keep dropping. 

We’ve become a society where corresponding  by email is as natural as breathing.  We pay our bills online.   We apply for jobs online.  Some of us even send Christmas cards online, and thank you notes, and birthday cards online . . .. 

Makes you wonder what those dedicated riders for the Pony Express would have to say about all this, don’t you?  After all, it wasn’t so long ago that America was completely dependent on the Post Office to courier its goods all over the country.  And some of those goods were mighty strange.

Here are some examples:

* A farmer shipped  1 and 1/2 tons of hay by parcel post from Oregon  to Idaho.

* Someone shipped a coconut from Miami to Detroit fourth class; postage and address was attached to the shell.

* It was fairly common to save on trucking costs by mailing sections of prefab housing to construction sites.

* Harry Winston was kind enough to donate the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian in 1958.  He sent it wrapped in brown paper, first class registered mail.

Even more stranger:

Poisoned candy, loaded pistols, and assorted body parts in various stages of decomposition.

Of course, with bizarre things comes the risk of mishap – like when black widow spiders and poisonous snakes and even lady bugs escaped.

But in 1916, the Postmaster General put his proverbial foot down when someone shipped AN ENTIRE BANK BUILDING from Salt Lake City to Vernal, Utah–80,000 bricks packaged in small bundles.  But an exception was made in 1941 to allow 9,000 tons of gold bricks to rumble from New York to Fort Knox, an endeavor that took an entire year and allowed the Post Office to collect an astounding $1,600,000 in postage, insurance and surcharges.

But my absolute favorite–or my most appalling, whichever you prefer–shipped goods was in 1914 when the parents of four-year-old May Pierstorff plunked 53 cents worth of postage on her suitcase (though some claim the stamp was glued to a tag on her coat) to pay for the 3 hour trip  by train to her grandmother’s house in Lewiston, Idaho.   They got away with it since it wasn’t technically against the law to ship a child.  Never mind that it WAS against the law to ship a pig–or smelly Limburger cheese.  But since the cost of a train ticket equated to a full day’s pay for May’s father, the local postmaster agreed on the basis that it was lawful to ship little chicks, of which he considered her such.

The story had a happy–and safe–ending.    The baggage clerk delivered her promptly from the train to the Lewiston post office, where Grandma waited to greet her–a happily delivered product of the United States Post Office.

And yes, this is little May.  How could her parents plunk a stamp on her and send her on her way, all by her lonesome?  

What was the strangest thing you’ve ever shipped by mail or otherwise?  What was the strangest thing you’ve ever received?

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I’m pouting because no one attempted to guess who was America’s most famous silhouette.    But here he is.   George Washington himself.  Not surprising, since the silhouettes were the rage in his lifetime.

Here’s the identities of the silhouettes.  Some were easy, several were much tougher.  Two, no one guessed correctly.

#1 – Benjamin Franklin

#2 – Jane Austen

#3 – Abraham Lincoln (who could miss that bearded chin?)

#4 – Abe and his family.  That chin again.

#5 – Marie Antoinette

#6 – George and Martha Washington

#7 -  Queen Elizabeth

#8 – Beethoven

He DID look like an African-American female with that curly hair, didn’t he?  But it must’ve been the way the light shined behind him, and the details his artist took time to incorporate into the silhouette.  He was young here, too. 

And there you go.  Hope you enjoyed skipping down memory lane with me!

If you went to school in the 60′s like I did, they probably made a black and white silhouette of you.   Though I can’t remember how old I was (six or seven, maybe) I remember the experience - sitting on a chair with a light shining on one side of me  and staring straight ahead without moving.  I’m a little vague  as to how my silhouette was transferred to the white paper, and who would’ve traced it onto black paper, but I remember the finished project.  And that it hung on our wall for a long time.

What I’d give to have that portrait back again.

In this age of digital photography, silhouettes have faded into the realms of nostalgia.  But in the late 1700′s, they were the cheapest, quickest and most effective way to preserve one’s likeness.  Originally called ‘shades’ or ‘hollow-cuts’, artists charged mere pennies to produce a black paper cut-out or an ink painting.  Others produced more ornate creations, transferring the silhouettes into beautiful black, bronzed or coloured masterpieces on ivory, plaster, card or glass.  And still others simply did them at parties, for a fun souvenir for their guests.

The term ‘silhouette’ came by way of the French finance minister Etienne de Silhouette in 1759.   Notoriously miserly,  he enjoyed paper-cutting as a hobby, and cheap articles of portraiture became known as  ‘a la Silhouette.’   Talented artists could wield their scissors freehand without sketches and/or purely from memory.   The more ambitious produced life-size cuts.  Noted American artist William Henry Brown took it a step further–he cut silhouettes of the entire St. Louis Fire Department–all 65 members!–finishing up with a 20 foot long group portrait.  How cool would that be?!

By the mid-1800′s, however, silhouettes fell victim to the daguerreotype, and, as they, say, the rest is history.  Today, silhouettes are revived by collectors and on jewelry, but also on more modern wares such as wallpaper, drapery and upholstery fabrics, dishes and stationery.

Here are some silhouettes from popular historical figures.  Can you guess who they were?  (No fair Googling!)   I’ll post the answers later this afternoon.

Do you know who had America’s most famous silhouette?  (No fair Googling!)

Did you have a silhouette made of yourself when you were young?  Do you still have it? 

#1

#2

#3 

#4 

#5 

#6

#7

#8

Will Rogers died before I was born.  I never saw any of his movies or heard his voice on the radio.  But I feel as if I knew him because he was my dad’s favorite movie star.  Dad talked about him a lot, especially on long car trips. 

Most movie cowboys were city boys with pretty faces.  Born in 1879 on the Dog Iron Ranch in Oklahoma’s Indian Territory, Will was the real thing.  Both his parents were part Cherokee (Will once quipped that his ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat).  The youngest of eight children, Will quit school after the 10^th grade.  He was more interested in being a cowboy than in reading, writing and arithmetic.  A freed slave taught him how to use a lasso to work Texas Longhorn cattle on the family ranch.  As he grew older, Will’s roping skills were so remarkable that he was listed in the Guiness Book of Records for throwing three lassos at the same time:  One rope caught the running horse’s neck, the other would loop around the rider and the third swooped up under the horse to loop all four legs. 

After some early adventures abroad, will returned to America and went into show business as “The Cherokee Kid.”  His skills won him jobs trick roping in wild west shows and on the vaudeville stages where, soon, he started telling small jokes.  Quickly, his wisecracks and folksy observations became more prized by audiences than his expert roping.  He became known as an informed philosopher, telling the truth in simple words so that everyone could understand.  Here are some examples:  

“A fool and his money are soon elected.” 

“Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.” 

“Buy land.  They ain’t making any more of the stuff.” 

“Even if you’re on the right track you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” 

“If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?” 

And my favorite–”We will never have true civilization until we recognize the rights of others.” 

Will starred on Broadway and in 71 movies and was also a radio broadcaster.  He wrote more than 4,000 newspaper colums and six books.  Presidents, senators and kings sought his opinions.  Inside himself, Will Rogers remained a simple Oklahoma cowboy. “I never met a man I didn’t like,” was his credo of genuine love and respect for humanity and all people everywhere. He gave his own money to disaster victims and raised thousands for the Red Cross and Salvation Army.   

Will was also a devoted husband and father of four.  He married Betty Blake in 1908 after an 8 year courtship.  He would say, “When I roped her, that was the star performance of my life.”  In 1935, at the age of 55, Will took off on a flight around the world with a legendary pilot named Wiley Post.  The plane crashed in Alaska.  Both men lost their lives.  The outpouring of national grief over Will Rogers’s passing is generally regarded to be the greatest such show of national mourning since the death of Lincoln some seventy years earlier.   Will has been honored with postage stamps and monuments, including a statue in the U.S. Capitol building.  And his wise, simple words are still with us. 

Will Rogers was America’s cowboy for an earlier generation.  Who would you nominate for the title today?  Do you have a favorite Will Rogers saying? 

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I was pleasantly surprised to find a stunning vintage calendar in my mailbox the other day from Harlequin.  Celebrating 60 years in the business, they compiled some of their covers in a glorious depiction of what those early days in publishing looked like.

Harlequin has made strides in the roles and relevance woman have played for the past 60 years.  The covers are a reflection of the times and they depict the marvelous advances women have made over the past six decades. 

My biggest “oh wow” moment came when I read the subtitles for some of these books.   In the above cover titled Anna, the subtitle reads: “She lived like a wicked little animal.”  Anneke De Lange 1952

Or “Men cast a net for her” in Virgin with Butterflies.  Tom Powers, 1949

And “The private affairs of not-so-private secretaries” in Nine to Five. Harvey Smith, 1952

Color me naïve, but I had no idea that these early books started out with such flair!  I also noticed that men wrote the majority of the books depicted the calendar!  That’s another “oh wow” moment. 

Fun facts:

The books sold for 35 to 50 cents. 

Harlequin sells over 4 books every second.

1 in every 6 books sold in North America is Harlequin/Silhouette

More than 1/3 of American females have read a Harlequin book at some time in their life.

Harlequin publishes in 107 countries and 29 languages

I believe great covers sell the book.  I’m sure back in those early days, these covers were controversial, the cutting edge in bookselling.  I love a good cover, while I’m not a fan of sexy “clench” covers, I do like to see a man and woman interacting on the book.  And for westerns, I love a “man only” cover. 

What kind of cover attracts you the most?  What stops you in your tracks when you’re passing by a shelf of books?  Do any of you have one of those “old” Harlequin books hanging around? 

In the spirit of the Christmas holiday, post a comment today and I’ll pick two readers to win a copy of Do Not Disturb Until Christmas (one of my favorite covers). 

Suite Reading and Happy Trails!

Click to purchase!

Take a stroll with me down memory lane and see how many of these things you remember.  It’s funny how we forget many trivial things that were, at one time, significant in our lives.  Some, I haven’t thought about in years, but once I was reminded, they put a smile on my face and the memories came flashing back.

 Special thanks to my friend Cindy M, for reminding me about things long forgotten!

 Who remembers the good old 45 RPM Spindles?  Gosh I haven’t thought of them in ages.  But they were necessary when we played our records, because only the 78’s were the right size.  The 45’s needed the spindle in order to fit our record players.  Gosh, I remember at my 7^th birthday party, we played and replayed my favorite record outside in our backyard, the 45 spindle working like magic as Frankie Avalon sang “Venus, oh Venus, goddess of love that you are”.   Well, we didn’t wear the record out, but we’d forgotten about it and the good old California sunshine melted that 45 record. It had curled up at the edges, never to be played again. ”Burning” a record has taken on a whole new meaning in this day and age!

And who could forget the Drive-In Movies?   It was the Saturday night hang-out for teens, back in the day, when it was fun and safe and thrilling to see a movie in your car!  For me, it was special, because it’s where my husband of 34 years told me he loved me for the first time!  I couldn’t tell you what movie was playing, but I will say that was one heck of sweet night for me.

Do you remember gum wrapper chains?  Again, I haven’t thought of them for a long time.  Chewing gum was BIG when I was a kid.  We had wrappers galore. I chewed Juicy Fruit, my favorite.  So my gum wrapper chains were always yellow.  We’d have contests to see who could make the longest chain. 

Ah, before Microwave Popcorn, the only way you could get popcorn in your home was to JIFFY POP it!  What an invention!  Our popcorn always burned because we had an electric oven and we never could get the temperature right.  I remember standing over the oven, holding onto that handle and shaking and shaking, hoping that we didn’t undercook or overcook the popcorn.  The bag would burst on its own, right down the middle.  If we were lucky, our popcorn wasn’t brown and burnt around the edges.  Most days, we weren’t so lucky!

McDonalds was a big thing in our day. It was one of the first fast food chains to come along.  Honestly, I don’t remember the 15 Cent hamburger.  But I sure do remember a time when there wasn’t a McDonalds.  Goodness, my mom cooked every meal and occasionally we would go out to dinner at a restaurant, but those times were few and far between.  I do remember when Jack in The Box opened up right across the street from my high school.  It was very innovative, to drive through and order your food.  My goodness … that was a treat!

And lastly, do you remember a time when we only had television stations from major networks, 2, 4, 5, 7,9, 11 and 13?     The TV stations would go to “bed” after a certain time.  Who remembers when that was, midnight? 1 or 2 PM?  I can’t recall now, but I remember those Test Patterns.  Yep, they’d come on and let all the insomniacs know there wasn’t going to be any television until the morning.I’ll be giving away a signed copy of Western Weddings today!  Please join in on the fun and let us glimpse into your past.  Do you have more to add to my stroll down memory lane?   What icons do you remember? 

Thanks for sharing the day with me today.

I’ll announce the winner later in the day! 

If you’d like to purchase one of my books, simply click on them!

 

 

 

 

It’s so great to be back on our regular blogging schedules here on P&P. I’ve really missed everyone! I hope you enjoyed the guests and maybe won some fabulous prizes.

Today, I’m going to talk about the importance of aprons. I’m not so old that I can’t remember when every wife, mother, and grandmother wore them. They were quite handy to have around. The main principle was to protect the dress underneath, especially when cooking. Aprons were a lot easier to wash then a dress. Back before automatic washers and dryers there was usually only one wash day set aside per week. Unlike today when we can pop something in the washer and turn the dial, washing clothes was a major chore.

But let’s look at some of the other uses that aprons filled.

They were handy for removing hot pans from the oven. Not exactly a good replacement for pot holders, aprons were readily at their fingertips and did the job.

Aprons were used for gathering eggs from the chicken coop. Or for carrying fussy chicks. And sometimes for taking half-hatched eggs to be finished in the warming oven. They could also shoo an angry rooster or a lazy dog off the porch in case of need.

When company came, those aprons made ideal hiding places for shy children. And those big old aprons were excellent for drying tears or cleaning dirty ears.

When the weather turned cold, aprons could be wrapped around grandma’s arms and used as a makeshift shawl. Or she could wipe sweat from a brow and carry kindling and wood chips into the kitchen for the stove.

While working in the garden, aprons were really useful to have. A woman could load her apron full of ripe vegetables. And she could use her apron to hold the hulls of peas she shelled. In the fall, aprons could carry apples that had fallen from the trees. Those nifty garments could polish those apples to a shine too.

Unexpected company coming to call? No problem. It was surprising how much furniture that apron could dust in a short time. Better and faster than a feather duster and she didn’t have to go looking for it!

Aprons were amazingly used in place of cell phones. When dinner was ready, grandma walked out onto the porch and waved her apron to call men in from the fields. It was a sign dinner was ready and they’d better get their rears to the house.

The big roomy pockets of aprons would hold plenty of clothes pins when grandma was hanging out wash on the line. Those pockets held a variety of other things the wearer wanted close at hand.

In the West, aprons were made from the all-important flour sack and they covered as much of the dress as possible. Cotton material was also used if it was available. The full aprons had a loop or opening that went over the head and held the bib in place. All aprons had fabric ties that went around the waist and tied in back. There were also half aprons that went only from the waist to the knees. Back in Victorian times and earlier, aprons were decorative and worn as actual clothing. In the 50′s and 60′s before they went out of style completely, aprons became merely a fashion statement when entertaining and were very frilly.

Whatever the use, aprons were around for a long time. It’s sad that no one wears them anymore. I have fond memories of my grandmother in her worn apron shelling peas on her front porch. And of my mother, standing at the stove preparing a meal. I loved those old aprons.

Do you have any memories of aprons that were worn by your grandmother, mother….or grandpa? I’d like to hear from you.