Fire and Ice (Cream Trucks)
Chris from the blog, At Home At Last, recently wrote about her first memory. I thought it was an interesting thing to blog about, so I thought I would write about mine here.
Until I was around the age of three, I lived with my family in a house in the town of Marion, Ohio. I have two main memories from that long ago time in my life.
The first memory was of a fire that we had there. My mom was cooking something on the stove in the kitchen in a big iron skillet.
I don't remember what she was making, but she must have been frying something in the skillet in oil. The oil got too hot and caught on fire. (With three children all under the age of five at the time, I imagine she had gotten distracted by one of us which kept her away from the stove too long.)
I was in the living room and heard my mother let out a sort of half scream, half yelp kind of noise in the kitchen. I wandered in there to see what was going on. My brother and sister showed up there, from wherever they were, at about the same time. Mom hustled us three kids to the door as fast as she could telling us to go outside in the yard and not come back in the house. All the while she was trying to get us outside, she was yelling and calling out to my Dad about the fire. Dad was upstairs and unaware of what was going on. I remember seeing just my Dad's legs coming down the stairs as Mom ushered us out the back door to the yard.
We three kids huddled outside wondering what was going to happen next. In just a few seconds, Dad came hurtling through the back door holding the iron skillet by the handle with the fire still a-blazing in it. He ran down the back steps and quickly flipped the skillet, fire and all, upside down into the grass in the yard. This immediately smothered the fire since it cut off the oxygen supply to it. He told us everything was going to be OK, but that we should not touch the pan because it was very hot.
This would have happened around 1961 or 1962, so that was a little early for my Dad to have seen this video.
He went back in to help my Mom clean up the grease spatters and to try to air the smoke out of the kitchen. Luckily, no one was injured and the kitchen suffered no permanent damage.
I can remember a few days later, though, when some kids from around the neighborhood were over to visit. My older brother and sister (with me tagging along, of course) immediately took our visitors out to the back yard to show them the circle of blackened, burned grass where the skillet had been flipped to put out the fire. It was quite an impressive thing to see for the under eight crowd at the time.
The other main memory I have from living at that house was a much happier one. It was watching and listening for the ice cream truck to come down our street. Mom would give us money to buy a cold treat from the big white truck that drove slowly up and down the streets of our neighborhood broadcasting a tinkly musical jingle in the summertime. It looked a lot like this.
We always bought the orange push-ups on a stick. They were actually made of orange sherbet, I believe, rather than ice cream, but that was the only thing I remember us ever buying from the ice cream man.
You know I don't like to miss an opportunity to post music on my blog so here is one for the rocker fans reading this. This music is a little more wild than what the ice cream truck man played when he came tinkling past our house all those years ago.
Here's Van Halen with a slightly different take on the Ice Cream Man to get you moving today.
WAAAAAAA!! YEOOOOOOOW!
How about you? What is your earliest memory?
* * * * *
Until I was around the age of three, I lived with my family in a house in the town of Marion, Ohio. I have two main memories from that long ago time in my life.
The first memory was of a fire that we had there. My mom was cooking something on the stove in the kitchen in a big iron skillet.
I don't remember what she was making, but she must have been frying something in the skillet in oil. The oil got too hot and caught on fire. (With three children all under the age of five at the time, I imagine she had gotten distracted by one of us which kept her away from the stove too long.)
I was in the living room and heard my mother let out a sort of half scream, half yelp kind of noise in the kitchen. I wandered in there to see what was going on. My brother and sister showed up there, from wherever they were, at about the same time. Mom hustled us three kids to the door as fast as she could telling us to go outside in the yard and not come back in the house. All the while she was trying to get us outside, she was yelling and calling out to my Dad about the fire. Dad was upstairs and unaware of what was going on. I remember seeing just my Dad's legs coming down the stairs as Mom ushered us out the back door to the yard.
We three kids huddled outside wondering what was going to happen next. In just a few seconds, Dad came hurtling through the back door holding the iron skillet by the handle with the fire still a-blazing in it. He ran down the back steps and quickly flipped the skillet, fire and all, upside down into the grass in the yard. This immediately smothered the fire since it cut off the oxygen supply to it. He told us everything was going to be OK, but that we should not touch the pan because it was very hot.
This would have happened around 1961 or 1962, so that was a little early for my Dad to have seen this video.
He went back in to help my Mom clean up the grease spatters and to try to air the smoke out of the kitchen. Luckily, no one was injured and the kitchen suffered no permanent damage.
I can remember a few days later, though, when some kids from around the neighborhood were over to visit. My older brother and sister (with me tagging along, of course) immediately took our visitors out to the back yard to show them the circle of blackened, burned grass where the skillet had been flipped to put out the fire. It was quite an impressive thing to see for the under eight crowd at the time.
* * * * * *
The other main memory I have from living at that house was a much happier one. It was watching and listening for the ice cream truck to come down our street. Mom would give us money to buy a cold treat from the big white truck that drove slowly up and down the streets of our neighborhood broadcasting a tinkly musical jingle in the summertime. It looked a lot like this.
We always bought the orange push-ups on a stick. They were actually made of orange sherbet, I believe, rather than ice cream, but that was the only thing I remember us ever buying from the ice cream man.
You know I don't like to miss an opportunity to post music on my blog so here is one for the rocker fans reading this. This music is a little more wild than what the ice cream truck man played when he came tinkling past our house all those years ago.
Here's Van Halen with a slightly different take on the Ice Cream Man to get you moving today.
WAAAAAAA!! YEOOOOOOOW!
How about you? What is your earliest memory?
