Paul and I saw a story on television the other night that featured a couple who was important in the creation of the American Basketball Association back in 1967. The league was an alternative to the National Basketball Association - marketing itself as a more fast paced scoring league. I was ten years old at the time and loved all things sports. I received one of the cool red, white and blue balls for my birthday.
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| I'm sure I would have been better at actual basketball had they utilized this ball |
The memory of that ball took me back to a memory of our basement in my childhood home in Atlantic. There was a tile floor in the room along with a small black and white television. I'd watch the games and dribble the heck out of that ball, around my legs like a little Harlem Globe Trotter.
The Bullock girls and friends spent a lot of time in our walk out basement of that ranch style home. Mom would insist! (smart lady). In addition to the TV room, there was the large "playroom" that had a concrete floor covered by a jute rug on one half. The piano was parked in one corner and there were raw wood shelves along one wall. In another corner there were floor to ceiling cupboards where our parent's "stuff" from their earlier lives were kept. The ceiling wasn't finished and there was a rack in the corner for luggage and a built in rack for dad's lingerie samples, though he also had a couple racks on wheels that were usually in the TV room, flowing with robes, nightgowns and slips of all sizes.
The shelves in the playroom were full of all sorts of things! Cindy had an aquarium for a while - with beautiful angel fish. My Cedar Rapids grandma gave us some of her costume jewelry - we had fun dressing up in that. It didn't take us long to dismantle Mom's beautiful doll cases, dolls and clothing. My Aunt Jeanie donated her record player to us - I remember firing up favorites like Peter Pan on it.
My sister Cindy was very creative and was fun to play with (though bossy). She could direct several of us in building a wood block village, utilizing plastic farm animals for "people", naming every one. We also made boxes into houses using leftover wallpaper samples for decorating for Barbie. The Reinertsons from next door were frequent visitors to our basement building experiences, stopping only for meals.
One of my earliest basement memories is watching Roy Rogers on TV and riding the hell out of my rocking horse. That was some good exercise - I bet it wore me out. I always did love horses after that.
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| I wish I had this horse back! |
And slumber parties! The basement was the scene of the crime for each of those. The food would get laid out on the laundry room table. The laundry room was another huge room with laundry appliances including a giant machine called an iron rite, its own walk out door, a phone with an extra long cord, a row of hooks for coats and huge freezer.
During slumber parties we put the "sleeping bags" in the playroom, which was very dark as there were only a couple tiny windows up high. There was no insulation between there an my folks' room so...there was a lot of stamping on the floor when it got late and we were loud - carrying on with "Mary Worth" and lifting people, and so on.
One summer, Susi used the basement as her room when she came home from college in Colorado. The TV room had lots of windows and a door, and she dreamed a bad guy was trying to get her - causing her to scream. That brought Dad running, but he slipped on the stairs bruising his heels as he scrambled going down (it's a funny picture to the Bullock girls, Dad in his jammies bumping down on his heels). A quick check around found no intruder, but by then whole house was awake and Susi will never live it down.
Does any of this explain my dislike of basements? Naw. I'm still not sure where it came from. I'm just weird. Yeah, that's it.
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