Oh, the “B” Street memories…

Ashland is so gentrified now that it loses the flavor of where we lived.

We were children when we married and our first apartment was, to me, like playing house. We couldn’t believe our luck in finding the second-floor apartment so cheap -$50/mo. Maybe it was furnished even. I know it was ready when we were married on December 20. (In those days there was no moving in together before marriage.)

We brought home a small tree to decorate.  After it was totally decorated with our sparse ornaments my darling (grr) man insisted that the tree needed to have snow. I was horrified that he sprayed all the small ornaments. I kept that one small ornament with snow on it for at least 25 years before it ended up in tiny blue pieces.

We arrived home from our honeymoon on Christmas Day. But that’s another story!

It’s hard to consider now, when all of you so carefully consider your relationships and marriage seems to be a terminal commitment, but for us it was a giant lark. Oh, I don’t mean that we weren’t in love but it was probably teenage angst as much is anything. and I couldn’t help thinking that  we were pulling one over on our parents to actually get permission. Me, a fundamentalist protestant marrying at Catholic? In those days it wasn’t an easy proposition.

But let’s stick with the fun part.

Your Dad remembers the last name of the young couple who shared the second floor. They seemed very strange to us but were probably quite worldly in comparison. I know they were really, really blonde which wasn’t so common in those days. They had us over to play cards. Real adulting!

Grandma Weinhold’s bread recipe. She was adamant about stirring the yeast into the warm potato water with a fork.

My friends thought my marriage was lark, too. I invited schoolmates to visit the apartment when I was making bread. We did a lot of laughing as the dough was tossed around. My husband‘s grandmother had taught me and I was quite happy to show off a bit. And I was proud of my cinnamon rolls. We frosted and ate them all in a sitting. Never mind dinner when you can have hot cinnamon rolls.

Our back stairs – through a small field – and to town

My husband had gone to a neighboring city to visit his uncle who sent him home with a goose. I was quite proud of that goose and invited my father to join us for Sunday dinner.

The disaster started when I couldn’t find the wall clock that hung in the kitchen. After a mad search we found it behind the stove. Evidently the pilot light in the oven at had gone out without my realizing it and quite a lot of gas gathered by the time I lit it. The clock fell behind the stove with the impact of the boom.

That was just the beginning. To make a long story short – the goose was so tough after hours of roasting that the fork bounced off of it when we tried to carve it. We ended up eating waffles for dinner.

Those were happy days. My husband could walk the block to the basketball courts and I could walk a block to the grocery store. We were typical newlyweds, wrapped up in our own lives and happy to share our happiness with friends and family. We were still students on scholarship at the local university. All our extra money came from pot bowling.*

Very quickly real life took over and my husband got a real job. Goodbye, Ashland. Goodbye, apartment! Hello marriage!

xxoo

Pot Bowling:

Bowling for money has been associated with the sport throughout its entire history. Bowling pot games is the most common form of gambling through the years.

Pot games involve many players, three or more, and can account for payouts to multiple players should there be enough players participating and sufficient amounts of money in each pot to pay multiple spots.

Each players puts up a money stake to compete in a given game. The stake is predetermined by the players and can vary in amounts. Depending on the number of players in a given game and the amount of the stake per game per player, the pot of money can vary as will the 1st place payoff.