Lois and Sharon

From Marlene's house coming up the road, you get next to the Krugers, pretty white boarded
house. They were an elderly couple, originally from Russia, who we saw at church, but had very
little to do with. 

At 213 11^th Street were the Werners. The Werners were very poor, we thought. They had no grass outside their house – just dirt. And the paint was pealing off the house. The driveway down to the side of their house was rough and there was junk lying around all over the place. Our mother told us we must never go into their yard, or their house. But she didn't say they couldn't come to our house
and yard.

(Just checked on Ancestry. Their father, John, worked at a gas station. Their mother was called Annie. They had at least five children still at home in 1950. In 1940 he made $695 a year.)

Lois was a year older than Judy, but they got along well together. She was a pretty girl, slim and athletic, and very bright. She was definitely the boss in any game we played together. I was pleased to see somebody being more important than Judy. And when Sharon was around, I wasn't at the end
of the power chain – she was.

(In 1950, according to the Bismarck Tribune, Lois was featured in a band concert at St. Mary's Grade School – top billing. I had no idea she was musical or what instrument she played. I have a feeling Judy and I played a piano duet - The Little Donkey - in that concert but we aren't listed, which might have been because she shouted at me because I went too fast and we had to stop and start over again. Just maybe she was too slow.)

Sharon was my age, but I can't remember her being in my class at school, so maybe she was a
year behind. She was overweight and whiny and a real pain. Usually Lois and Judy would go off someplace together, leaving me and Sharon to entertain ourselves. I suppose it meant I was the boss at those times, but I didn't like that either. She didn't want to do the same things I did. Sharon
was teased about her weight at school – called a Fatty. I was very skinny, and may well have been called that, but it wasn't nearly as much of stigma.

When the weather was bad, which was very seldom in our hot summers, we would all go down
into our basement to play. Lois decided we should form a club, and the coal room in our basement would be the clubhouse. There was no longer any coal there, as the furnace had been converted to natural gas before we moved in. But the hatch which was raised for the coal to be dumped down into the room was still there. There was a window in the room too, so it wasn't too dark and dreary, but best of all, it seemed a long way from our mother's hearing, so we felt we could get away with just about anything.

We had to have a name and between us we came up with Wee Willing Workers – the WWW club.
We made a sign and put it on the door. We dragged a table and some chairs into our den, and set down to make out our plans of how the club would run.

If you thought from our name that we were determined to do good in the world – or at least in the street, you are very wrong. Our plans were anything but kind, and some of them, I am ashamed to say, were very unkind.

The main focus of our action was the man who lived next door at 219. He was about middle age, a slight shy man, who didn't work. His mother lived there too, and was disabled sufficiently for it to be necessary for him to stay home and look after her. We never saw her outside, but would catch a
glimpse through the dining room window, and somehow her toilet functions were of great interest to us. So I am thinking she must have had a commode. We had no sympathy for her or for her son. We just thought they were different, and odd, and therefore, something to be worried about.

(According to Ancestry, his mother Eva, aged 74 by then,  was born in Hungary, and they lived on private means. Martin was 32, and ten years earlier had worked as a salesman in a food shop.)

Martin loved his garden. He spent hours picking all the weeds and crabgrass out of his front lawn. His side yard, nearest to us, had a row of lilac trees, which he kept in perfect shape – not allowing the flowers to be picked, as this would spoil the shape. This was another reason we had a grudge against him. Our mother had been having a bridge party, and had asked him for a bouquet, and he refused her. He had whatever we did to him, coming to him, big time.

So we laid our plans for how we could do bad things to Martin. His Achilles heel had to be his garden. Somehow we had to spoil it for him.

The sides of his garden didn't have grass or paths – they had moss. But he was keen to tell us (through my father, as we never spoke to him) that the moss was very special, and native to California. It needed careful tending. What a nut, we thought. Who would choose moss over grass?

So Lois, in her role as leader had a plan. We would sow his garden with dandelions. We knew
that when dandelions seeded they made a perfectly round and very attractive head, which if carefully picked, could be preserved and kept for the best time and place for planting. So we went around our
garden, and the boulevards of our neighbours (not Martin as his grass had no dandelions in it). And we each had a plastic bag with dozens of full dandelion seed heads.

Then we had to figure out where to sow them. We couldn't just go into his garden. He would see us and what we were doing. But we had a secret place where nobody could see us, and from there we could get into the back of Martin's garden, and with cunning and guile we could take a stick and make ridges in his moss, and put collections of dandelion seeds into the grooves. We thought it was such a clever plan. And he wouldn't have a clue that it was us who did it. He would just think that the
seeds had blown in from somewhere else in the neighborhood.

With our full bags and sticks ready, we chose one afternoon when we had seen him in the house. We went outside telling our mother that we were going to play ball in back piece. She was okay with that.

We climbed over the fence from our bit of land, into the center square. Then one by one we sneaked over Martin's bit of the fence. Lois and Judy went first, and I had just got over when we heard a cry. Sharon had fallen and caught her dress on one of the fence boards. Her cries were enough to wake the dead, and certainly had given away our cover. So the rest of us high tailed it out of his garden, back into neutral, and hardly caring that Sharon was bleeding and upset, we reclimbed back onto our patch, and then back to our house, ditching the dandelion bags in the garden waste barrel as we neared the house. Our mother had heard the noise, and had come outside to investigate.

“Oh, Sharon,” she cried. “What happened?” and she took her inside to wash the wound, and put on a band aid.

“Don't you dare tell,” said Lois through her teeth.

“I fell over and hurt myself,” she said, lacking the imagination to go beyond the obvious.

But by then our plan was foiled, and we decided that our next plan would have to be one where Sharon couldn't possibly mess it up.