Write the World

Gene has very strong feelings about advertisements, he will never buy something because of advertising, but he will boycott because of it. Around St. Elizabeth there were very few ads to see because “there are only two reasons to go to through St. E, that’s where you’re going or you’re lost.” Even today the only two stores in town have no displays so they have no ads. However, Ginny greatly enjoyed Christmastime when the Sears Roebuck catalog came out. She and her siblings would make list after list filled with the latest fashions of Montgomery Ward and Spiegel that her mother use as inspiration for patterns.

© Kate Hodge used by permission

They can remember the Burma-Shave ads on the side of the highway further away from home and Gene recalls the ads about the traveling circus. He says that those always had a sort of rhyme to them that you could always remember. The one that most sticks out to him was on the way to Chicago where a little kid was “dropping her drawers” on a suntan lotion billboard. As much time as they spent on the road Gene was never fond of driving games, but Ginny played punch bug in the sixties. Recently they have started to see a lot of airplane ads in Arizona (where they spend the winter months) and Gene is very aware of ads on the back of tractor-trailers by nature of what he does.

© Chris Lott used by permission. No changes made. Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/fncll/4843998095

In their rooms growing up they never had many posters up. Ginny shared a room with three or four of her siblings and the crucifix her mother had them pray the sacred heart to every morning before school was about the only decoration. Gene’s home had a few religious pictures and his grandpa had President Kennedy and the Pope on the wall, but decorating your room was not something you did back then. Their kids had plenty enough posters when they came along to make up for it.

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The first movie Ginny remembers seeing in theaters was Maw and Paw Kettle in black and white on a family trip to Meta. Meta is a town smaller than St. Elizabeth about thirty miles away and the theater there did not last overly long. Ginny and Gene saw very few movies there, but they did go to a nearby drive-in, where Gene and “the boys thought it would be a good idea to put beer cans under the car.” They always parked near the bathrooms at the drive-in, though Gene said it did not matter where anyone parked because if you got too close to the screen the picture was too grainy and you had to crane your neck, but if you parked too far back the detail on screen was lost. In the end it almost did not matter where they ended up because they half the speakers did not work because people drove off with them in the windows and the only time they went together was on their first date.

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Growing up Ginny’s favorite movie was South Pacific and she loved a good romance, but she never saw enough movies for them to have much influence on her. One of Gene’s all time favorites is the Glenn Miller story. It had great music, a love story, success, tragedy, and the orchestra was always looking for the sound. He can still recognize a Glenn Miller song to this day. Unlike his wife, Gene is not a fan of romances; he prefers historical shows, ones that make a moral and ends happily with the hero staying a good guy all the way through.

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They were never banned from seeing a movie or show while they still lived with their parents. Gene’s dad never once told him he could not do anything, go anywhere, do whatever, that trust to this day means quite a bit to him. Ginny never went to see anything without her parents and that trend of trust and togetherness was passed on when they had children. They never forbade their children from things, though they did recommend their kids not see The Exorcist.

Gene hasn’t seen a movie in 20 years, he’s “gotta stand for something [so he] refuse[s] to buy the Hollywood product.” Ginny goes sporadically, but she has never bought popcorn from a theater, a trend started when she was young and money was an issue. Neither of them use online streaming services or rent movies today. They do not rent movies for themselves, but when I was young, they rented Anastasia enough that Ginny went out and bought it.  

Newspapers and magazines were (and sometimes still are) a large part of rural America’s connection to the rest of the world. When they were young, Gene and Ginny were far removed from the world. Ginny to point that her home did not have indoor plumbing. That gave her family a place to share the newspaper though, because they put it in the outhouse. The paper was delivered for both of them either daily or weekly depending on if it was the Jeff City paper or the county autogram. Ginny’s favorite section was sports and Gene’s editorials. Now he says, “old people first look at the obituaries and look at the ages.” A bit morbid but it is a way to keep track of people they may have known.

© Kate Hodge used by permission

Gene has quite a lot of feelings on the state of the news today. He says there is not a single publication today that does not have some sort of political slant and that people can have no expertise in the subject they write about. He was especially upset about this the day I interviewed him because he had heard in the span of three hours a reporter change what they said three times. Both of them believe that today’s papers are led by a different type of person than back when Walter Cronkite’s word was considered gospel truth. For them, there are too many political agendas between papers that come through the emphasis each puts on the same story. That does not stop them from keeping themselves informed on the news, just that they do not tend to like what they read.

 © Kate Hodge used by permission

Reading itself was a very different experience between them growing up. Ginny loved to read. She went through seven or eight books every two weeks from the book mobile and the Lending Library at school. She has read every Zane Grey book ever written, he wrote westerns with a bit of romance. In the early days of their marriage they “subscribed to every magazine they sold” but her favorites were Good Housekeeping and Readers’ Digest. Gene preferred Mad Magazine and believes that the only book he has ever read is The Count of Monte Cristo. Nobody in their town ever blacklisted anything, but Ginny thinks that was because nobody knew enough about books to tell if they shouldn’t be read.

© Meg Hodge

Many people today take television for granted. It operates as a connection to the rest of the world, an escape from life’s struggles, a babysitter if you are my grandmother in the ‘60s. However, Gene and Ginny both recall a time when TV was something not everyone in their small town had. In the beginning Ginny could only get two black and white channels at her house (more came later of course) but in her home they watched TV in the living room with four or five young kids on the floor and their father in charge. That meant they watched a fair few westerns: Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Lone Ranger. For Gene his “fondest memory was that my grandma and grandpa had one before we did. When I was little kid on Saturdays it was a treat to watch professional basketball.” Though they didn’t watch the same things, they both recall the very poor reception that covered the screen in snow.

© Bernie Bax used by permission

TV was a major change in society, but a relatively minor one in St. Elizabeth. Ginny’s house (and the surrounding land drawn above) implemented rules for before the television was turned on: dishes washed and dried, homework finished and put away, some TV time, bed was at 8:30. The biggest change was that she and her siblings didn’t play games outside anymore (though they didn’t play many to begin with and the boys still played cops and robbers in the house). Gene can’t recall much effect on his home because they “certainly didn’t live or die by it.” They watched very few cartoons and almost never in the daytime. It is a trend that held though great-grandma’s house because I have never seen the TV in her living room (pictured below) used as more than a decoration holder.

© Gina Hodge used by permission

The more widely accepted TV became, the more the world shaped around it. Corporations got into advertising, the most remembered by my grandparents being General Electric, 20 Mule Team Borax, and car companies on The Dinah Shore Chevy Show. The world turned to TV for the biggest news of the time. Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow were the faces people could trust when they tuned into the news. They watched the moon landing, the Selma to Montgomery marches, and the integration of Mississippi schools. The civil rights movement pulled their attention when the sets were turned on. The speech “I Have a Dream” delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. is the greatest speech ever written according to Gene and the TV ensured it reached him in Missouri all the way from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

© Meg Hodge

Gene and Ginny grew up in (and around) the same small town in rural Missouri. Born a week apart from each other in 1942 they went to school together from first grade through graduation. Though they did not start dating until after graduation, getting together to carpool home from an Air Force base and college respectively, they have been happily married for 55 years. Originally I sat down to interview my grandma, but as is her usual, she pulled her husband away from the living room and to the dining room table. Usually it’s to play games with us, but this time it was to tell a story.

© Bernie Bax used by permission

Growing up in what can still today be classified as a village gave a somewhat limited public access to music. Gene attempted to be in the school’s music program one year. That attempt consisted of being a tenor in chorus that moved his mouth but never made a sound. “When sound was made it was flat and I was dismissed.” There was a local orchestra that was rather popular playing not only at country dances, but also traveling all over Missouri. The church choir and that orchestra made up the entertainment in town since there was no radio in church or school. The jukebox at the community center had twenty records that as far as they know were never changed. By high school, there was one record player in school, that Gene might have been the only one to use.

© Loretta Kemna used by permission

In Gene’s childhood home (pictured above) the family had a victrola in the living room. His favorite record artists were Hank Williams and Billie Vaughn. While Gene had free reign on what he would listen to when, he “would never chose to be, I would never have played it loud if I thought it would irritate.” Being the oldest of six, I’m sure there was no shortage of sound in his home. Ginny’s home had no record player but, “many years ago, when I was a very small child, we had an old victrola, I think it was my mother’s mother’s, but something happened to it when I was young.” I have been informed that a victrola is the one you crank to get it to play music and that that victrola played about one Christmas record. Ginny has a fond memory of borrowing a friend’s record player for the weekend, “it played the small round ones, the forty-fives.” When she had a classroom of her own (she was a fifth grade teacher for some time) there was record player in her classroom.

© Kate Hodge used by permission

Gene’s experience with the radio was limited almost exclusively to car rides. Though he did enjoy The Lone Ranger and Shadow Knows (the equivalent of NCIS today, he says). In Ginny’s home it was a bit different. They had a battery operated radio outside that her mother had full control over. There was no electricity in their home until Ginny was in the fourth grade. She has carried the childhood trend of tuning into the Cardinals games into her life today. Both of them remember, not-so-fondly, the static that seemed to be a permanent part of their listening experience. When FM came out it was “an improvement, though we weren’t that attached to radio anyway” for Gene and a relief not to have to keep turning the radio just right for Ginny. By the time there was a radio in the house, Ginny would lay across the kitchen counter to enjoy it.