Leslie Early Childhood

Leslie Childhood

(These and other stories in the blog are edited for grammar and clarity by Marcene Fielding Taylor, daughter. Comments are in italics.)

My New Hat

Leslie said “I don’t remember much about my life until the age of six or seven.

 I started school at Jameston at the age of seven.  This stands out, not because of any particular love at that time for schooling, but because one day I realized I had lost my new hat. I finally found it on Versal Session's head.  I was a timid one and waited most of the day before I had the courage to let him know the hat he was wearing was mine.” 

Eating and Health

“My folks told me I was a sickly child.  I was bad enough that they were concerned that I might not survive. I was stiff as a board when I was seven years old and I think I might have had rickets or rheumatic fever or something that wasn’t diagnosed then. I guess I just outgrew it, because it went away.

“Later, I had stomach problems that would come in periods.  I'd be all right for quite a while, then under stress, or when I would eat something that disagreed with me, my stomach would quit working. As a result, I’d get deathly sick.  After a sick period, I’d be all right.  I even remember being taken home from school one day.  I’d be out a day or two then I’d come back again.  That gradually disappeared with time.

“It may have been something to do with our diet.  Mother was a prime cook for her day, but the traditional menu for most every one was fried potatoes, meat, bread or biscuits and gravy.  We had vegetables and fruit but only in the summer.  When Sophie (Leslie’s Stepmother,) came, she fixed our first green salad.  She could hardly get us to eat it then, it was so strange. But I learned to enjoy it as time went by.”

“When I was growing up we started to eat bread crumbled up in milk.  I liked the stuff from the first.”  (Leslie continued to like it the rest of his life.  He was famous for it, because no matter where he was, after he had eaten most meals, including dessert, he would pour himself a glass of milk, crumble up a slice of bread in it and eat it.)   

Childhood Games

“My bother Harold and I were close friends and playmates as boys because we were only a year apart.  Most of the things we played with were of our own creation or imagination. One of our favorite toys was a felloe or iron wheel from a wooden wagon wheel to which the spokes had been attached. It was about six feet in diameter.  We would push them around and balance them with a stick.  That was quite a popular thing for the young people in that day.

(Playing games and ceremonies with hoops had a long tradition, but were especially popular during the Victorian period and after the turn of the century.  Not all the hoops were recycled metal, some were formed of bamboo wood and were sold in stores.)

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I remember pushing the hoop in the dust and dirt while barefoot on the unimproved county road of what is now the Jameston-Taylor highway or East 1300 North. The road ran beside all of my homes growing up. We never wore shoes in the summer, only for special occasions or Sundays while attending church.  The main county roads were graveled in 1919, including the Jameston-Taylor road.”