When I was around six or seven my dad had a playhouse built for me. I remember walking out to the back yard to find Bob Sinclair, dad’s handyman, cutting big sheets of plywood into interesting shapes. One particular piece clearly had the doorway cut out and I could tell, even with it laying flat on the ground that it wouldn’t accommodate my height. He stood it up and I tried it out. Sure enough, I was too tall to walk through it and he had to re-cut the opening.
In the days that followed I watched with excitement at the building of the little gingerbread house. It was shaped in a Dutch style with slanted sides and roof with windows on each side and window boxes for flowers. A scalloped wood border trimmed the front of the roof. Bob painted it blue with white trim on the outside and white on the interior. It had a blue linoleum floor and an electric light bulb on the ceiling. You can imagine my joy and elation because this was a dream come true. My favorite pastime was playing house and the thought of a real little house of my own was unbelievable. One of my favorite things to do was assemble a playhouse behind a big chair in the living room. I’d gather my dolls, pillows to use for their beds, little cups and dishes and crackers for us all to eat.
The finished playhouse was the most marvelous thing I had ever seen and I hurried to bring out my doll bed, toy dishes and table and chairs to fill it up. I recall one sunny afternoon deciding to make a real pie in a small aluminum baking pan. It was about six inches across, one in a set of many pots and pans I had to play with. I lined the bottom with fine moistened sand from the driveway. Then I cut several dandelions from the yard, cut the tops off and placed them top down on my "crust". Next I sprinkled a little more sand on top to finish it off and slipped it into the small toy oven inside the house. When it had "baked" and cooled, I cut myself a perfect little piece and put it on a tiny plate. With that I was ready to sample my culinary handiwork. With my tiny toy fork I took a nice big bite. Believe it or not, in my fantasy world I really expected to eat it! To my surprise it didn’t taste like pie at all and my face distorted as I hurriedly spit it out.
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Johnny, I remember many happy hours we spent playing in your playhouse. It was many things to us, not just a house. We would play house, of course, and I was always the "daddy", but it was so much more!
On any given day, the playhouse could be a doll hospital where we tended our sickly dolls, nursing them back to health; or it was an airport terminal where we were the counter personnel in their handsome uniforms announcing incoming and outgoing flights.
The airport incarnation was directly influenced by your house being situated across the 2-lane road from the airport terminal. This was the 1950s, mind you, and there were no electronic boards with flight information so everything was verbally announced, sounding within and without the terminal building.
I remember Ma Moore, your live-in nanny/housekeeper, took us up to the airport terminal where we and helped ourselves to the counter-top brochures that contained the flight information for each airline that flew from our airport. In your little house, we would sit at our respective "desks" with our play stethoscopes plugged into our ears and make the announcements into the "bell" of the stethoscopes.
Within our heads, it sounded just like the loudspeaker announcements. Anyone looking in on us would have thought we were crazy, talking into toy stethoscopes and not even interacting. But we weren't crazy, we were just kids, playing at what our real world contained from our child's perspective.
Funny how different our childhood was from the children of today. Our mothers worked outside the home like so many do today but that is about the only similarity. But this is a muse that is suitable for a later posting. Thank you for the memories!
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