All You Ever Wanted to Know
(And Didn't Want to Know)    

      ABOUT ME

Overview: Part 1
Unfortunately most of the pictures and links don't work anymore because of the various hosts I used left the Internet.

Here you will find out what it was like to grow up in the 50's from someone who lived through that time.  I even survived the 60's with all the drugs and sex going on around me. I'll tell you things about my family, including my paternal grandmother's memories of bears in this area when she grew up.

  I even include a month in my life when I was 10 as written in my diary. Also there are links to explain more fully places I mention. Hope this page isn't too boring for you.

The pictures that have blue borders around them used to take you to links or larger views, but few of them work anymore due to hosting services shutting down )  but some still work so you're welcome to try them.

I have so many pictures in here it takes a little while to load.  I compressed some of them so it won't take as long as it used to and I shrank a bunch of other ones. Maybe you will find enough to read as it is loading. I hate for you to have to turn off the graphics, because I think I have some cool pictures to share. Old ones, new ones, cute and ugly pictures.

I will start with my mom.  Here is a picture of her and yours truly.

That's my dad holding a couple grandchildren, a frequent sight.    -->    My father was born on a farm in Northwestern Ohio in 1916. When he was 4 years old they moved to another farm, very near where I live now. He used to tell me the story of the move and how he remembered sitting at the back of the old wagon with his legs dangling over the edge and wondering what would happen to him if he fell out.

My father had 11 siblings, but two died young. He had a hard life but seemed to have developed his sense of humor at an early age. Maybe that helped him get through the difficulties he had. His family home had a furnace, but they weren't allowed to use it. His father was strict and austere. He didn't believe it was necessary. They heated the house with just the wood burning kitchen stove and a heater in another room that they burned corncobs in for fuel. The upstairs, where my dad and his brothers slept was either freezing in the winter or roasting in the summer. The bathroom consisted of a tub and a sink. The outhouse in the back yard was a "two holer" which I have scary memories of.   I was only about 3 years old and barely able to climb up onto the platform where the seat was. I was scared I would fall in, but more than that, I was afraid someone else would come in and sit beside me. At that young age I found that more frightening.

My father was the student council president his senior year of high school.  Here's a
picture from his yearbook.  He was the first male in his family to complete high school.

If you want to read more about my dad as a youth, go to my page called  More about my father.  It has more pictures of him in his high school and a picture of a classroom full of 1930's kids.

There you will find stories of his childhood and early adulthood. You can come back here after you read that, or just keep going on here.

Now I will briefly mention my siblings and give you one picture of my them and myself. I guess I am transitioning you from my dad because the first picture I choose was one where I am sharing my dad's lap   with my brother Dick. There is more about my siblings towards the bottom of this page. Mary is on the left and John on the right. The one with my dad was taken when I was just under two. We didn't have our TV set yet, it would go next to that bedroom door you can see behind us. We always put our TV there. When I was 12 I got to move into that bedroom since my older sister moved away to college. With the TV next to the wall it got pretty noisy at times.

What was it like to grow up in the fifties in the "good ole USA?"

How about being a teenager during the "hippie" era?
Here I will talk about those strange and wonderful years. I'll also tell you some history of my little home town including the American Indians that used to live here, the swamp that used to cover this part of Ohio, and a little about my great grandmother.

Now if that doesn't sound exciting, I don't know what does!

The basics:

First I will introduce myself. My name is Maggie, and I am old enough to remember both Kennedy's being shot. I was in grade school when John Glenn went into orbit. No, I wasn't around during WW2, the big one as Archie Bunker would call it.

Yes, I remember when you could get a candy bar for a nickel. I always remember having a TV. I watched Captain Kangaroo (remember Tom Terrific? What was his Wonder Dog's name? I remember it.) every morning before school. I was madly in love with Roy Rodgers even tho I was a little girl. Howdy Doody, Sky King (remember Penny?) and Ed Sullivan were my favorite shows. Have you figured it out yet? (Tom Terrific's Wonder Dog's name? Email me and ask and I'll tell ya.) Of course I had a favorite Beatle, Paul, yet I also had a "thing" for Herman of Herman's Hermits otherwise known as Peter Noone.

I was busy working at a huge amusement park in Northern Ohio, here's a link to my page with pictures of co workers and my memories of it and then here is  (another link to Cedar Point) the summer of Woodstock and the walk on the moon. I was earning my next semester's tuition at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. (Didn't finish it, sometimes regret it, sometimes I am glad!)

Working at an amusement park is an interesting way to earn some money. You meet a lot of people, and make a lot of friends. There was a special dormitory for us to stay in and they had a special after hours clubhouse with games and free soda pops and snacks. The week before I started there had been a tornado that had killed people. It was kept quiet, but it happened.

Boy, that was some era! I was born in conservative Northwest Ohio . Having grown up Catholic, gone to the Catholic school (when nuns still wore their forbidding habits) and then to be thrown into the hippie world was down right...um what can I say, LIBERATING!

Well if you are still trying to figure out the year I started breathing on this earth (this time around anyway) just figure out what would be the second best year to be born in a century. I mean as far as being able to keep track of your age.

I'm a Scorpio too, if that helps age me. (meaning, if its late October, then I just added another ring in my trunk)

Want to hear about the best tree I ever climbed?
It was a Weeping Willow tree in my neighbor's back yard.

(The neighbors that sold the monuments) The only hard part was first getting into it. Once you got up into the split about 3 ft off the ground all you had to do was duck down under a limb to your left, cross over under and around and you found yourself at the beginning of a ladder kind of arrangement. After climbing to about 20 ft. off the ground you could either stop there and sit with your legs dangling towards our yard or take the challenge and go onward. The challenge was crossing from one limb that stretched from the right side of the tree all the way over to where you sat hanging onto the branch above it. You had to sit on the lower one that came from the other side and scoot across thru all the weeping willow leaves as they brushed your face from the branch above you that you held onto as you scooted. Then about half way across you stopped and just sat and secretly spied on the world below. I would hide from my brothers hidden from all by the many willow leaves surrounding me. Ah, what a heaven and a haven both!

Now for some real excitement.

Here is a month of diary entries from when I was 10. Don't get too excited
(as if you were) because this is not very thrilling. Mostly its about 
my brother picking on me, poor wittle me! My Diary When I Was 10  

I was about 5 and had never seen an earthquake in my life.
I dreamed that I was walking on the sidewalk towards my neighbors house. All of a sudden, the ground started to shake and then started heaving and rolling under my feet. I could hardly stand up. Then to my horror the ground started splitting open with huge cracks. I was scared I would fall into one. I kept jumping from one area to another frantically trying to find a safe spot. I don't remember anything else.

Where I was born.
I was born in Northwestern Ohio, many years after the Great Black Swamp was drained. (Our house had quicksand under it, discovered when they built our basement.) In the olden days, it was difficult to travel thru this area with the swamp and heavy woods so the river was used as a transportation method. My father remembered swimming in the river as a child with some of the few remaining Indians in the area.

His mother, my grandma, told me about her mom chasing black bears off her porch with her broom when grandma was a little girl. She and her future husband were both born on their farms near Ottawa, Ohio.                                                                    

 I have several pages devoted to the history of my family. Although there aren't a lot of pictures of my ancestors I do have access to a book that two of my distant relatives wrote about our family genealogy.  So I do have lots of information and names throughout the generations. If you are interested you can go to My father's great grandparents and other ancestors  There is a really interesting picture there of Anna standing with some of her grown children on the old farm. Since her husband, Frank, died young, you can see the hard life she lived, in her face. One of her married daughters is in the picture with her children and they all look hardened.  Also there is a link you can click to go to another page I made about the way their ancestors lived in Germany in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Here's a series of my extended family photos, professionally taken. I am putting just one picture on a page at a time for this series because they are fairly large. You will have the opportunity to go to a huge version of each picture. Some of these are very old and I just recently was able to scan them.

My Mother's parents

My mother's father, whom we called Pappy. His name was Fred.

My mother's mother, whom we called by her first name, Edie.