Joan’s Memories of Growing Up in Town

**Joan Marie Pick**

House in Town:
407 E 5th St
Remsen, IA 51050
October 1946 to April 1960

My first memory from childhood is learning how to tie my shoes. I don’t remember who taught me but I do remember that I was four years old. Mom and Dad told me what a good job I did. I had brown and white saddle shoes that I really liked.

When I was four, maybe five years old, I wanted to iron my doll’s little dress. I ended up burning my whole arm. It hurt for days and days. Mom and Dad took care of my burn. I still have a scar today but it is a lot smaller now.

Little Joanie

at age 5 1/2
(about the same age as iron incident)

On our birthday we were treated with pop, whatever kind we wanted. My favorite was orange. Mary liked crème soda and David liked orange too. Someone else would choose root beer. We had a lot of pop between June 3 and July 9! (side note: oldest three Pick kids have 6/3, 7/3, and 7/9 birthdays)

We never bought our birthday cakes; Mom made them for us. Mom would make lamb cakes for Easter, but one year Mary got one for her birthday! I remember a cake with a big candle for Connie’s 1st birthday. We each got one thing for Christmas but what we got was very nice. Very good quality.

Lamb cake for Mary’s birthday, 1952.

Made by her mom, Marvel Pick.

There were these pastries that we liked from Bob’s Market and David told me to ask for “cow pies” when I was sent to buy some. Whoever waited on me would laugh. But that is what they looked like!

Mom made desserts for Dad as often as she could. He had a dessert when he came home at noon and at suppertime. The only time he didn’t have dessert was for breakfast. Mom always had a dessert of some kind on hand - and always served with ice cream. That’s about all Dad really liked. He would eat everything else because he wanted to make sure we ate everything too, otherwise, we probably would’ve eaten only desserts too. He always told Mom he couldn’t eat stuff like green peppers but she’d put it in her dishes any way because she didn’t believe him. Same with onions. I think they bothered Dad’s stomach.

It was so nice when we were little because all we had to do was go to the grocery store – charge it, dime-store – charge it, Schaaf’s – charge it! Charging was how it was done back then.

The Fuller Brush man came by a lot. And the Watkins lady… that’s who we bought the box cake mixes from, and how Mom, Mary, and I started making box cakes. I was about seven years old when I started making cakes.

We took our bikes to get groceries. I didn’t do it very often. One time I fell and the eggs broke and I cried. We had a lot of fun in town. I didn’t like school but I loved being at home with my brothers and sisters. I hardly ever looked at my school books, but I loved to read. I liked to go into the closet and be by myself and just daydream.

I think I was in 5th grade when the girls at St. Mary’s started to wear uniforms to school. We liked them. Mom made sure we had nice clothes. There weren’t many of them but they were well made and she got them from good stores and they would last. We shopped at Tot’s and Teens in Le Mars, and Mom ordered clothes from one of the traveling salesmen - Margaret Kurtenacker from Alton.

Florence Offerman, the beautician, gave us permanents with a machine that we got hooked up to. When Bernice and LeRoy Treinen built their house in our neighborhood (the house north of St. Mary’s High School), Bernice put in a beauty shop. That’s when we started going to her. She didn’t have a machine like Florence. We had really curly perms that were tight to our heads.

Beauty time!

Jeanette Homan & girls on the farm doing their hair.

Mary Steichen, our housekeeper, was such a wonderful person. We just loved her and she loved us like her own kids. She was a good cook too. She talked about us even when she was failing with Alzheimer's.

The only hill in town was on our street. We roller-skated down it and in the winter we’d take our sleds down that hill. It was so much fun. Other kids in town did it too.

We played in the “hills” – (side note: a sunken grassy and wooded area that was east of George’s house and is now Danny and Clarice Groff’s backyard). The ‘meanies’ (older neighbor boys who were bullies) harassed us when we played there. One time David and I were in the hills and got a fire going. We heated up a can of beans without it being opened and it exploded. We made tunnels in the bushes so we could walk through. We really had a lot of fun there. Another neighbor, Bobby Parker, didn’t play in the hills but he stole Barbara’s report card and hit her on the head with a (play) sand shovel.

We formed clubs with some of the neighbors and friends and had meetings in the basements. There was a president and secretary. One time the boys tied up Patrick Johnson. I said to them, “Don’t do that!” I was always the ‘conscience’ in the group. “You shouldn’t do that. You shouldn't do that. That’s not nice.” David made the clubhouses. He built them in the backyard and then he tore them down a day or two later. He did a lot of building. Connie Phillips, Anne Zimmerman, Joan Ritz, Mary, Barbara, and I were some of the girls in one of the clubs.

We had a lot of fun because neighbors would come to our house to play. David and the boys had a lot of toys. Mrs. Hussey (neighbor lady) was so nice. David shot the granddaughter, Carol Hussey (from Minnesota) with a BB gun. But that was probably just practice!

Jeannette Homan’s grandparents (Peter Homan, Sr.) lived on the street north of our backyard in Remsen. She played with us when she visited them. She hit me on the head with a bat once. I don’t know why but she did it purposely. She was a good friend of mine later.

We made grass houses on the vacant lots by raking the cut grass into outlines to make floor plans. David and Richard made different things. They made a house for us in the backyard, then took it apart and made it into a fort. We had a lot of vacant lots to play on then. We had a lot of fun with just nothing.

The circus was so much fun. A lion got out and we thought it was walking in front of our basement window. David would say, “Oh, there it goes!” That’s when we were pretty young. Afterward, I kept dreaming about a lion chasing me. I still had dreams about that lion after we moved to the farm. It was chasing me through the alleyway of the corn crib.

On one of the dentist’s appointments with Dr. Joynt in LeMars (I had braces on my teeth), I got lost. Someone said “You can walk back” from where ever I was at the time. I didn’t know where I was and I started crying. LeMars was too much for me at that age. I was pretty shy.

During the Asian Flu epidemic of 1957, I was in fifth grade. Dad moved all of our beds into the living room and set them up like a hospital ward with Mom doing the nursing. I felt like I was going to die. People died from it in Remsen. Mom and Dad gave us Dr. Pepper when we had the flu. David and Richard could never drink Dr. Pepper again after that. We had the measles together and we had the mumps. We always had fun even though we were sick. Mom always made it fun for us.

Grade school was only four blocks away. Once Guy climbed out of the school room window and went home when he was in first grade. He couldn’t sit still. We liked to dress Richard up like a girl. He was so cute!

Barbara and I took ballet lessons from a lady in Le Mars when I was about 6 years old. Barbara was pretty young too. I had a pink tutu and she did too. We were so cute! The teacher taught us the basic steps and how to plie. We never did get ballet shoes because she never ordered them. She took the money though.

David, Mary, and I took rock and roll dancing lessons at the Old Barn in LeMars, Iowa. David was the only one who would dance with me because I was too young. He and I took dance classes at school too. I learned how to ice skate on the tennis court when it iced over in the winter. The tennis court was by the swimming pool.

For a couple of summers, we took swimming lessons at the Le Mars “Pit” and rode the bus to get there. It was dirty and had fish in it. That was before the Remsen pool was built in 1956. It was really wonderful with the pool so close to our house. We practically lived there. We had season tickets and could go anytime we wanted to. We swam and had so much fun. To get to the pool we walked through John Schneider’s pasture with sheep dung in it. It was the shortcut. Our house and the pool were on the edge of town. Considered out in the country at the time.

Our first TV set was black and white and not very big. Dad watched the fights (boxing). That’s what he liked. He didn’t watch sports. No one watched sports in our family then. We watched cartoons when we were younger, and The Little Rascals, Jack Benny, Ed Sullivan, and a lot of variety shows that were really good.

One time I had locked Mary outside because I didn’t want to do something but somehow she got back in and was partway through the front door. I was trying to get the door shut and Mary had a broom in her hand and stuck it out of the door really fast and it hit me between the eyes and broke my glasses. Dad fixed them with wires and I had to wear the glasses to school that way for a month.

Mary was so strong. That’s why I always had to have David help me if I was ever going to beat her up! (We never tried) Even when we fought we had fun. And we fought a lot but it wasn’t to kill. I think I could still fight if I had to. I remember different times when some of the kids purposely walked on the kitchen floor after Mary had waxed it and it hadn’t dried. She chased after us.

All of us in our family went with the George Bindner family to Lake Okabena in Worthington, MN on a Sunday (1957 or 1958). Bindner’s had a boat. As soon as we got there David did a cannonball into the lake and it was only two feet deep. He kind of wrecked his back. Almost everyone tried to water ski. Dad did too and did really well. We all had our swimsuits on. It was a lot of fun.

Another time, in 1955, the very dry year, Mom took us to Lake Okoboji. We went to the Fun House at Arnold’s Park and visited the cabin site of an Indian massacre.

The Summer of 1955

The Pick kids take a photo op on their family trip to Lake Okoboji.

The house in town was very well made. I remember how hot it was and we had all of the windows open in the house in town in the summertime because we didn’t have air conditioning. That house had a lot of windows. We always thought that house was so big but it really wasn’t. The kitchen had a table height island, large enough for everyone to sit around. The upstairs had four bedrooms and a half bath. We had nice Heywood Wakefield furniture… couches, bedroom furniture, and dining room table and chairs. I liked that house.

Our town was so nice to live in. It was like this big huge playground. That’s why it was so awful to go on the farm. Dad wanted us to learn how to work; that was a lot of it. It was just hard to leave such a nice house.

Dad’s Practice

David’s 1965 XKE Jaguar Roadster