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Martha Gerdeman: Our entertainment once required imagination, not electronics




Gerdeman

Gerdeman

As many readers know, I volunteer one afternoon a week at the Clement Railroad Hotel Museum. Sidebar: if you haven’t been there, you should go. It’s one of Dickson County’s treasures.

The three rooms on the ground floor were the manager’s apartment, and one of them is decorated as a sitting room could have been in the 1920s or 1930s. We frequently guide students on school field trips and it’s not uncommon for the younger kids to look around for the television. They have a really hard time imagining life before all their electronic gizmos. So, what did we do before TV? We entertained ourselves.

Currently there is an exhibit about home entertainment, and it was not supplied by any other museum, but was totally created by our local staff. Plus, many of the artifacts on display belong to local folks who have loaned them. Come see it. But what did we do?

For one thing, we played outdoors. I lived in the country until I was 16 years old. I knew every corner of the woods behind our house. It was more exciting to climb out my window to go to the woods than to use the front door. I wasn’t really sneaking out; my mother didn’t care where on the property we went, but the window was more fun. I had a favorite tree I liked to climb — sometimes with a book in hand.

At one end of the property was a fallen tree with one end shaped like a “V.” There were probably 15 or 18 inches of space under it, so my sister and I spread bark on the top from one side to the other and had a snug little hideaway. We also knew which tree had a long limb with one end only about a foot off the ground. It made a wonderful bouncy toy.

Also in the sitting room at the museum is a piano. Every young lady learned to play the piano in those days, so sometimes the family would gather round the piano (or guitar or whatever they had) and sing. My mother was a music major, so she would play classical music. There were certain pieces that one or the other of us always wanted to hear.

People visited nearby families, sometimes for impromptu dancing. On occasion, we were known to have a taffy pull. It was always in the winter because after the taffy was cooked to the proper consistency, it had to be poured into flat pans and set outside in the snow to cool before it could be pulled.

And of course, there was the radio. Every afternoon after school I would flop onto the floor to listen to the mostly cowboy shows. There were “Sky King,” “Wild Bill Hickok” and “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.” Another one was “Bobby Benson of the B Bar B,” about a teenaged boy who owned a ranch. I was almost as much in love with him as I was with Roy Rogers.

There were also the soap operas. I remember one time when Stella Dallas’ daughter was locked in a closet by a crazy woman. She spent months in that closet. Now I realize that the actress probably wanted time off to perform in a play or something like that.

So, if, like me, you are old enough to remember pre-TV, what did you do to pass the time?

Martha Gerdeman is a professional researcher with a passion for family genealogy. She is a past president of the Middle Tennessee Genealogical Society and lives in Dickson.

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