Tales of Our Childhood from Jane Hilder

June 3, 2020

Tales of Our Childhood from Jane Hilder.

I was born in Bay Shore, New York, in March 1948. My parents were Peter Hilder and Aimee Carlile. My family lived in the village of Brightwaters, which was about halfway out on the south shore of Long Island. We lived in an older three story Victorian house with a wonderful covered porch across the front and halfway down one side. The house had once belonged to my mother’s mother Marion Warner Carlile and before that had been a summer house belonging to her parents who lived most of the year in Brooklyn. My parents had met and were married in 1943 while they were both living and working in Washington, DC. My father was an Army lawyer in the Ordinance Division and my mother worked for the Board of Economic Warfare. My mother’s mother Marion was being treated for cancer during World War II, and had moved in with my parents in their Arlington, VA, apartment to be closer to treatment. But at the end of the war Marion wanted to move back to her home for the remainder of her life. My parents moved to Brightwaters so that my mother could help care for her mother. My grandmother died before my brother was born in 1946.

 

My father was a patent lawyer who worked in a small law firm in the Battery area of southern Manhattan. Every weekday he caught the Long Island Railroad Train at Bay Shore Station and  rode it into Penn Station in Manhattan, then took the subway south to the Battery to get to work. It was a long trip, probably taking more than 1 1/2 hours each way. My mother drove him to the train station every morning to catch his train and went back to pick him up at the station at the end of the day. After my older brother Peter Jr, called Skip, and I were born, she had to bundle two small children into the car twice a day for that trip. She later told me that was especially difficult when she had to get us into our snowsuits to make the car trip. The distance is only eight tenths of a mile but there were no sidewalks. Possibly he sometimes walked but I do not remember that.

 

In the early 1950s, children’s car seats did not exist. There might be a car bed for an infant or an elevated toddler seat hooked over the back of the back seat with a minimal harness, not the  sturdy five point harnesses of today. Sometimes a parent would let children ride in the front seat where a mother could swing her right  arm across in front of a child to keep that child from being thrown forward when stopping suddenly.

 

One day when I was quite small I decided I was going to go to the train station to pick up my father by myself. I must have been at that, “I want to do it myself!” stage that my two year old grandson has been going through. I was riding in the front seat. As my mother slowed a lot to make the last left turn before reaching the station, I opened the car door intending to get out. I vaguely remember clinging to the door handle and seeing pavement moving past down below me, as the door cracked open. Needless to say, suddenly getting out by myself seemed like a scary prospect. My mother was able to jam on the brakes, reach over and close the door.

 

I also remember my excitement about starting kindergarten at Fifth Avenue Elementary School.

 

Kindergarten was morning only and students went home for lunch and the remainder of the day at noon. My mother drove us to school every day, I think. We may have lived too close to the school to be bussed. But there was a bus to take kindergarteners home at noon. On the first day of school the teacher asked which students were supposed to ride the bus, and I raised my hand. So I rode the bus to a stop at the street corner of Manatuck Blvd. closest to my house and I walked home. But no one was home because my mother had driven to school to pick me up from the first day of kindergarten. She returned shortly a little bit shaken by not finding me at school, but I was sitting on the front porch waiting for her. After that I did ride the bus home every day after kindergarten.

 

Another memory of kindergarten was the teacher asking if anyone in the class could count to 100. I think it was the first week of school. I raised my hand and was called on to count. I remember being embarrassed when I got to 99 but did not know what came next.

 

Submitted by Jane Hilder.