Some
years ago at the Falk Reunion I requested that family members would
write down some of their memories. My Aunt Lois did it for me and this is my typed version of her story.
MEMORIES
FROM THE PAST
"Two
Damsels in Distress"
by
Lois Lotspeich
I
don't remember how old we were, but we were probably teenagers or at
least Wilma must have been in her teens. Anyway, it sounds like
something teenagers would enjoy doing. Our mother was in on it, too,
and helped us with the planning or at least helped us with her
advice. When she was younger and in good health she had a real sense
of humor and enjoyed a good joke as much as we did, so we decided to
go for it.
But
how could we dress so our dad wouldn't recognize us? My mother had
some outdated clothes (by our standards these days) in a trunk
upstairs along with some other old keepsakes. (How Wilma and I used
to enjoy going through that trunk when our parents would take an
occasional trip into town with a horse and buggy in those days before
automobiles became more plentiful. Since the trunk was sort of a
"no-no" it made a trip through it even more enhancing and
we discovered why it was on the "stand-off" list in going
through it. We ran across some old love letters our dad had written
to my mother during their courtship days. Curiosity killed the cat,
you know, and we couldn't let it do that to us. We probably told her
what we had done after we grew up. No wonder her black hair
eventually turned to gray.)
Fortunately,
we had a large house with several entrances and exits so there was no
problem in getting outdoors in our stranger's attire after we were
dressed for the occasion. We came down the stairway to the hallway,
which had a door into the bedroom on one side and a doorway into the
parlor on the other. We went through the parlor and out the doorway
on the other side to get to the road without being seen and of course
our mother was posted to make sure that our dad was detained should
he make any moves that would give us away.
We
came up the road, through the yard, and onto the steps and Wilma
lightly knocked on the door. Of course, our mother made sure our dad
answered the door.
Wilma,
in her somewhat disguised and plaintiff voice told him how we had
become stranded and where we were going and that we would very much
like to spend the night there if they could accommodate us and then
go on in the morning. He reluctantly said he didn't know whether it
could be arranged but Wilma wasn't easily persuaded and in a much
more distressed, almost pleading tone of voice seemed to come up very
easily with persuasive arguments. Finally, he said he would talk to
the "Mrs" so we patiently waited on the somewhat darkened
doorstep. (No electric lights in those days to brighten the doorway
out in the country where we lived, which was much to our advantage at
this particular time.) When our dad came back he told us that they
thought they could make room for us, so he asked us in and when we
shed our disguises and became "Wilma and Lois" in our
natural habitat, the surprised and embarrassed look on his face made
all the careful planning well worth it.
Of
course, he told our mother that he knew all the time who we were, but
the evidence pointed very much to the contrary, when he came back to
give us the good news that they could "put us up" for the
night. Like Don Regan in the Iran-Contra hearings I would have given
him an award for his acting had he known who we were. But if we could
tell such big ones why couldn't he?
What
a joy to have parents who can take a joke without becoming offended!
No wonder I was such a happy, carefree and bubbly child. And Wilma
with her lively imagination make life very interesting for me. But
that opens a whole new can of worms. There aren't really such things
as bogey men, are there?
