Saturday's Old Photo

For the first two years of my life, my dad was a student  at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee, and I lived with my parents on campus there. The married students attending in the 1950s lived in little trailers in what was known as Trailerville. You see one of the Trailerville trailer houses in the background of this photo.

Most of the trailers would have been the size of our travel trailers. My family had only three people—my parents and me—but some couples had four or five children. Can you imagine what it would have been like to spend a rainy day with five children in one of those little homes? Now, a mother could just pack  all the kids in the car and drive someplace for a break, but back then, no one used the car—if they had one—for trivial things like that.

And none of the trailers had bathrooms. Instead, there was a communal shower house and a communal laundry. There was no air conditioning, either, and the trailers became like ovens in the heat, so when it was hot, families spent most of the day outdoors.

I’ve made things sound miserable, but I think my mother was really happy in Trailerville. She loved having lots of people around her, so meeting a neighbour or two every time she used the bathroom or did the laundry wasn’t necessarily a drawback for her.

That’s me on the trike in the center of the group of Trailerville kids. Going by the date printed on the photo, I would have been 15 or 16 months old, so there’s no way I could actually ride that trike. Maybe that’s why I’m looking so grumpy.