Riverside Park
Stories set here
- Mom's Card Tables and a Perfect HandBarbara remembers Mom crocheting over morning coffee, hosting Club with tuna casserole, yeast rolls, sweets, and nuts, and praising the prizes the children bought at the Highland dime store. Annual Club picnics at Riverside Park featured homemade food, flavored pop, swimming, cards, and watermelon. Shortly before Mom's death, during a card game at Carol's house while Diana visited from Florida, the players secretly arranged a perfect 500 hand for Mom and never told her. Barbara also recalls the haunting story of a Club lady losing a finger in a Mix Master, tentatively identifying her as Olene Allerdyce.
- Neighborhood Friends and Games for Every SeasonBarbara remembers her closest neighborhood playmates and the pretend games she shared with Margie Britz. Childhood pastimes included swimming at Riverside Park, Popsicles, catching lightening bugs, lemonade stands, jump rope, cards, treasure hunts, yard games, and Jacks at school. She describes the frightening nighttime chasing game One O’clock And The Ghost Isn’t Here. Winter brought snow games, sledding, cocoa, and warming up on the register; fall brought leaf piles and Halloween treats and pranks. Quiet pleasures included reading Little House in Big Woods and watching clouds beneath sheets on the clothesline. Children also played in summer rain, although they were warned about “Night Air.”
- Riverside Picnics, Warm Rolls, and WatermelonCarol recalls favorite family picnics at Riverside Park, followed by swimming at the Moline Swimming Pool and playground play while the grown-ups played cards. Picnics with families from Mom's 500 Club featured each family's specialty foods. Mom rose at 5:00 a.m. to prepare cinnamon rolls and credited careful kneading for their texture. Bernie and Bob arrived early to save tables. Watermelon finished the outings; Carol accompanied Daddy to choose melons, which he tested for ripeness by cutting and tasting a wedge with his pocketknife.
- Bob's Bright Fragments of ChildhoodBob lists vivid childhood memories: neighbors, a gasoline burn while playing with a toy steamshovel, Barbara refusing medicine, Bernie's skating injury, and Tom Johnson knocking out power lines with a falling tree. He recalls visiting the Rodgers in Cordova, swimming at Campbell’s Island, annual Riverside Park picnics, Iris’s wedding, and poker games with Art and Eileen Cordingly. Other memories include orchard camping and spraying, gathering walnuts, toys and homemade kites, fireworks, homemade foods, hauling water when the well dried up, building a house addition, basement heat relief and flooding, coal heating, backyard tomatoes, and the surviving mailbox millstone.
- Railroad Treasures and Childhood Days by the RiverIn a sequence of childhood memories, the narrator recalls locomotives, Grampa's walks to kindergarten, gathering fallen coal for Mommy's stove, and finding treasures near the foundry. He remembers his fifth birthday, first-grade lessons, a printing prize, and a teacher locking out Arnold for lateness. Life in a big white house includes celebrations, baby Carol's arrival while Mommy is sick, Mommy returning with Baby Delores, games with Bobby and Iris, penny treats, a tavern visit, May baskets, and the fascination of a river the children are forbidden to approach.
Events here
Yearly
Yearly Club picnic
Mom prepared fried chicken, pineapple upside-down cake, and scalloped corn. The ladies played cards while children played or swam, and watermelon followed.
other
Family picnics at Riverside Park
Recurring family picnics, including gatherings with families from Mom's 500 Club, featured specialty foods, cards, playground play, swimming afterward, and watermelon before going home.
Annual, during childhood
Annual Riverside Park picnics
Annual picnics are included among the childhood memories.
Family corrections
Notes sent in by the family and approved on review. They sit alongside the original record — the book's wording is never changed.
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