13)   Growing Up In Granville

Children’s Games and Entertainment in the 1920s

(Ruth Sipe)

Growing up in Granville in the 1920s and being one of a large family, we always had plenty of activity at our house.  I had seven sisters and one brother.  We had a huge lawn with a beautiful big elm tree.  Granville used to have a lot of those big elm trees before the blight.  We played hopscotch and leapfrog and all the games like that.  There were enough of us so I always had playmates.  And my dad had a beautiful tenor voice so we spent our evenings mainly just sitting around on the floor listening to him sing and play the harmonica.  He sang folk songs and some hymns.  We’d all call for our favorites.  I think a lot of kids at school envied us.  They thought we had a party every night!  And it was just wonderful till it came time to do dishes.  You can imagine doing dishes for eleven people

Kindergarten at Monomoy House

(Virginia Jones Olmsted)

I remember going to kindergarten at my aunt’s house, which is the Monomoy place.  Monomoy was originally the home of Doctor and Mrs. Follett   And then my father [ J.S. Jones] married the daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Follett’s so he acquired Monomoy place that way.  Daddy’s sister Margaret stayed at Monomoy later on when she was a widow.  Mother and I used to go visit Aunt Margaret there quite often.  Monomoy had a ballroom and I used to love to go up there and sit and imagine all the people whirling around, dancing to the waltzes.  That was kind of a romantic getaway for a small girl’s imagination.

Gunpowder, Ant Hills, and Harold Taylor

(Rob Drake)

When we lived in Texas, my brother and I routinely would keep a quantity of homemade gunpowder around.  You'd just go to the drugstore and buy what you needed and mix it up.  We had used it all to blow up our fleet of plastic warships before we moved up here.  We’d build these models and sail them on the creek behind our house in Texas.  So we had used up all our gunpowder to blow up our fleet.  And you can’t make gunpowder explode without a blasting cap.  It just flashes and burns very brightly. 

So anyway, we got here and thought, well, you needed gunpowder to burn up ant hills.  You never knew what you needed a little gunpowder for when you’re 12 years old.  So we went into the Taylor's Drugstore when Harold Taylor was still running the store and went up to the counter and said, “Well, we’d like a tin of sulfur and a tin of salt peter and a tin of charcoal please”.  And he looked at us and said, “Why I couldn’t sell you that!  You could make gunpowder!”  And we said, “Oh, well yes.  That why we wanted it.  We were going to make gunpowder!”  He wouldn’t sell it to us.  So that was the end of our days with gunpowder because Harold Taylor wouldn’t sell us the ingredients.  We had no means of getting out of town to acquire them.

Eating Out for School Lunch

(Fred Abraham)

When I was in the old high school, we had 45 minutes so we could walk uptown and eat lunch.  We had a soda jerk inside Taylor’s so we always went in there.  And we ate lunch everyday at the Aladdin.  It was a lot of fun.  And we'd go to Welsh’s grocery.   Carl Welsh and his wife had that store and everyday he would make a lot of, now we call them deli sandwiches, but he had these sandwiches all sitting out there, just waiting for us.  I remember going in there a lot and he was just a great guy.

Sledding Down Thornwood Drive

(John Klauder)

With the permission of the local police -- and there was only one policeman back then, Red Pettit -- they would let us close Thornwood Drive off and all the kids then would go sledding.  They could slide down Thornwood Drive and go all the way down to Beechwood Drive.  And if the sledding was really good, you could get all the way down to Broadway, which was quite a run.  I remember Big Daddy Thomas had Jeep and we’d all hook on to each other by our feet  -- and there might be ten or fifteen of us on sleds -- and then we’d hook onto the back end of the Jeep and Big Daddy would pull us back up the hill so we could sled back down again.

And, because my mom and dad would close off the road, the mail man and the milk man both agreed that my parents could deliver the mail and the milk to the folks who lived on the street while it was closed, which, obviously, would never happen today.  That’s a great indication of what small town living was at one time in Granville.  But Granville still gets as close to it as any town, I bet.

College Street, Elementary School, and Golf Course as Places to Play

(Lea Ann Parsley)

When I was a little kid I had a Big Wheel and that was my mode of transportation -- I rode it literally until the front wheel fell off and we had to get another one.  But we had great neighbors.  We knew everybody down the street and East College was a great street at the time because it wasn’t very busy.  So we kind of had that whole street to play on and didn’t really have to worry about a lot of car traffic.

Even though we didn’t have much of a yard, we didn’t mind because, at the time, you still had the big playground at the elementary school and the golf course right there.  We tried not to set off the alarms there because if you stepped out onto the greens, sometimes the alarms would go off.  So we tried to be respectful, and stayed on the little hill there, right behind Mr. Kirkendall’s house, next to what used to be the bus barn.

We played and played and played.  We were outside constantly.  We played in that whole block area there with the golf course, the junior high and the elementary school, just running from place to place.  We were on bikes, we were on foot, we were on skateboards, but just all over the place.  We played Spotlight and Kick the Can and baseball.  And we’d climb up those pine trees and crawl all over the top of the old middle school.  We knew all the places where you could get up on top of the buildings and we’d find all the Frisbees and the tennis balls, everything that people lost up there. 

Granville is a Safe, Supportive Place for Kids

(Lea Ann Parsley)

I certainly feel grateful to have grown up in Granville.  It was always a place I felt safe.  I always felt like the town supported us as students.  We always had the best of everything.  We never needed anything.  And when it came to our sports, we would have huge caravans of people from Granville going to support us.  There was always that feeling of support and love, and just go out, have fun and do your best. Your town’s behind you.  So that’s nice, to have that kind of nurturing growing up. 

And I certainly think that the time I spent on the fire department and around in my community gave me a sense of responsibility at an early age of helping your neighbor and of keeping things in perspective when you’re in that kind of a job.  You see life at its best.  You also see life at its worst -- life and death kind of things.  I think that helped keep me grounded.  I was able to stay a little more focused even in the midst of all the Olympic hype and everything.  I could keep it in perspective knowing that we are just out here having fun, and in the big scheme of things it doesn’t really matter who can go down the hill the fastest.  There are a whole lot of other things in the world that are more important.  I’m grateful for that.

<- Back  /  Forward ->

        If you have website technical questions or corrections email Bill Holloway, at wehollo@gmail.com
        Copyright © 2008 Granville Historical Society
        Last modified: 02/07/08