Zoomers, March 22, 2024
First Row, Left to Right: Dan Tontz, Fred Elder, Diane Zinn; Second Row, Left to Right: Marilyn Tompkins Bellert, David Robinson, Glenna Stearman Park;
Third Row, Left to Right: Janice Collins Bailey, Linda Soderberg McKay, Rodney Pierce; Fourth Row, Left to Right: Perry Ann Porter, Tom Tatlock, Lee Ayres
Following some initial conversation, everyone introduced themselves and where they happened to be. Host Fred Elder explained that our topic for this session was memories of Easter and other spring celebrations. The following is a summary of our conversation, not a transcript. Please let us know if your comments need to be revised.
Janice Bailey, Wichita KS. Spring is definitely 
underway in Wichita. The trees are just starting to leaf. Today is lovely, cloudless and warm, and no wind is blowing. Imagine that! I take my dog for a walk every day and am just back from enjoying today’s walk. Have we gotten the wild storms hitting the middle of the country? Well, the TV weather always says that we either just had storms or are just about to get them. Not today.
Linda Soderberg McKay, St. Louis, MO I’m going to start with a thank-you. Many of you last time talked about a book about a man named Charlie. Someone
gave it to me and I just hadn’t read it, but I read it in a day and it’s probably one of the most delightful things I’ve read. For those of you who weren’t on the call, it’s about a man who lived to be 109 years old. He was a doctor from Kansas and it’s worth your time to read.
What I see happening for Easter that I don’t see happening anymore is that’s when you got a new Easter bonnet and new white gloves because your old ones were dirty and you got new shoes for Easter Sunday. That’s my memory of Easter besides being at church all day long. The new clothes for Easter were always special, and I did that with my four daughters, too. I do remember the wind in Wichita during the springtime.
Perry Ann Porter, Poulsbo, Washington Did any of you 
ever have a treasure hunt looking for your Easter basket? My mom made clues for us, which we followed as we looked for our baskets. The clues were clever and we really had to think to solve them. One year, my Easter basket was in the clothes dryer. Another year, it was in the oven. Once, it was outside in the back of the car. We couldn’t hunt for Easter eggs until we found our baskets. It was really fun!
Rodney Pierce, Colorado Springs, CO Most of the time in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, I was out at sea with the U.S. Navy. But when I was home, my wife always made our girls Easter
dresses and we usually had an Easter egg hunt in the back yard. When I was out at sea for so many years, I wasn’t home for Easter, but when I was home, the girls enjoyed it and I did too. Yes, my wife sent me pictures of the girls in their new dresses. I would usually be gone for 9-12 months at a time. The only communication we had was by letter and sometimes it took three weeks to get mail because the mail service was hauling parts instead of mail. Linda said that was a complement to Rodney and his wife. Rodney said they were looking at year #64 now.
Glenna Stearman Park, Montgomery Village, MD. My strongest memories are from before we were in grade school. 
We lived on a farm in Oklahoma, where my dad built airplanes in the barn. We had a lot of fun with critters. There were always baby ducks and chicks. My cousins came for Easter and our Easter egg hunts were wild. The hunt was all over the farm. Hiding eggs was as much fun as hunting them. I remember finding an Easter egg in July. I took it into the kitchen to show my mom, who said not to eat it!
Today, I love spring in the D.C. area, especially the cherry blossoms all over town. I also enjoy the 2000 or so daffodils on the hillside at my house. Daffodils have begun turning up all over my yard. Starting about three weeks ago, I pulled up clumps of daffodils. There were dozens of bulbs in each clump. I separated them and put them into clay pots. Then, it rained. I now have five pots full of daffodils. The previous owners of our house were the gardeners and planted the daffodils that I enjoy now.
David Robinson, Wichita, KS. One of the things I remember about Easter growing up was that one of my sisters got her hair fried with one of those home permanents. I didn’t
hesitate to tell her she looked even uglier than she normally did. We all got new clothes and that’s when we rotated our shoes. The old shoes became your school shoes and you wore your new shoes to church. We did dye Easter eggs, but I don’t remember if we hid them or if my parents did. Our Easter basket was Mom’s sewing basket. It sat in the middle of the dining room table. We each got a chocolate egg with our name on it, but we weren’t allowed to eat it until we found all our other eggs. Then we had chopped eggs on toast. One of my sisters to this day says she gags with the thought of it. But I liked it, creamed eggs on toast. Our mother was a good cook, so it wasn’t crappy.
Anyway we all got dressed up and went to church. We went down to the Baptist church, which had two services, and both were loaded on Easter. I hesitate to say Baptist since KU is playing a Baptist school tonight, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed for that one. When we came home for Easter dinner, I remember that we always had ham, baked beans, and potato salad. and angel food cake for dessert. It always seemed like a special event. Now, as far as flowers and highlights of spring, Wichita has that beautiful botanical garden. We just had Riverside Park.
Marilyn Tompkins Bellert, Sycamore IL. I also read The Story of Charlie in the past month and really enjoyed it. 
Charlie’s can-do attitude, resilience, and grit were inspiring, especially given his frequently inopportune circumstances. There were women in the book who shared Charlie’s ability to invent their lives, and he was smart enough to appreciate them. As others have said, Charlie’s life span was shared by our parents and grandparents. For me, knowing about their experiences gave more meaning to Charlie’s life.
Easter was a time for new clothes in my family, too. Getting new shoes that were big enough was especially welcome! I also sewed dresses for my girls at Easter and all year round, a skill I learned at Mead Intermediate School. Along with the Easter egg hunt, my kids received outdoor toys at Easter, such as stilts, pogo sticks, bigger bicycles, roller skates, jacks, and jump ropes. My grandchildren didn’t get new clothes for Easter. They already had plenty of clothes, which their parents purchased as needed. I don’t think they ever experienced life with just two or three pairs of shoes (church, school, outside), much less only one item of “dress-up” clothes for church or special events.
Dan Tontz, Dallas, TX. My earliest recollections of this time of year are all centered around basketball, of course. The NCAA games usually started the third Thursday of March.
By the way, what day is it today? Yes, the third Thursday of March. There are sixteen games being televised today. I have a good friend who is in Charlotte, NC today, so he will see four games. What I remember the earliest is 1956 and I remember sitting with my dad in our house in Wichita. We turned the radio on to listen to Wilt the Stilt Chamberlain. KU was in the tournament. Of course, no TV then, but we liked to imagine as we listened on the radio.
Janice, you were right across the street then, probably with your new shoes on. Oh, the other thing I was going to mention is kind of a sick joke about Easter. If someone is merging into dementia, you can say you can at least hide your own Easter eggs. No response to the comedian there, you’ve all heard that before. I won’t remember it tonight.
Today, I did not think I would be able to talk on this Zoom, but I didn’t cough as much as I thought I would, so one other thing. Glenna, when I was working for an agency headquartered in Washington DC, I got to see the beautiful cherry trees flowering. The wine was good and the French (who donated the cherry trees) were good. The flowers just don’t last long enough.
Diane Rusch Zinn, Lawrence, KS. When I was a little girl, we celebrated Easter at my grandmother’s farm, way up north of 
Wichita on Broadway. She always hid the Easter eggs outside. When I was in 2nd grade, she gave me a bunny. We had just moved from Planeview to Timber Lane. My dad built a hutch up on stilts. One morning, I found that the bunny had eaten his way out of the hutch and disappeared. Like others of you, I made new dresses for my girls at Easter, and we hunted eggs indoors or outdoors, depending on the weather.
Spring – it’s beautiful here. I love watching the plants and flowers emerging from their winter hideouts. I’m always looking for new things and am seeing more new plants this year. I’m still working on winter cleanup, about 20 hours in the last week and a half, gathering limbs and other debris from winter’s storms. Conditions are just right for spring. The redbuds are in bloom. The forsythia is in bloom. And there’s no wind. Rain is coming in a few days, so it’s time to apply an acre’s worth of crabgrass pre-emergent control and fertilizer. I’ll be spending a lot of time on the tractor.
Tom Tatlock, Appleton, WI. I have five younger brothers and sisters and we all dyed Easter eggs. My sister Becky loved to dye khaki-colored eggs. We had one of those stories
about hiding Easter eggs. We wrapped some of the eggs in foil. One year, we hid the eggs in the house and we didn’t count them correctly. Three months later there was this smell of rotten egg emerging from a silver teapot on the sideboard. Sure enough, there was the rotten egg inside, the smell wafting into the dining room.
Glenna’s comments about daffodils reminded me – soon after my brain injury, we planted two or three thousand daffodils because deer wouldn’t eat them. There were all kinds that we ordered from White Flower Farm and other places. I underestimated my own endurance as I planted the bulbs. They turned out to be really beautiful. We inherited from the previous owners of our house, a whole field of trillium, small spring bulbs, and periodically we would find trillium in various places. Squirrels would move them around.
I have fond memories of Easter dinners, multi-generational get togethers. We’ve had kind of a burst of spring here in Appleton with temperatures in the 60’s and 70’s. Then down to 20’s and 30’s and it’s supposed to snow tonight. But there’s more daylight every day and that’s something to rejoice about. I think that’s all I have to say about Easter except that it’s a joyful time of year. As kids, we had lots of church services. We were in choirs, served as acolytes, and so forth.
Lee Ayres, Fresno, CA. I remember March in Kansas. That’s 
when the track season started, usually indoors because of the weather. I recall distinctly that Coach Timmons worked us hard right up to the state meet. I better appreciate that now. The time available to get in shape was short! I really looked forward to getting outside for practice. Sometimes it was too muddy.
Thinking about spring — it starts really early in Fresno, but the redbud trees wait until late March. Shelley and I planted box hedges to divide our yard, and by now, trimming them gives us quite a challenge every spring. As for Easter — I associate it with springtime in Kansas and always enjoyed it.
Fred Elder, Madison, WI. When I was three or four, I can’t remember exactly, my mother and I were living with a family in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Somebody decided it would be a good idea
to get Fred a bunny for Easter. Fred really liked that bunny, so much so that he died from my playing with him too much. That caused some concern. As you know from my recent e-mail, I’ve learned to appreciate the hens from Cadbury. They make these wonderful little mini-eggs, and I’ve decided those are good hens.
In terms of Spring, I live in a condo, but I look out this window over here and I can see turkey and deer and other animals. The other day, three deer showed up within ten feet of this window. I’m not sure why, but I enjoyed seeing them. As Tom mentioned, we’re supposed to get some snow tomorrow, quite a bit in Madison, or so they say. But it’s still snow time of the year, so that’s okay.
I also remember running outdoors in the spring (at East High), at least for wrestling. Lee noted that cross-country ran to College Hill Park. We wrestlers had to do that, too. Coach was very careful to drive to make sure we were doing it. So those are some of my memories of this time of year.
Back and Forth, and So Forth
Diane asked who had Bradford pear trees in their area. They’ve become invasive here. Twenty-five to thirty years ago, they were THE ornamental tree to plant in your yard and now they are everywhere, inundating all the fields around, so planting them is discouraged. Dan asked if they bore fruit, but no, they don’t. They are beautiful trees, although the limbs break easily. Red burning bushes have also become invasive here. Janice added that Wichita has prohibited planting the Bradford pears.
Glenna – We had a wonderful tree when she lived in San Antonio. I contacted the state to see what peach tree would produce fruit for the best pies. We planted that tree, and it was absolutely incredible. We had peaches for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and all kinds of neighbors collecting them. The squirrels would come down and take one bite out of a peach and leave it. I finally decided I would just cut around the squirrel bite and use the peach anyway. I wasn’t about to give up a peach because of a squirrel bite.
Marilyn – We have friends with pear trees that bear delicious fruit, and the squirrels did the same thing. So, my husband got a special kind of wrap to put on the pears and he tied these wraps on every pear on both trees. It then rained, and in short order, the pears all rotted inside the wrap. The whole crop was lost. Glenna – People did that also in San Antonio and the fruit came out beautifully. Marilyn – When I was in China years ago, I remember going through pomegranate orchards and seeing fruit tied in bags in the trees. There were thousands of them, and I can’t imagine doing that. It must have taken a huge number of people to bag all those, but they figured out a way to do it so the fruit doesn’t rot. I don’t know what the pests were – winged, four-legged or what. Glenna – Orchard workers did the same thing all over Korea.
Dan remembered a stay in Korea with the US Army around the 38th parallel. They used human fertilizer a lot in the growing season. I was a rookie. I had a jeep, and the driver took us up there and all of a sudden there was that smell. I was ready to go back home real quick. I’ll bet that not much has changed since then.
Glenna added – they are more careful about that now because they went on a trip through much of Korea. Going through the towns, you learned not to step in the gutters, because the small towns had no sewage system, so all went out into the streets. In some places, they dump on a certain side of the road. It’s a very careful trip. I have some other stories I’ve shared with those who’ve gone to China. We have bathroom stories from China. They’re not really not all that repeatable, but you really appreciate our cities, which take care of sewage efficiently. When we lived in Korea, we couldn’t drink the faucet water, so every day we had to go to the well and get water in containers to take to our apartment. The tap water wasn’t dirty or smelly, but they said it wasn’t safe to drink. We did wash our clothes in it with very hot water. The other funny thing that happened was that the bathroom smelled really bad. I cleaned it with really hot water and bleach, but it still smelled so bad. The reason, we learned, was that there was no U shape in the drain pipe so there was no seal, so the smell came through. I bought some incense to burn until a Korean friend said I shouldn’t be doing that because the incense meant someone had died in the apartment and that it was lying in state. There are no funerals there, so visitors came to pay respects when they smelled the incense. Then they took the body to the countryside and buried it on a hill, but not deeply, because mounds from the bodies were visible everywhere. Every January concrete tables are put up and people come to recognize the deaths. So, I quit using incense in the bathroom and replaced it with wet clay over the drain. When visitors came, I had to explain the mound was wet clay, not poop, on the floor. I had to wet it down every 3-4 days.
Fred commented that we don’t realize how lucky we are to have fresh water, as most persons around the world are drinking bottled water or water they have to travel to get.
Glenna said that in Africa some girls must walk 6-8 hours a day to get water and thus have no time for education.
Linda added that here, with all our challenges, we have so many blessings.
Lee mentioned the recent study by the Pew Foundation, which shows that in the U.S., people over 65 say they are happy, while people 18-30 say they are not so happy. This difference is a change from Pew surveys in the recent past. Why is there so much difference between the generations? We talked briefly about the reasons and thought it might be a good topic for a future Zoom.
Last Words for Today
Lee – Bill Farmer, the voice of Pluto and Goofy grew up in Pratt, Kansas and is 71 today. He lives in southern California.
Tom – I can’t top that.
Perry Ann – My mom taught me that when we saw the first robin of spring, we would lick our thumbs and stamp a fist in our palms. I still do it when I see the first robin.
Rodney – We are expecting snow on Sunday. I hope to go to church on Saturday. Have a blessed week.
Janice – I’m enjoying the spring weather and feeling grateful that I’ve spent most of my life in Wichita, Kansas.
Glenna– I’m still thinking about Charlie. I’m interested in the description of their drive from Kansas City to southern California before highways. Never realized how new the U.S. highway system is. It wasn’t common to our parents and grandparents. When my grandmother was 4 or 5, she walked with her family from Kansas to Arkansas with a wagon full of all their household goods. They didn’t like Arkansas, turned around, and walked straight home. They went farm to farm, paying farmers to put down fresh hay where they could sleep and working with farm wife on food.
David – Happy Easter, however you celebrate it. I’m happy to be part of a great group of East Hi grads.
Dan – It’s March Madness. We have the first upset win. No spoilers from me!
Fred – Go KU!
Zooming with the Aces #27 is scheduled for Thursday, April 18, at 2 p.m. Wichita time. We would love to have you join us! Look for an invitation from Fred on April 16 or 17.
