On October
4, 1955 a little girl was born to Russell and Opal Guenther. She was their eighth child. They hadn’t decided on a name for their new
baby before she was born, but the nurse who was at the baby’s delivery was so
kind and good to the mother that she wanted to give this new baby the nurses’
name. So on a beautiful autumn day in
Boone, a small farming community in Iowa, Catherine Lee Guenther (that’s me!) made
her entrance into this big, beautiful world.
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| My childhood
home at 607 Jefferson Street, Boone, Iowa. This picture was taken in
2008--on a trip I took to Boone to visit my mother. |
The house I
got to come home to as a newborn was a very big house that was built in
1900. When it was built, it was a
mansion. It had three porches and four
entrances into the home. Inside there
was a room that was built to be the home’s library, a window in the wall
between the dining and pantry that servants once used to get the food from the
kitchen to the dining room and two beautiful staircases which led to the
upstairs of the house. But when my
parents bought the house it was in very bad shape, so they spent a lot of time
and money fixing it up and making it a place to raise their family. Even though the house was very big, there
were only four bedrooms. But these
bedrooms were huge! So it was no
sacrifice to share a bedroom. The
biggest bedroom was the girl’s room, one bedroom was our parents, and the other
two bedrooms were for the boys. Because
there was sixteen years, sixteen days and sixteen hours between my parent’s
oldest child and their youngest child (me!), I don’t really have any memories
of sharing the bedroom with my three older sisters because I was so young. But my sisters do! My father was a long-distance truck driver
and my mother had eight children, plus a big house to take care of, so my older
sisters have lots of fun memories taking care of me. They loved to dress me and fix my hair. In fact, my oldest sister remembers going to
a parent/teacher conference for my mother when I was in kindergarten!
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| Standing upstairs in my childhood home by the banister. Isn't the wood work beautiful? |
I went to Lincoln
Elementary School. I was always very
proud of that name because the school was named after Abraham Lincoln, and I
thought he was the greatest president our country ever had. When I was a little girl, girls had to wear
dresses to school. I remember on cold
winter days, we would put long pants on under our dresses, along with our
coats, hats, mittens, and boots to walk to school. Once we got to school, we had to take off our
long pants. We also had to take them off
and on for gym classes. I’m sure glad
that girls don’t have to wear dresses to school anymore! It’s a lot easier to run and play!
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| This is me in our school gym. My p.e. teacher, Mr. Klomps took a picture of me doing the splits and put it on the school bulletin board. Notice the pants I wore under my dress for p.e. |
I liked
school a lot. When I was your age, I
loved learning to read and learning to do arithmetic (math). The main characters in the readers I learned
to read from were a little girl and boy.
Their names were Dick and Jane.
Dick and Jane had a dog named Spot.
All the stories that I learned to read in the first grade were about
these children and their lives and adventures.
Then when I grew a little older, I especially loved English class and
history class. In Boone, there was a
wonderful library. It was in a building
that looked like a building from ancient Greece. The main library was on the first floor. On the top floor was an auditorium. And in the basement was the children’s
library. Mrs. Stevenson was the
children’s librarian. She was the only
children’s librarian, so if the library was open, she was there! I loved Mrs. Stevenson. I went to library every Saturday and Mrs.
Stevenson introduced me to all kinds of wonderful books. There was a row of books that were
biographies about famous Americans that I particularly enjoyed reading. I especially loved the biographies about
Helen Keller and Pocahontas.
Being the
youngest of eight children, I’m sure had fewer chores than any of my siblings. But I remember being my mother’s helper when
she was making big dinners. When I was
your age, I regularly dusted the furniture in the living room and dining
room. And I remember learning how to
iron. One of my chores was to iron my
dad’s handkerchiefs. Another chore was
to help with washing the dishes. I was
too short to reach the sink and wash, so I usually dried or carried the dishes
from the sink to the cupboards. (The
cupboards weren’t in the kitchen with the sink.
They were in the pantry!)
Our family
had a television, but if you saw the television we had when I was your age, you
might not recognize it. It was a small
screen cased in a piece of wooden furniture.
There were no remotes. You
changed the channel (there were only three) and the volume with a dial. Sometimes the picture would “go bad”. Then there were dials to try to fix that,
too. The family next door bought a color
television when they first became available.
But the color was never right. The
people would look green or orange.
Everything was the wrong color and the little dials just couldn’t adjust
the color enough to make it look right. When
my parents saw how bad the color was, they decided we wouldn’t get one until
technology got better. TVs have changed
a lot since then.
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| This is my mom and me. I'm about 12 years old. My sister, Anna, took this picture with her brand new Polaroid camera. You can see the television in this picture. But its not our first tv. Its our new modern tv. |
Every summer
for a vacation, our family took a trip to Missouri to visit my dad’s family. My Grandma Guenther lived on a farm, but
because she was older, she didn’t have any animals or do any farming. Someone else farmed the land. It was fun to visit her. She always made a big breakfast of bacon,
eggs, and pancakes. And her home was
filled with little figurines she had collected.
In fact, in the basement she had shelves and shelves of them. She would always let my older sisters choose
a figurine to take home with them. She
didn’t let me have one because she said I was too little and would break
it. But when I was about your age, I
convinced her to let me have two little figurines, a Dutch boy and girl. She was worried that I would accidentally
break them, but gave them to me anyway.
I had them for several months before I accidentally broke one of them
when I was playing with it. It was hard
for me to leave them sitting on the table!
While in
Missouri, we also visited my Aunt Birdie who lived in a lake house on the Lake
of the Ozarks. She and her husband had a
speed boat. They had only one child, and
she was already grown, so my aunt and uncle spent lots of time entertaining us
when we came. They had a board they
would pull behind the boat that I could ride on, and then when I was about eight,
I learned to water ski, like my older brothers and sisters.
Dancing has
always been my favorite hobby. One of my
older sisters, Anna, took dance lessons and was a beautiful dancer and I wanted
to do it, too. So when I was four years
old, I started dance lessons. At first,
I just learned ballet. Later, I took
tap, jazz, and baton twirling classes.
My dance teacher went to Hawaii every summer, so I also got to learn to
hula and other ethnic dances of the South Pacific Islands. Dancing is a hobby I still love. It’s helped to keep me active and in shape
my whole life. And it’s so much fun!
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| My first hula dance. My hula skirt was bright pink! |
I had one
pet growing up. My sister gave it to
me. She had grown up, moved out and
gotten a cute orange kitten. Because my
sister was moving again, she couldn’t keep the cat and gave it to me. The cat’s name was Suzy and she was so sweet,
soft and cuddly. However, she had one
flaw that my mother couldn’t tolerate.
She wouldn’t always use the litter box.
Sometimes she would use our shoes!
After a month of this and lots of ruined shoes, my mother said the cat
had to go be a farm cat. So one day,
before my dance class, she and I took Suzy to the farm. I was so sad and I cried. My mom never really wanted any pets. And since moms end up cleaning all the real
messes and my mom had eight children, I can understand.
When I was a
child, I got to play outdoors a lot.
There were lots of children in our neighborhood. Some of my favorite things to do outside
included riding bikes and playing jacks, hopscotch, jump rope, hula hoop or
freeze tag. There was a park and
playground “kiddie corner” from our house.
I spent lots of time playing there with my friends. On our property was a traffic sign that said
“Caution, children at play”. For the
longest time I thought it was for the eight kids in our family. But it was for the park! One game that you might not know about is
Chinese jump rope. You have to have
three people to play it. The jump rope
is a huge circular piece of elastic. Two
people stretch the elastic out by having it around their ankles and they stand
four or five feet apart from each other.
And the third person gets to jump between the pieces of elastic and
catch the elastic on her feet and do tricks with the elastic. Some of the tricks were pretty hard, but it
was lot of fun.
The foods I
ate growing up aren’t too different from the foods you eat now. But my favorite foods were, and still are
breakfast foods. As a little girl, I
loved eggs. I especially loved scrambled
eggs, and then my older sister taught me to like eggs prepared sunny side up by
showing me how to dip buttered toast in the yolk. Another food I loved was rice. But we only ate it for dessert. We would put sugar, cinnamon, and milk over
hot rice. I loved it!
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| My sister, Anna, gave me this Chatty Cathy ornament my Christmas in 2010. The doll I received as a Christmas gift as a girl looked just like her except her dress was pink and white striped and she wore a white pinafore. Wasn't it thoughtful of my sister to give this ornament to me? |
As most
children, my favorite holiday was Christmas.
Some of my older brothers and sisters were living on their own by the
time I was your age and it was wonderful to have them come home to be with
us. We always had chili and oyster stew
on Christmas Eve and plenty of cakes, pies and candies to enjoy! One of my favorite Christmas gifts as a child
was the Chatty Cathy doll I got from my parents. She had a string on the back of her neck and when
the string was pulled, the doll would say different phrases such as, “I love
you.” One of my earliest memories at
the Baptist Church, where I went as a child, was receiving a wrapped Christmas gift
from my Sunday School teacher. She gave
us all a turn to guess what was inside.
I remember guessing that it was a cookie. Then we all opened our gifts together. Inside was a wooden plaque with a picture of
the Savior, Jesus Christ. Our teacher
explained that Jesus gave his life to us that we could all live forever and
ever. I think I still may have it packed
away in a box.
I’m so
grateful for the wonderful childhood I was blessed to have. I’m also grateful that you are my
granddaughter and I look forward to the times that we get to be together and
make happy memories that you might remember throughout your life. It would be wonderful to live closer to you,
but I know that you are surrounded by those who love you.
When I was a
little girl and found out that my parents named me after the nurse that was at
my delivery, I was kind of disappointed.
I wished that I would have been named after Catherine, the Great who was
one of the early rulers in Russia. And
sometimes I would daydream about being named after her instead! But as I’ve grown older I’ve learned to
appreciate the woman they named me after and realize that it’s a good name to
live up to. I try to be like the kind,
caring nurse who helped deliver me. I
can see that our relationships with the people in our family, friends and
neighbors are the most valuable things we have.
I look back fondly on the memories I have of those who showed love and
kindness to me and it motivates me to be a kinder and more loving person. I hope that you, too, will look for ways
opportunities to show love and kindness to those in your life. Even small kindnesses, like smiling at
someone who looks sad, or sharing a treat or toy, or doing something for
someone else without being asked will have an influence and power in the lives
of others and your life, too.
