Ah! November of 1961! As a bride of only a few weeks, November of 1961 is a very good month for me. It is autumn, with the holidays ahead to celebrate for the first time as a young married woman.
We have small paychecks coming in from jobs we enjoy. Except for our rent, utilities, food, gas and incidentals, R.H. and I have only one payment a month in these pre-credit card days--$5.25 for a 17-inch black and white television from Western Auto.
On Thanksgiving Day I will wear the going-away outfit my mother recently made me. I had asked for something like this…
Mine is a tailored red wool suit. The jacket is short, to the hipbone, which I can easily find, and Mama covered the buttons with the same red wool and made bound buttonholes. The sleeves are not fur-trimmed but for our honeymoon to the mountains of Gatlinburg, Tennessee she lends me her silver mink stole.
R.H. does not tell me that the white harlequin glasses spoil the sophisticated effect of the suit and mink stole. Love is blind.
When Thanksgiving Day comes, we begin the tradition that is to last for years. We have an early Thanksgiving dinner at my mother-in-law's house and then leave to have another later in the day at my own parents' house. Neither of us wants to give up Thanksgiving dinner the way our own mother prepares it.
And neither of our mothers expects me, the new bride, to cook anything to contribute to the meal. I have just barely learned how to operate my new can opener. I am beginning to cook from my new red and white plaid Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, mostly on weekends.
It all seems like play. Everything does, marriage, jobs, making a home in an attic apartment that I want to look like this…
Earlier in the year, before graduation, I sat in study hall and on television watched Alan Shepard splash down in the Atlantic Ocean after his short sub-orbital flight in space, but I am not worried about troubles building with Cuba, or nuclear testing, or about the United States aiding South Vietnam in their fight against the Vietcong. And sad to say, I am little concerned with news about the "freedom riders" coming to the South, wrapped as I am in a cocoon of suburban white wool.
It is my first Thanksgiving Day as a Mrs., and I imagine we will live the life of Father Knows Best, just as my parents have.
1961 was a lovely year.
[All pictures other than personal photographs appeared in the November 1961 McCall's magazine.]
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