No. 108 August, 2009
A Farm Boy Learns About The Birds and Bees
By Harold Ratzburg
OK, OK, you would think that being brought up on a farm with all those animals around doing their thing, that farm kids would be enlightened just naturally about that stuff.
Maybe some kids were, and caught on faster than I did, but some small things come up out of my ole Geezer memory about how my knowledge came about.
For some reason, I remember that my first question that I asked my Mother was about a new calf that appeared in the pasture one night next to the mother cow. "Where did it come from?" My Mother answered, "The cow dug it up out of the ground," or words to that effect, and of course, being a kid I just simply took it as gospel and thought no more about it. Later on, a cow in a box stall in the barn, came up with another calf, and when I checked out the situation, I remember thinking that something was a little odd here, cause the cement floor of the box stall sure didn't look like it had been dug up, and how in the world could a cow dig through it and put it back so neatly.
With the attention span of a very young kid, I pondered the situation for maybe 10 or 15 seconds and then went out to play in the yard and forgot all
about it. After all, Mother wouldn't lie, would she? So time went on.
As with most kids, I believe, there was not much in the old farmhouse that was a secret from me. I snooped around everywhere, even in the bedroom dresser of Mother and Dad. Mother did have a book on the birds and the bees, (a.k.a. SEX) which showed drawings of the anatomy of he's and she's, but those drawings seemed pretty tame to me, so I don't believe I spent much time studying them.
I believe that I learned a little more by studying the women's underwear and corset pages of the Sears- Roebuck catalog that hung in the two holer outhouse out beside the wood shed. Style had changed by that time so that bloomers were not longer in style, so the photos in the catalog showed the female body curves much more so than the old bloomer ads did. The Bra ads also helped my learning curve a lot about the birds and bees. (You gotta remember that magazines like Playboy were way far in the future, and the closest thing to a Playboy Magazine at the time was the "Police Gazette" magazine which I ran across from time to time.)
(Another more practical thing you learned from the old Sears and Roebuck was that the glossy, thicker pages of the catalog did not do the job in the out house that they were intended for quite as good as the thinner, more crinkly pages. That was a lesson that you could use immediately and you caught on very quickly.)
Then came a real eye opener. In one of our sheds, was stored an old car probably belonging to a distant uncle or other member of the family. As a snoopy kid of course, it was my job to snoop through the old car to see what I could find. I guess that the "collector obsession" in me was starting to blossom.
Anyway, in one of the door pockets, I found about three old "eight pager" comic books that some adult had hidden there and forgot about. I don't know how many readers ever heard or saw any of the old eight pagers, but those old comic books were NOT written for kids!!!!
What they did, was some cartoonist took the characters from a comic strip and re-drew them showing the characters in the most explicit sexual activities you can imagine. I remember that one of eight pagers was of the Katzenyammer Kids, and what the Captain did to Mamma cannot be part of the story in the Marion Advertiser. Another of the books showed Blondie and Dagwood carrying on. At that age, I found the illustrations to be more than I could believe and time kinda eased them from my mind.
An interesting tidbit showing how times have changed is that I have run across eight pages in the recent past-------In a Barnes and Noble Bookstore ------in a book where someone had gathered a bunch of them into a volume to show something about sexual values in the "old" days. How about that????
My research into the birds and bees took a huge leap one day when I went to a carnival in Clintonville. One of the sideshows, in a tent, featured a vaudeville act which had the usual comedians and strippers in scanty costumes. BUT----as an added attraction, (and for an additional 25 cents,) your could proceed to another tent behind the first one and see a continuation of the show. The Barker of course, made it sound pretty interesting, and it had to be to have me shell out another quarter of my allowance.
The show consisted of one blond lady who proceeded to remove ALL of her clothes and parade around the stage in her "altogether". My close study showed that the lady really was not a natural blond, but I didn't really care at that point, because here was a Sears Roebuck Catalog picture without any covering. WOW!!!!!!!!!!!
I don't remember just how old I was at that point, but believe me, those carnival guys didn't give a hoot as long as you had the 25 cents in your hot little hand.
I found the first love of my life in Maple Valley Grade School. I was head over heels in love with a cute blonde, but I don't believe that she had the slightest idea about my passion.
As proof of my love, I scratched our initials rather deeply into the top of the sliding wooden top of my desk, and these days I wonder sometimes where that desk is now. Maybe in some antique shop somewhere, and it would be a real kick to find it and use it as a decorator piece as people do nowadays. There was (maybe still is) a beech tree in the woods up on top of Tim Nolan's hill (it used to be called the Ratzburg Hill) which also has my first love's and my initials surround by a heart, carved into the bark. After about 70 some years, that tree is really good sized by now, or more likely, it has tipped over a long time ago, like a lot of my old friends.
Eventually, this little ole farm boy got old enough to drive and brave enough to ask girls out for a date. Remember that back in that ancient history time, a date usually ended with a kiss, "if you got lucky". If I got a fleeting touch of a boob or a leg, I felt like I was really "making out." Only once did I get slapped by a girl and it was because I tried to KISS her!!!! Maybe I was just too shy and proper, but that is the way I saw the dating game back then.
Night time dates were usually to go to the movies, or to the Caroline dance hall on Saturday night. After a movie you would go out for a malt and a ride, maybe even find a place to park and watch the "submarine races" in the Wolf River, where you held hands with your date and discussed all that important stuff that is important to teenagers. Like I said, holding hands, and maybe a kiss or two, was as far as it went for this little ole farm boy.
And, parents back then kept a pretty close eye on the comings and goings of their daughters. After one of my dates when I took a girl to Caroline dancing on Saturday night, my date and I stopped on a whim to walk through the cemetery on the north side of Marion. Anyway, to make a long story short, I took my date home a little later than I thought. When I got back home to my own house, I found my date's Daddy waiting for me in the driveway. He proceeded to let me know in no uncertain terms that I had kept his daughter out way too long that night, and that is just was not acceptable. Of course, after that, I watched the time more closely when dating that young lady.
Daytime dates usually took place on Sundays and in the summer time, swimming was the best option. There were lots of swimming holes in the local rivers and to drive to Waupaca or Shawano Lake or Bare Lake was not unusual. There they had diving boards and towers and and a sandy beach instead of a slippery, grass covered river bank that you had to negotiate to get into and out of the water. The local rivers sometimes had a little cow poop floating down from the pastures upstream but it never slowed us down from enjoying the water.
Cooler weather dates included taking your girlfriend hunting, ice skating, sliding down hill, etc. All of it was pretty darned innocent fun compared to the disco scene these days. And you know what? We enjoyed all that innocent fun just as much----I think?
By now, you may be wondering---OK, so when did this little old farm boy lose his innocence and really get the lowdown on the birds and bees thing? Well Sir, it happened like this. I was darn near 21 years old--------------------But you know what? This is written for Dan's Advertiser, and Dan's paper is a Family Paper, so, I'll quit right here. Sorry about that.
copyright 2009, Harold Ratzburg