Privacy? Not!
I just realized, you never heard about the awnings. Well………
All the houses either had metal or canvas awnings. It was a cool thing to have in the fifties, I suppose. As you’ve seen the psycho next door had the metal ones, which made for wonderful sound at Halloween.
We had canvas dark green striped ones. What a godamned nightmare in italics. One little one for the parents’ bedroom (mom’s favorite window to read), a larger one for the driveway side of porch, and a monster the width of the porch front.
From the side, it was a right triangle–the 90 degree bend was on the lower right, the two 45 degree angles were the awning itself. The canvas was very heavy and thick–I always thought it was made from leftover tent stock from the war. One person could not carry the front awning, it was well over 50 pounds. The top of the awning hung on the roof with a series of hook-and-eye pegs that had to turned with a pliers to lock the canvas in. Pipes went into tunnels for the front, and twin lead pipes screwed into the ends of the large pipe (these two pipes pushed the awning away from the porch.
I think I could just blog about the many ways that this became an exercise in futile insanity.
The pipes were made of lead. This was a leftover from pre-war, when lead was considered a great way to carry water…….after all, lead was so strong even Superman couldn’t see through it. Lead poisoning? Are you crazy? Lead was safe.
This means that the long 25 feet) front pipe could be carried alone. Mom and dad did it until I was around 10, when I could at least stand and hold the canvas out so dad could thread the pole through the various sleeves. I wanted to be the one on the roof who secured the canvas with the pegs, but that didn’t start until I was in high school and daddy’s weight began dragging him down.
Screwing the side pipes was insane. One person had to hold the now-50+ pounds of canvas + pipe, while the other one grabbed the 10 pound small pole and tried to push it/thread it into the front pole. Without fail, I was screamed at every spring for some perceived sin, like not being strong enough or not paying attention to his every grunt and mutter.
So I get sent in the house. But I knew what was coming; I’d seen this movie hundreds of times. Mom comes out, tries to help, she’s useless as a parasol in a tsunami. So he comes in, screams some more, and out I go.
During high school, I would do the two smaller awnings myself, and eventually he gave up doing teh front awning and by then, he stopped leaving the house completely except for work.
In summer, the whole block had awnings. In retrospect, it was wacky–you couldn’t see any porches. There could be 6 people sitting there and you couldn’t tell. The only way you’d see anything was by walking slowly past and focusing. When our shrubs grew, you literally could not see a thing on the porch without walking right up to the front steps. Gee, do you think that was a subliminal message? (“Go away, we’re not interested”)
At times, it was eerie to ride your bike in the summer scorch–not a soul outside and any noise you heard was muffled and vague ’cause everyone’s awnings disguised what was going on.
Can’t find a song about awnings, so here is a really good ‘summer song’ you probably don’t know.