The Dining Room Table

     Except for when I was very young and we lived on George, Hurlburt and Smith Streets on the southside, we always lived in a house with a formal dining room.  I thought about this recently when I read that a lot of new homes cease to have dining rooms as they are thought to be a wasted space.  The trend is towards kitchen, family room combinations, aka the great room, with an area set aside for a large table of some sort.
       When we were growing up, the dining room was the center of  the house.  We always lived in houses with big kitchens that had a kitchen table in the center of the room and we ate most of our meals there.   As far as I can remember we even ate in the kitchen on Sunday except when we had company - and we had a lot of company.
      There was always a lace tablecloth on the table that my mother washed and stretched on the curtain stretchers which adjusted to the necessary size. (Curtain stretchers were a rectangular wood frame with a lot of little sharp tacks around the edges  - and they hurt when you were putting curtains or tablecloth on - to hold the curtains/tablecloth while they dried .   This was before permanent press and the table cloths/curtains were made of cotton and the stretcher held them tight so there was no need for ironing.  Lace can be tricky to iron.  The stretcher  had a stand and you set it up in the backyard or basement depending on the weather).
       Our dining room table was the gathering place for us kids.  Pushing the lace tablecloth aside, this is where we did our homework, and before television, this is where we sat and quizzed each other on things we learned from the World Book Encyclopedias.  All of us knew the States and their Capitals.  One of us would read something in the WBE and impart that info to the others and we used the World Books for school reports.  David as early as three would join us and ask us to "make me some adds"  - easy additions.  There was a radio in the kitchen, that we turned up and listened to Hopalong Cassidy, Sky King (and his niece, Penny) and assorted other radio serials while we did homework or sat around the table.
        In the middle of the table was usually the laundry that Mother had washed and dried and put there  that we pushed aside while we did homework but while we listened to the serials we folded clothes that we then put away.  I just remember there was always a pile of socks - I hated folding socks, because most of us wore white ones and it was a real headache trying to figure out whose were whose (and listen to the radio) and of course, there always seemed to be some left over that didn't have mates. 
       When we did have company and ate in the dining room - if there were a lot of people, we kids still ate in the kitchen and after the meal was over, it was time to clean off the table as soon as possible, don't put the lace tablecloth back on -  Mother had put a white one on for the meal - because the men - my dad and the uncles - gathered around the table to play poker while the women did the dishes and when that was done they sat around the kitchen table and talked.
       When we lived on Howett Street, Ernie Scherer lived with us while he was going to Bradley and slept in a small room off the dining room.  There were two bedrooms upstairs - Mom and Dad had one and the oldest five slept in the other.  When Ernie got married, Mom and Dad moved their bedroom to the little room and the girls had one upstairs room and the boys the other.  They sometimes used the summer kitchen behind the kitchen - A room with a lot of windows and a door of its own - as a bedroom but often one of my Dad's brothers and sisters lived there and during WWII, they rented that room out to a friend and his family when housing was scarce. 
        I remember being eight or ten, and on winter days, taking the clothes pins and books of various sizes and making roads and bridges around and under the dining room table.  If our brothers would let us, we 'played cars' with their toy cars but if not we used tinker toys or blocks as cars.    The dining room table -  lots of good memories.