Growing Up As a Girl Child In America
My friend got a pony for her 5th birthday, and so did I … and it's been a long time since
I spent my earliest years growing up in an orange grove, and for some time, they were happy.
I got a pony for my 5th birthday. My grandparents invited my entire Kindergarten class to my birthday party. Everyone got to ride Dapple. One of the Price boys led them around our circular driveway. We ate cake and I remember drinking grape juice mixed with water.
I loved riding in the Rambler with my grandfather, Bampy. We would drive around the orange grove and see if anything needed to be fixed. I had a tiny pair of little kid Levi button fly jeans. I thought I was so big and mature helping my grandfather light smudge pots late at night to keep the trees from freezing.
Bampy was always kind to me. He never raised his voice.
If I did something wrong, he would gently correct me. I listened to his every word.
Many of the things he told me stayed with me for the rest of my life.
Always tell the truth: any lie will make any trouble you’re in much worse.
Think before you speak. The wise person waits for other people to speak, listens, and is careful in what they say.
Always treat others the way you want to be treated.
Work hard and do your best.
Above all, one day I came home from school and commented that another kid had gotten a prize in a school contest and I didn’t think they really did a very good job, he said, “No one’s candle ever burned brighter for putting someone else’s out.”
In other words, don’t put others down in an effort to build yourself up. What they do shouldn’t affect how you feel about yourself.
Bampy died when I was 13 years old. My life changed forever on that day.
But I will always have my young, golden years to look back on and remember the lessons he taught.
For that golden time, I was a privileged child. I was a young, sweet-tempered blonde child who didn’t realize my true situation. I had a loving, caring, wonderful grandfather who made things easier with my grandmother. He kept her from flying off the handle every day. He provided stability, security, and guidance.
I lived in a beautiful house in the middle of a ten-acre orange grove. I had friends at school, I never went hungry, my clothes and bed were clean and warm and safe.
I had a dear pet Basset Hound named Rebel. I learned how to walk by hanging on Rebel’s ears.
I had a Shetland pony named Dapple. I had a cat named “Kitty Cat” (see above picture).
I went to school, did chores around the grove and yard, helped to care for Bampy’s banty hens. We had eggs from the hens. We even had an ice box in the kitchen that stored a big block of ice and a man brought milk in the early morning.
I had a red tricycle and a little red wagon.
I loved to read and I had learned to read by sitting on Bampy’s lap. I am told I was about two-and-a-half when I started reading back to Bampy.
The summer I was six, my grandmother Nana took me to the A.K. Smiley Public Library in downtown Redlands almost every day. She would leave me in the Children’s Room for most of the morning. I stayed there and read books. I won the summer reading contest for children my age: by reading so many books.
In the afternoon, she would take me to Sylvan Park, where I’d play with other kids and swim in the Sylvan Plunge.
One day I was sitting in the Children’s Room reading when a man appeared at the end of one of the long rows of shelves. He came in from the outside door, the one that led to the small park between the Library and the Lincoln Shrine.
He wore a long coat, even though it was a hot summer day.
He said, “Hey little girl” and opened his coat.
I didn’t even know what I was looking at. But I knew he was a bad man and I knew I was scared.
I screamed and ran toward the two librarians, who sat behind their nearby desk.
I remember telling one of the ladies that the man was holding a hot dog.
They never caught that man.
A couple of months later, another man did the same thing to me when my grandmother left me alone in the toy store near Sage’s supermarket. He looked almost the same. And he too, was waving a hot dog at me.
I was six years old. I was about four feet tall, and I think I weighed about 40 to 45 pounds. I had long blonde hair, blue eyes, and delicate, small hands and feet.
I didn’t know what those men were doing until as an older child, I saw them making fun of flashers on Laugh-In.
Neither man was ever caught. When I was about ten, Bampy told me about Peeping Toms and said I should be sure to never let anyone see in my room when I was changing clothes or taking a shower. By this time, Bampy & Nana had sold the orange grove and we’d moved to a rural home about ten miles outside of town.
When I was 12, he and I were working in his garden next to one of our fig trees and he pointed across the street to a mixed development of mobile homes and small cabins where one of my girlfriends liked to play.
“Be careful playing with her over there,” he said. “My deputies and I arrested a man in that green cabin on the other side of the Sankey [Zanja — a locally built irrigation stream].”
My grandfather Bampy — E. Norton Sturtevant — had been the Constable in Redlands during the second World War. He served this role because he had been born in 1901 and was a bit too young to serve in the first World War. By the time the second war came, he was a bit too old. He was one of the most respected and best-liked men in town and when the younger men went to serve in Europe or the Pacific, he stayed home and led the other men, working for Sheriff Joe Rivera, who respected and cared for him. My grandmother Nana, who was called “the most beautiful woman in Redlands,” served as a police matron at that time.
Bampy told me that in this run-down green cabin, he and his deputies had answered a call that something bad was going on. Upon arriving at the cabin, he said, “We went in and a man was in there in bed with his two daughters.”
They arrested the man, they said, and took the two girls, both about my age, to Juvenile Hall. Eventually, he said, another family adopted them.
He went on to further warn me about that type of bad man. And, he said, “This man was in the Sheriff’s office. If an officer ever asks you to do something you don’t think is right, don’t do it honey.”
He continued, “Once you learn to drive, if an officer pulls you over and he asks you to get out of the car, don’t. He’s not a real officer.”
I was 12 years old at that time.
Seven years later, Bampy was gone. An officer did pull me over. He did want me to get out of the car. I remembered what Bampy had said, and I think that it probably saved my life.
The officer who pulled me over and wanted me to get out of the car was CHP Killer Craig Peyer.
I’m writing the steps of my life in order to try to understand how a little blonde girl could have such value to some in her family, yet so little value to others and to the world at-large.
I think understanding that every child has value — is what needs to happen for every person to have true value for themselves.
I love that you had a wonderful grandpa to instill such great morals & values for your safety in life. (I know they can’t always protect you) but your bampa sounds like a great man.
you and your friends got a pony .. I got a couple of books
we are not from any kind of similar background .. you are or were definitely "upper class" while I was "working poor"