2026 - 28 Summer of '42: My Mother's Sixteenth Summer

Margaret Nolen, My Teenage Mother

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 28

Prompt: Leisure

December 25, 1941—just eighteen days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor changed American life forever—my Aunt Sue ("Sister Sue") gave her big sister Margaret a five-year diary for Christmas.

Margaret's five-year diary, a Christmas gift from her sister Sue in 1941. Eighty-four years later, it opened a window into one unforgettable summer.

Fifteen-year-old Margaret faithfully filled its pages with a few lines almost every day during 1942. The diary is filled with the ordinary pleasures of a sixteen-year-old girl living through extraordinary times: sleepovers, surprise birthday parties, Girl Scout and Red Cross meetings, making cookies and candy, skating on the creek, playing in the snow, late-night bowling, dancing, eating at Coney Island and Ike's Chili, and movies—lots of movies.

I opened the diary intending to make a list of every movie she mentioned to see how many I had seen myself.

What I found was so much more.

It was time to go back to the diary...

The little brown diary that let me spend one more summer with my mother.

As I read, I recognized names of family friends from my own childhood. Lon and Irene Alcorn. Howard and Dorothy Williams. George and Ella Wright. The Galloways. The Morgans. Every weekend seemed to bring another visit with family or friends.

During the war years, my grandparents often picked up soldiers and brought them home for dinner or even to spend the night. At the time, they were simply young men far from home. I suspect those visits helped shape Margaret's view of a world that was changing quickly.

On May 4, sixteen-year-old Margaret ordered her senior class ring and celebrated by going to see Gone With the Wind.

A few weeks later, her homeroom class enjoyed a picnic at 51st and Yale—today's LaFortune Park.

Then came summer.

May 27 School's Out May 28 Crystal City

Vacation began with a swimming trip to Crystal City with her brother and sisters. They packed a fried chicken picnic, rode the Whip and the Dodgem, and had what she described as "a real good time." On the way home they got off the bus at the wrong stop and had to walk the last mile.

Today, every time Bud and I drive to Ollie's for Sunday lunch, we're only a few blocks from where sixteen-year-old Margaret spent one of the happiest days of her summer, now Crystal City Shopping Center.

The very next day they went fishing at Deep Fork. They caught one fish and forty crawdads—and once again, had a wonderful time.

June brought a longer visit with the Alcorn family near Bristow. Margaret helped plant cane and corn, carried water, chopped cotton, picked blackberries, gathered peas, and helped can the harvest. Hard work during the day ended with homemade ice cream, dancing, card games, and trips to town on the tractor.

August brought another stay with the Alcorns. This time she worked in the hay field, helped grind feed, and canned four bushels of tomatoes. One evening they played horseshoes by the light of a tractor.

Back home there were boat rides on the lake, swimming, picnics, car rides, and, of course, more movies. Home was between Sand Springs and Tulsa, so her movie-going took her to the Harmony and Broadway theaters in Sand Springs, as well as the Cozy and Tulsa Theater in downtown Tulsa.

The Cozy Theatre in downtown Tulsa. Margaret saw at least five movies here during the summer of '42.

She even played pool at George Wright's native stone house—and won! That entry made me smile. I remember the pool table in the basement. As a little girl, it seemed like a mysterious place where only the men gathered. I only got to go downstairs once. My great-aunt Anna and her husband, Hank, lived in the apartment above the detached garage behind the house. The house is gone now, but every time I drive past the vacant lot on Charles Page Boulevard, I still think of George Wright's native stone house.

One day she canned grapes, something I never knew people did. She also spent hours writing letters to friends and to soldiers she had met through family and neighbors.

One entry especially made me smile. On the Fourth of July, Margaret had her first "real date" with a soldier. She wrote, "Went to a show. It was my first real date dear Diary and it was oh so thrilling." Reading it, I couldn't help but smile. Before she was my mother, she was just a sixteen-year-old girl thrilled about her first date.

Looking back through those three months, patterns began to emerge. There were twenty-one swims, four picnics, fishing trips, eighteen trips to the movies, Scout meetings, sleepovers with friends, homemade ice cream, dancing, card games, wrestling matches with her parents, and two long stays at the Alcorn farm near Bristow. She babysat for spending money, collected scrap rubber for the war effort, bought new clothes and fabric to sew another dress, and even spent a few days experiencing dorm life at John Brown University while visiting friends. It wasn't one unforgettable adventure that made the summer special. It was the accumulation of ordinary days, each one carefully preserved in a few handwritten lines.

The last summer of leisure ended when Margaret began her senior year at Tulsa Central High School that September. Although the diary had room for four more years, she wrote only a few entries in 1943 and then stopped altogether. Somehow that seems fitting. Childhood doesn't usually end all at once. It simply gives way to the busy years that follow, and one day you realize you've left those long summer days behind.

Reading these pages, I realized I wasn't simply making a list of old movies.

I was spending the summer with my sixteen-year-old mother.

I thought I was writing a story about leisure.

Instead, I found a window into the everyday joys of wartime America and got to know the sixteen-year-old girl everyone called Margie, long before she became the woman my father called Peggy.