Bunk Beds

My older brothers, Dale and Randy, had a bunk bed.  I thought their bunk bed was the coolest thing.  Once it was a pirate ship sailing on the high seas and we were pirates chasing someone to get their gold.  It seems my brothers had lively imagingations and would also dress the part of pirates to make the game play more real.

Dale teaching me about pirates

To this day, I’m not sure what my mother’s hosiery and high heels had to do with being a pirate, but I guess at the time it seemed essential.  Just for the record, we are both happily married to women and no longer dress as pirates.

Sometimes the bunk beds served as a stage for hand puppet or even string puppet shows.  We had hand puppets of some of the characters from the Howdy Doody show.  Mayor Phineas T. Bluster was one and Flub a Dub was another.  I don’t think the stringed puppets were characters on any TV show, I think they may have been a project or craft of one of my older brothers.  We also made hand puppets out of Play-Doh and cloth, as well as sock puppets made from socks with buttons for eyes.  My mother would help us with these.  It was always fun and challenging to make a puppet head out of Play-Doh and then dry it and attach it to some cloth for a body.  The puppet heads were always very heavy for their size but we didn’t care, we made them and we were having fun.

The room Dale and Randy shared was large enough for the bunk bed, a dresser or two and nothing else.  The house we lived in was a very small two bedroom home, probably no more than 900 square feet, if that.  With five growing boys it was getting smaller all the time.  However, during these years when we played pirates, or cowboys, (then the bunk bed would become a stagecoach) I was between five and eight years old, making Jerry’s age between two and five, and Kevin was another three years younger than Jerry, I think.  We were still small so we still fit in that little house.

The bedroom I slept in should have belonged to my parents, but instead Jerry and I, and then later, Kevin, all slept in that room in what seemed to be a large bed.  Our room was okay for Lincoln Logs and games like that, but without a bunk bed it seemed a little less interesting.  We did have a mysterious closet that held secret things as well as toys and clothes.  The secret thing was a panel that could be removed to access either plumbing or electric, I’m not sure which.

As I said before, my parents slept on a roll out in the living room.  I think they used the closet in my room for their clothes.  Can you imagine folding up your bed every day and unfolding it every night, for several years?  I wouldn’t want to do it.  I suppose it wasn’t their idea of a good time either.