My high school years were taken up with the church, friends, reading and swimming. There is a convent in Belmont called Notre Dame, and they had an Olympic-size swimming pool with a diving board, a nice metered diving board. Every summer they allowed women and girls, for 25 cents a day, to go swimming. We could walk. It was quite a little ways, but it wasn't all that far. My sister and I spent our time in the swimming pool, diving and playing around in the sun. We also played tennis by the hour. When canasta came in, we learned to play canasta. I don't really don't like playing cards, but I learned to play canasta.
We had dirt clod flights in the yard with the other kids, played kick-the-can and hide-and-seek. And Frank, a friend of mine, had his Coaster stolen. I'll never forget, and I can see it till this day, a sign painted on the concrete: Five Cents Reward for Frank's Coaster. Somebody took it. It was one he made out of skate wheels and whatever, but it was his. Somebody took it.
The Herd girls were well known in Belmont as very good girls, so we never had any problem getting a job. In those days, if you could do anything, they'd hire you. We worked at the pharmacy. In the pharmacy they had a fountain, and so we worked behind the fountain. I remember fifty cents an hour was the rate when I worked there. Then I was hired in another place for a dollar an hour. I didn't work there very long, just till I got married. As I got nearer nineteen, my friends and I would take a bus to San Francisco and we'd go to the Mark Hopkins Hotel. We would get dressed up with the hats, the bags, the gloves, the stockings and the matched shoes, and we'd go sit in the hotel and watch the people. You had people from all over the world come through, and the Indians in their beautiful sari's and the turbans. And we would sit there and watch them. And then we would go to a seafood restaurant for lunch. After that, we'd come home. We really enjoyed that.
Carol and I were very close. We took a bike hike together once. We borrowed bikes, because we never had our own. Joanie Fox, who was younger than us and lived next door, had a bicycle. She'd let us ride her bicycle sometimes. We borrowed bicycles that time and took a bike hike up Canada Road, all the way along, and then it was all downhill from the top down to Redwood City. And that's a long way, all downhill. We'd go up and see the Hetch Hetchy, which has a cistern that I found interesting, with the water. It was all tiled and flowed. It's nice.
I don't remember ever discussing my father with Carol, but I'm sure I did. We used to hide under the covers and curl our hair. Being the daughters of a beautician, we had to look okay for school. Sometimes we didn't feel like doing our hair in the evening, but we knew it was going to look horrible in the morning, so we'd take a flashlight, and get under the covers. I got quite good in the dark. I can do it till this day, pin-curling. I can pin-curl my hair in the dark.if I had to.
We used to play clay. We had a lot of clay, not all at one time, but you kept adding to it, and you didn't really get rid of too much. On rainy days, we would want to go outside, but we couldn't go. We were told that if there was enough blue in the sky to make a cat a pair of pajamas, it would clear up. But of course it didn't. So, we would say, "Rain, rain go away. Carol and Betty want to play." And it didn't. So we'd play clay. We'd get the clay out and make a lake, and little people, and even little outfits. It was fun. I think that's probably why I go into the artistic end of it, because we did stuff like that.
