Playtime in Waco: Kids and critters
By Terri Jo Ryan Tribune-Herald staff writer
With school ending for the semester and two glorious months of summer idleness ahead, it only seems appropriate to look back at some of the children of Waco’s past and the special bond they shared with their furry playmates.
Helen Gelber Lewison, 84, who spent most of her first 19 years of life in Waco, shared stories of her favorite animal companions in her self-published 2000 childhood memoir, The Waco Kid(s): Barefoot Girl with Cheek.
The “cheek,” by the way, refers to her sassy attitude and boisterous ways. Growing up in the Jim Crow era before the racial integration of the 1960s, an outsider to black and white society because of her Jewish heritage, Lewison was heard once as a child wondering aloud “how colored water tastes.”
Rather than play with dolls, she recalled, she preferred to play with her big, orange cat, which she called “my very own living friend.”
After her mother gave her a baby doll and a wicker buggy to stroll with it in, she recalled, “I hurried out, found my cat, took off the doll’s clothes and dressed my orange friend together with the little bonnet carefully tied under his chin. Into the buggy I placed him, and off we went down the street.
“Within a few minutes, my furry friend would jump out of the buggy, the bonnet still tied to his neck blowing in the wind,” she wrote. “He was just as stubborn as I was.”
In later years, as a student at South Junior High, she had an Eskimo Spitz named Boy that enjoyed frolicking in the creek with her. Although he was sometimes ill-tempered with strangers, he was patient with her attempts to clean him up in the wash tub in the yard.
The daughter of Alexander and Bertha Gross Gelber, who came to Waco just after World War I, Helen Jeanette was born June 16, 1924. Her brother, Morton, born in 1921, died of spinal meningitis in Waco in 1935 — a loss that haunted her youth, she wrote.
In late 1942, a year after graduating Waco High, she moved to San Francisco for adventure and work. Lewison, who lives in San Francisco today, is still a cat lover.
tjryan@wacotrib.com
757-5746
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