Our Tar Paper Shack

When I was a little girl, we lived in Bloomington, Indiana, where my parents were both enrolled in Graduate School at Indiana University.  We lived in a trailer, in a trailer park peopled primarily by poor and relatively uneducated workers at RCA’s television factory.   My mother was (is) from an upper middle class family who’d lived in the suburbs of Chicago; and my father was from a lower middle class, rural family—his grandfather had been, among other things, the mayor of the tiny town (1,000 inhabitants) of Cyril, Oklahoma.  My father was upwardly mobile, but to say that we didn’t have much money at that point is the understatement of the year.  Still, my father was a proud man, valuing his own rural roots, his opportunities to ‘better himself’, and his pioneer background.  His grandparents, with whom he grew up, had been part of the land rush when the Oklahoma Territory ‘opened up’ to white settlers—a process that had many an adverse impact on the original inhabitants, but which was also linked to a central set of mainstream American values on adventure, courage, independence, and a rural lifestyle.

Around 1953, when I was 8, my father decided that we needed more space (or maybe my mother did?).  Anyway, he decided to build a small shack out to one side of our 24’ trailer.  I remember him sawing and hammering into the night, proud of his accomplishments, enjoying the work—even though he was already busy with his graduate studies (in anthropological linguistics) and a full time job at RCA.  I can still see the light color of the wood and the sawdust, the light glistening off the wood as it lay across a sawhorse; I can even smell the freshly cut beams.  I watched the gradual growth of this structure, and noted my mother’s pleasure as she contemplated the reduction in crowding within our trailer.  I saw her pride in her husband’s creation and her enjoyment of its added space.  I listened to my parents joking about their tar paper shack.

After it was finished, I was given the right to play on a shelf right in the front of the ‘shack’.  My most vivid memories there are of playing with two dolls: Tinker Bell and Peter Pan.  Tinker Bell had a mini skirt and lovely gauzy wings; Peter Pan was all dressed in green leaves.  They were the size of today’s Barbie Dolls—though of much more human proportions!  I spent hours recreating the Peter Pan story, putting myself in Tinker Bell’s shoes (or wings).

When I started writing this, I didn’t even know if tar paper continued to exist or not, but it does: I saw some the other day.  It is a sort of tan color, with speckles of black or dark brown.  I think it is black on the underside, definitely scratchy to the touch, rather like sandpaper.  When I was little, it was the cheapest external covering one could buy for a house.  It was also symbolic of poverty in the US.  Saying someone ‘lived in a tar paper shack’ at that time—I haven’t heard the phrase in years—set them aside as particularly poor and disadvantaged.  I remember the irony and amusement with which my parents referred to their own ‘tar paper shack.’  They thought, I suspect, that it was amusingly inappropriate for their situation, since they assumed their poverty (which was real enough) was temporary.  Now, living in a trailer has much the same meaning.  But the tar paper shack was even lower on the economic totem pole.

My father’s fondness for our tar paper shack reflected several of his core values.  Building such a structure served as a reaffirmation of his manhood (something that his intellectual pursuits, in his eyes, threatened).  He demonstrated his independence from public opinion—he could laugh at the stereotype of a tar paper shack, even while owning one.  And he confirmed his conviction that one’s worth was in no way defined by where or in what one lived.  He was proud to have our tar paper shack.  For me, it symbolizes some of my happy childhood memories—and, although I don’t share my father’s view that to be a ‘real man’ one has to actively and routinely display one’s physical strength, I do share the other values he displayed in his attitudes toward our tar paper shack.  He was a good role model in many ways.

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