Today's photo is one that I fondly recall. I grew up when Franklin was a small, rural town in Tennessee where not much happened. One big event each spring was the Franklin Rodeo. The Rodeo was started in 1949 by the Franklin Rotary Club. It is known as one of the longest-running family events in Middle Tennessee and one of the largest rodeos east of the Mississippi River. When I was a little girl, the rodeo was a BIG deal! We never missed the parade if at all possible. There were local civic clubs represented with floats made on wooden hay wagons and pickup trucks with scout troops riding in the back and beauty queens sitting on the back of a convertible. One of my aunts was even selected as Rodeo Queen in her day. The Rodeo was HUGE!
When it was Rodeo Week at school, we all became cowboys. I don't mean the kind I really was that took a stick out into the pasture and drove the cows up to the barn at milking time, either. I mean the kind that wore leather cowboy boots, bandannas, and cowboy hats and rode the range. At the end of the week, we all were allowed to dress like the cowboys we dreamed of being. Well, sort of. You see, there was a dress code at my school and girls had to wear skirts or dresses - no pants. So, jeans and chaps were out altogether for this old gal, no matter how rugged you were out on your fantasy range.
I well remember that Mama made me a new outfit just for Rodeo Day. I believe that it was hand-crafted of chambray or twill of some sort and accessorized with a bandanna. My boots that I tromped around on the farm in were cleaned up and I was allowed to wear them instead of my normal 'school-shoes' which were probably Mary-Janes or, maybe, some sort of Keds. Best of all, I got to wear a cowboy hat as well.
When I look at this photo today, I see the scraggly barbed-wire fence built with cedar posts that Daddy cut himself which surrounded our rocky yard and the old tool shed in the background. I see the old second-hand car that Mama took me to school in that sent us careening into a neighbor's yard one morning (another story for another day). I see the cedar pole that was used to hold the power line that Daddy and Granddaddy ran from the house to the milk barn leaning off 'toward Aunt Sally's' as my parents' used to say. I see the date when the photo was developed and remember that scalloped-edge the picture had and sort of long for the old days when that is the only way we could get photos developed from an old Brownie camera at the local drug store. I see my seven-year-old, second-grade, spindly arms and knobby knees and wish I was half that skinny now. Gracious! We were poor country folk but I was smiling just as happy as can be to be dressed in my Rodeo Day finery.
As a teacher, looking back, I probably would have dreaded Rodeo Day like the plague because it would have been such a disruption. All those kids in hats and boots and hyped up about the next day's parade and big rodeo would have been rowdy and certainly not interested in doing anything school-like! Looking back as a kid, though, I recall just how fancy I thought I looked and how lucky I felt to get to go to school looking so decked-out. Good times!
Giddy-up, Cowgirl!
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