January 5, 1951

Shirley Baker said she likes Robert Harris. Martin, Thelma, Shriley Baker came out tonite. We put on a Buelah show. Folks played canasta. I got S on Math test & E on English. I wore house skirt & white blouse to school. Good thing Sat. tomorrow. I’m wore out.

The card game of canasta was fairly popular in the 1950s. I know this family sure played a lot of it! You can read the history and rules of Canasta here: All About Canasta.

The Bakers, Martin and Thelma, ran the local grocery store, Baker’s Market. They advertised “Groceries — Vegetables — Meats — Flour”. Their phone number was simply: “70”. That would have been easy enough to remember, if you were lucky enough to live in a home that had a phone at the time.

Shirley is Martin and Thelma’s daughter. She may have liked Robert Harris in 1951, but that isn’t who she ended up marrying!

By putting on “a Beulah show”, I can only guess what she means. Beulah was a 1940s radio series and 1950s television sit-com, and was named after the main character of that show, Beulah, who was a cook and housekeeper for a family named the Hendersons. Beulah was referred to as “the Queen of the Kitchen”. The comical part of the show came from the fact that Beulah continually solves problems that the Hendersons cannot. The Beulah sit-com is reportedly the first ever to star an African American, Hattie McDaniel.

My guess is that Hazel and Shirley put on a cooking show, and I can tell you right now that it’s a genetic trait that Hazel passed on to her granddaughter! When my daughter was little, and we would cook together, she would pretend that she was putting on a cooking show, and give long-winded explanations of each step of what she was doing. I, of course, was her assistant, handing her ingredients, and doing all the “behind-the-scenes” work. We laughingly called her “The Galloping Gourmet”. (She also liked to do radio and TV commercials for various products — you’d have been impressed with her shampoo spot!) Unfortunately, I did not own a video camera at the time — I may have caused Doctor Danna to miss her real calling!

A headline for an article in the January 5, 1951, local paper reads: “Men Do Not Know How Much Energy Housework Takes”. Ladies, don’t we think that’s still true today? What a hoot!