A Picnic

I was thinking about early childhood memories the other day (having misplaced some much more recent memories) and searched up a recent study¹ that indicated that people can have memories dating back to age 2 1/2, although they most likely guess their age at the time of their first memories inaccurately, usually adding at least a year. Older memories (from age four or five and up) are usually more-or-less correctly dated.

A fairly well-known literary mention of the phenomenon is found in the first pages of “The Education of Henry Adams”, where Mr. Adams(1838-1918) remembers “the boy’s” infant impressions of a the color of a yellow tile floor and the taste of a “his” baked apple after a long illness. Mr. Adams is not always a reliable narrator, but I’ll take him at his word here.

I find neither taste nor color in my distant memories, which are more like monochrome snapshots. One snapshot is a fuzzy mental image from a picnic in the early 1950’s. I see a three door portable toilet, with a line of men at one door, and a line of women at the next door, all in 1950s summer finery. There was no line at the third door, and I was waddling in that direction at top speed, having a sudden urgent need for the facilities. My Dad was with me and quickly steered me to a bush which then got watered.

His explanation made no sense at the time, but this is what I can reconstruct: the picnic was something that the “Union²” had specified in their “contract” with the paper mill “management”. Since there were very many “Union” locals in very many papermills all over the country. there were some odd things written into the “contract”. Specifically, since some of the papermills were in states with legally-mandated segregation, all of the mills were required by contract to produce a “segregated” toilet at their annual employee picnics.

Since New York State had no such laws, and the Corinth mill had nobody on staff to “segregate”, we had the absurd situation of a three-door port-a-potty, hauled in from heaven knows where, to comply with a national Union contract.