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VINTAGRAPH • WPA • WWII • YOU MEAN A WOMAN CAN OPEN IT?

Let's Pretend: 1954

My mother never mowed a lawn in her life. But she did pose here, for my father to take her picture, in the back yard of our first Levittown Pennsylvania home. This is my mother pretending to mow the lawn.
What’s interesting about this picture is the actual mower. The year of this picture is 1954. Notice the cord trailing behind my mother, wrapped around the side of the handle, and plugged into the motor. This rotary mower was electric. And it was quiet. No two stroke motor buzz or starter cord to pull. Though my father bought it used from an ad on a bulletin board at work in 1953, because he owned no mower before he owned that house, it only dates from around 1950 or 1951. I found the identical mower for sale in a Canadian Sears catalog of that era. Paint color was a dark rust shade of red.

My mother never mowed a lawn in her life. But she did pose here, for my father to take her picture, in the back yard of our first Levittown Pennsylvania home. This is my mother pretending to mow the lawn.

What’s interesting about this picture is the actual mower. The year of this picture is 1954. Notice the cord trailing behind my mother, wrapped around the side of the handle, and plugged into the motor. This rotary mower was electric. And it was quiet. No two stroke motor buzz or starter cord to pull. Though my father bought it used from an ad on a bulletin board at work in 1953, because he owned no mower before he owned that house, it only dates from around 1950 or 1951. I found the identical mower for sale in a Canadian Sears catalog of that era. Paint color was a dark rust shade of red.

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Wild Wild Meadow

Today there are high tension lines where my mother is standing and a fence keeping the homeowners away from them. I was only able to see 110 Dogwood Drive from the street when I was last there, but my subjective impression was that all of the homes in that section had lost half of their back yards to those new electric lines.
Dogwood Drive was the outer circle of the neighborhood, so all of the houses on that side of the street did not back up to other homes. Ours backed up to woods, an open meadow, and a creek that you could ice skate on in winter. I played in the woods, in the creek (which was shallow) and picked wild blackberries there.
Inner homes had streets and other homes in their back yards as you envision.
No doubt my parents, who were original owners, picked that lot, to have their Levittown home built on, because of the forest behind it.

As for what my mother was wearing, what can I say?
She had no house dresses or work clothes. And I had no separate school clothes and play clothes.
She wore what she thought was fashionable, always.

Posing

No kidding, she's posing. Who would ever mow the lawn in a tight long-sleeved shirt, long form-fitting skirt, and pumps? I'm perfectly fine with a domestic division of labours. I'll bet your dad never sewed a single garment as she did. What really surprises me is the edge of wildness behind the Levittown home: the tall grasses and woods. I imagined something a little more classically suburban.

Cool mower

Even this electric mower used a common styling feature of the era; the vertical teeth on the front. I love that look and would love to have an old mower to use on the "easy" parts of my yard. I'm not giving up my self-propelled Lawn-boy!

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