BEST DIGITAL COOKING THERMOMETER

This 1963 era photo is of Dot 'n Donald Reid in my family's living room in Dundalk, Md.. Donald was one of my mother's "first cousins", so Dot and Donald were "second cousins" of mine. Their five sons were, or still are, "third cousins" of mine. And back in the 1950s and '60s our families visited each other several times a year.

Dot ‘n Donald Reid lived up in the farmland that straddles the Maryland/Pennsylvania line, near New Freedom, Pa.. There were a bunch of Reid families up around there, all were my mother’s aunts, uncles and cousins and all were warm hearted, welcoming country folks who always wanted to feed us every time we visited them. For my parents, two sisters and I, it was about an hour and a half drive from our home, in the Dundalk suburbs of Baltimore City, up to visit the Reids. We would never show up at our country relative’s homes hungry, but they were compelled to offer and start setting out country cooked and baked goodies anyways. One time, we stopped along the road, bought a big bag of some famous, pre-McDonald’s era hamburgers, took it in to Aunt Mildred’s and Uncle Charlie’s house to show we didn’t need Aunt Mildred to be cookin’ up a storm in the kitchen, and she just happily hustles on in to her kitchen, saying, “Well then, we need desert, don’t we?” And all of a sudden she’s got ice cream, cakes and cookies all over the dining room table.

For a young boy like me, the best thing about visiting them Reids was exploring the outdoors out in the country and the closest small town stores with my cousins. Dot and Donald were who we visited most, and they had five children, all boys, with the middle son being my age and the others no more than fours years older or younger then me. Their names were Wayne, Gary, Steve, Glenn and Robert. Man! Did we ever have some great times together. Funny thing was, when they came down to visit us in Dundalk the boys all thought that I had it best with my closest friends right on my suburban block and stores a short walk away, while the Reid boys’ friends all lived a country mile or three from the Reid residence and the stores were a car ride away. They just wouldn’t take my word for it that they had it better out in the country with all them fields and woods to have fun in with four brothers and their friends.

My first memory of visiting Dot ‘n Donald are of me being about 6-years-old. They lived in an old farmhouse that had a wood stove for cooking and heat and a falling apart, unused, well weathered old barn out in the front yard. Two things about that day will always stay with me. First was, when we got there, Dot told us that she had just chopped the heads off two chickens and was going to pluck and cook them for dinner for us all. I immediately inquired if the chickens had run around with their heads cut off; she jovially answered, “Yeah,” and seeing my childish, mildish, comical, finger snap and “Aw shucks” disappointment at missing that show she promised me that the next time she was gonna cook us a chicken dinner she’d wait till we got there before she put the axe to any chickens, so’s I could see them chickens what the old saying says and run around with their heads cut off. The second thing I’ll always remember about that day is how much wonderful fun it was to climb all around in and run around outside and in that old barn with my five cousins and two sisters.

The next time we went to visit Dot ‘n Donald, Donald had built his family a nice, big, split-level home that had a huge yard around it and a little ol’ country road passing by it. We had corn roasts and country fiddle get-togethers there and lots of other memorable times too. My mother had been very impressed with the way that Dot had kept that old farmhouse woodstove at a steady temperature for baking those two chickens and dinner rolls and pies and cakes and such, but the new split-level house was a modern as they came at the time, which was around 1958. And I loved the fireplace in the new home’s basement clubroom.

Donald was a fantastic homebuilder, so, after a few years in the split-level he had moved his family into a newer, and just as spacious, home he had constructed for them. That house had a dairy farm adjacent to its back yard. One Sunday evening, the three cousins closest my age, my younger sister and I climbed over the dairy farm’s electric charged, barbed wire fence, and we teens went to chasing the cows awhile. We didn’t chase them too far, and every time we kids stopped to laugh, roll around in the grass and rest, them cows would all come back and gather all around to gawk blankly at us. So we’d pop up and chase ‘um again. Hopefully, we never affected them cows’ milk production none. I had such a good time at that that the next Monday, down in Dundalk High School, I wrote the word “COWS” on my school notebook. The kids in school got a kick out of asking me why I had “COWS” on my notebook and that it only meant actual cows

A community between Glen Burnie and Pasadena which is called Freetown was founded by freed slaves in the 1840s.
In the 1920s after two community activists, Cora Carter and Jane Dorsey Matthew, petitioned Anne Arundel County the Freetown school opened for African American children. Before the mid-1960s county schools were segregated in Maryland.

With money from the Rosenwald School Fund which was started by Sears Roebuck President Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington's Tuskegree Institute, the Freetown school was built . It is 1 of 11 out 23 Rosenwald schools which are still standing today, in Maryland.
From 1948 through 1952, the building had just two teachers who taught students in first through seventh grades. At this time used school books handed down from white schools were stored in the storage room. In front of desks with old-fashioned inkwells, students sat on old benches .
At this time a pot-bellied stove in a kitchen area was used by teachers for cooking lunches and the building had no indoor toilets . The windows were framed with handmade curtains.
For art supplies students rummaged the woods for berries for paint.

Sterling Construction Inc. did a beautiful job renovating this school. I was honored to photograph the historical school.for the company. It was exciting because I love history and loved to hear how people lived back in the days. Ironicly the next day I got to photograph the orginal school from Remembering the Titans movie and it was the first desegregated school in Alexandria, Virginia/D.C. So it was a week of learning more history.

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