"A Day At the Colorado State Children's Home" by Ann Unser

I will tell you about one day of being in the Colorado State Children’s Home and what it was like to live there.

Early in the morning, the house parent comes into your room to wake you up. Her name is Miss Bowerfild but we called her Miss B the witch because she was mean to us. She would come out snapping her fingers for us to get up and get dressed for the day to begin.

Her finders were painted a bright red and she would wear very bright red lipstick, as well, she would put on very bad perfume. She also had very bad taste in clothing, and they were awful to look at as they mostly black and gray in color. She was very ugly and fat.

We got up and made our beds, got dressed, and then lined up for breakfast. WE would go down the stairway that led to the front door, and then we would walk to the dining hall to eat breakfast. The food was always burnt and smelled very bad and tasted very bad as will even before you got in to the dining room: burnt eggs, toast, bacon, and cream of wheat. I mostly did not eat their food because it was bad and I did not like it at.

After we were through eating, we would go back to our department and do our work. I had to clean the stairway for at least four weeks; I had to get my pail of water, my scrub brush, and a rag. I had to make sure the metal on the edge go the stairs shined and on dirt was still on them or I would get in to trouble and be put on restriction and lose my little bit of allowance that they gave us each week.

When we were done with our chores, we would go outside and do more work like mowing the lawn then we would rake it up into piles. Sometimes we would play in the cut grass, make a playhouse, and pretend as if it was our very own house that we lived in all the time. I liked the smell of fresh cut grass, that was the only good thing about cutting the grass back then.

Then we would go back and get washed up for lunch, which was not much better then breakfast. We would have burnt hot dogs or hamburgers, French fries, pickles, and some kind of dessert like cake or pudding as they called it sometimes I think they did not know what it was.

After lunch, we would go outside to play if we were not in trouble or being punished for something we did or did not do like maybe running away from that place. This was because we were tired of being hit by that witch Miss B or being put in the hallway bent over with our hands behind our backs for hours and if we moved, she would hit us with her belt.

However, we had to stay right around the department that we lived in. We could only go away from the department if we were riding bikes on the D. The D was part of a driveway that was shaped like a D. Sometimes we asked if we could ride around the block.

We would sometimes have a picnic on the D in the summer time and that was the only time we had fun and good food to eat that was not burnt for a change like hot dogs, hamburgers, pickles, chips, pop and then we would play games like football, basketball, bad mitten and softball.

Next, we had to go inside the department ant wash up for dinner. I wonder what they made now for us to eat that they did not burn. Maybe hoping it was it some kind of meat like chicken with mashed potato, green beans and some kind of cake for dessert.

Now we go back to the department to watch some T.V. shoes for an hour or so like the Mickey Mouse Club, Old Yeller< and My Three Sons. They were our favorite shows.

Then we would have to take a bath before we could go to bed. There were twelve of us girls and we had three tubs so she had six of us at a time take our bath, two to a tub, I hated that but what could I do? I had to do what I was told to do.

Then we had to go to bed and do it all over again tomorrow the same old thing we did the day before.