INTRODUCTION
In the 1960s and 1970s, Mom designed a few different editorial columns, satirically geared toward working homemakers like herself (or those who just want to laugh at life), mailing out samples to over 300 newspapers.
Within a year, she was steadily writing two different columns (“No Laughing Matter” and “Minding the Hearth”) for 60 regular papers. Mom found her life, as a struggling, working homemaker, wife, and mother of five, to be the best subject about which to write and it was so relatable to so many of her readers.
Mom also created paralleling cartoon panels, which she called “Full House – as Kept by Gloria Pitzer”; all of which likewise depicted her life in the 1960s and1970s, during the Women’s Liberation movement.
The internet is an awesome source of information and archives for finding some of Mom’s old “No Laughing Matter” columns; as well as her old cookbooks that have been out of print for years but can still be found on Amazon and eBay (sometimes for ridiculous amounts because they’re no longer in print).
I’m dedicating this tab and these monthly posts to her ageless, satirical, creative writing talents. I have a couple of binders full of her humorous commentaries and I look forward to re-sharing them all, here. In honor of The Dog Days of Summer and Mom’s comedic writing legacy, here is one of her old “No Laugh ’N Matter” columns that she syndicated.
As before, I can neither find the exact date of when Mom wrote this article, nor when/where it was published. However, again, the descriptions of us on vacation on the Ohio and Pennsylvania turnpikes are probably from that long summer vacation we took in 1971, to West Virginia, to see our relatives from Dad’s side of the family.
FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
As seen in…
“No Laughing Matter”, by Gloria Pitzer (no printed date available)
HOW TO TRAVEL WITH YOUR KIDS (And Live to Tell About It!)
I HAVE NOTHING AGAINST traveling with our kids – as long as we can go in separate cars. A current poll, taken among the mothers of the Sears Sandbox symposium shows 10 to 1 in favor of going around Harsens Island on a skateboard, as opposed to traveling anywhere by car with their kids – even to the mailbox at the end of the [200-foot long] driveway.
For one thing, any trip is going to be automatically rated ‘X’ when, before you can get out of your own driveway, you must first settle which child is going to sit next to a window and which child won’t.
Before the trip is scarcely underway, we can always depend upon the child who rolls the window down, because they need some air, to be sitting next to the child who wants the window up because they’re cold.
The Sunday supplement ads for vacation-minded families, who want matching luggage, are a waste of time. Who wants matching luggage, when it should, by all rights, be packed in a U-Haul truck and immediately be disorganized the minute you unlock the motel room [or cabin] door…
Because this is usually the exact moment I have to find a clean shirt and slacks for the one who spilled their Dairy Queen [treat] all over themselves. If I told him once, I told him a hundred times: ‘let me hold the shake for you while you drive, Honey!’
The real trouble with packing, I feel, is that you usually end up taking all the wrong kind of clothes. When you leave home in the middle of a driving snow and the skies are icy grey and bleak, it doesn’t occur to you that 450 miles south you’ll be shedding the snow jackets and galoshes; wishing you had brought those shorts and tennis shoes, after all.
It is completely ridiculous to allow any child to pack their own suitcase. Chances are, they will try to convince you that one change of underwear is going to be adequate for a 10-day vacation – and that’s when I visualize myself spending all of my time sitting out the duration of our trip, watching my enzymes and bleach race their way to the dirt and grime in some out-of-the-way, ‘coin-op’ laundry [facility].
Some of the motel rooms we’ve stayed in, have been pretty nice; but then there are some others that left us feeling we could have had the same conveniences, for which we were paying $50 per day, for free had we stayed at home. If [I] can’t wash 6 days [worth of] dirty underwear in the wash basin, [we] can’t stay there!
Not one of the lovely travel brochures I read showed ‘the happy family’, as they pull up to the Pennsylvania turnpike gate without realizing that the baby ate the toll card along the way.
I can say, with all honesty, that we intimately know every public restroom on the Ohio and Pennsylvania turnpikes… not to mention, 3 plazas in West Virginia and several in Niagara Falls.
Another thing about traveling with the kids is that, invariably, the best restaurant is always just around the bend, after you’ve [already] stopped at the worst [one]. We are further engaged in the constant inquiries of the children who will, at annoying intervals, in the perfect unison of an acapella choir ask: “When are we going to get there?”
The remainder of the trip is spent… painfully telling them that I never wanted to read the roadmap for [Daddy] in the first place; and how was I to know that he wanted Exit 7, not 11! And how do you explain to the service station attendant that you were foolish enough to let your wife read the map and now you’re lost?
I’ll be darned if I know – but, before we take another trip with the kids, we’ll have a bumper sticker on our car that reads: “Approach with caution – driver under the influence of children!”
LAST THOUGHTS…
For questions or comments, you can email me at therecipedetective@outlook.com. I’m also on Facebook: @TheRecipeDetective.
[NOTE: As always, I’m asking only for proper credit if you care to re-share this.]
