WHEN LAURA TAYLOR was 10 years old, her mother, aka “the meanest mom on 33rd Street,” made a rule: Every Wednesday, Laura would cook dinner for the family.
The oldest of four children, Laura was also required to make out the menu a week ahead and give her mother the list of ingredients for the Friday shopping trip.
Preparing dinner Wednesday was not a choice, she said, and skipping out was not an option. If something came up that her friends were doing that night, Laura didn’t go.
“I did learn to cook,” she said.
Laura — now Laurie Medlicott — is still putting her skills to use as the volunteer kitchen manager and cook for senior meals at the Port Townsend Community Center.
She also has the strong sense of duty engendered by mothers.
So Saturday, when five of Medlicott’s friends from childhood arrived in town for a reunion, she told them where she would be Monday night: cooking the senior dinner.
And she asked if they would help. The response was unanimous.
“Everybody is involved in some kind of community service,” Medlicott said. “That’s the way we were raised.”
The “where” they were raised was a blue-collar neighborhood in northeast Kansas City, Kan., in the late 1940s and ’50s.
‘Lutheran ghetto’
The women laughingly call their neighborhood the “Lutheran ghetto” because all the families were of German descent and attended Grace Lutheran Church.
The children attended Grace Lutheran Day School from kindergarten through eighth grade.
On Saturday, the six women held a reunion in Port Townsend to reaffirm friendships rooted in childhood that have flourished for more than six decades.
“We decided to call ourselves the Grace Girls,” Medlicott said.
It was Judy Walton, who lives in Colorado Springs, Colo., who suggested having a reunion before they were too old to do it, Medlicott said.
Not wanting to go to Kansas City in the summer, she and Joan Christensen, who lives in Tacoma, suggested the others come out to the Northwest.
On Thursday, Joan drove her van to Sea-Tac and picked up Judy, Shirley Fowler and Carol Hackenberry from Kansas City and Trudy Darby, who lives in Grove, Okla.
On Friday, Joan took the visitors on a tour of the Tacoma waterfront and a boat trip on Wollochet Bay, then brought the group over to Port Townsend on Saturday morning.
There, they had lunch on the deck of Medlicott’s waterfront condominium and reminisced over school days.
“Do you remember ‘The End of the Golden Cheese?’” Joan asked, referring to the title song of one of the school’s annual operettas.
Walton put together photo albums for each Grace Girl, including a photo of them in costumes with “swoopy” sleeves for the year they were “the shadows,” flitting around the other characters on stage.
Although Joan, Trudy and Shirley were a grade below Laurie, Judy and Carol, the school was so small that the kindergarten and first-grade classes were in one room, with three grades to one room after that.
The girls and their siblings walked to school and also to church.
Medlicott recalled that on Christmas Eve, the families would walk to the children’s program at church.
She and her sisters and brother would return to find Santa Claus had come while they were gone, not realizing until they were grown that their father never saw the Christmas program because he slipped out and returned without them noticing.
After they opened presents, the other families would come over to the Taylor house for eggnog, she said, then they would all walk back to church for the midnight service.
“Christmas Day was kind of an anti-climax,” Medlicott said.
On the cliff
The families also celebrated her father’s February birthday with a sledding party on “the cliff,” a small slope behind the church, the children warming up around the bonfire and drinking hot chocolate from containers nestled in the ashes.
When the girls reached eighth grade, they were confirmed as members of Grace Lutheran.
A photo shows them wearing white dresses with wide skirts made by Carol’s mother, who was a skilled seamstress as well as a prolific baker.
They attended Walther League, the Lutheran youth group, while their parents belonged to the Couples Club at church, where they played cards or square danced.
“It was a great way to grow up,” Medlicott said of the tight-knit community.
She was also in a Girl Scout troop with Joan, Trudy and Carol. She recalled the camping trip to Devil’s Den State Park in Arkansas, where the girls went into a cave and slid down into a hole.
They rationed out squares of Hershey’s bars until they were rescued, Laurie said, which seemed like forever but was actually only an hour.
Then there was the slumber party where they mixed coke and aspirin in the hopes that it would turn into a strong drink.
“It was a complete nothing,” Judy said.
The girls also had fancy dinners with pretend champagne made of orange juice and 7-Up in her mother’s German crystal sherbet glasses.
Whipped Jello was a delicacy — the Jello separated into three layers.
Medlicott also recalled the six-week cooking class that she, Joan and Judy signed up for.
It was offered by the gas utility company at a test kitchen downtown, and the girls took the bus, paying a nickel fare.
There, they learned to make such gourmet delights as creole green beans.
Creole green beans
“You cut up some bacon, added it to the beans and stirred in a can of tomato sauce,” Laurie said.
Laurie, Judy and Carol graduated from Grace Lutheran Day School in 1957, Joan, Trudy and Shirley in 1958.
They remained friends through high school and careers, keeping in touch through their families who stayed in the old neighborhood.
Carol owns a Merle Norman cosmetic studio in Kansas City, which she bought in 1989 to support her family after the death of her husband.
Shirley, who also stayed in Kansas City, retired in 2002 after 31 years with AT&T and now works part time at an animal hospital.
Trudy lived in Kansas City until six years ago, when she retired from a career in information technology with Marion Laboratories and moved to Oklahoma.
Joan, the first to defect, moved to Tacoma in 1968 and is a retired special-education teacher who worked in the Tacoma School District.
Judy moved to Colorado in 1983 to go to graduate school and worked as a school counselor. She is now running for the School Board in Colorado Springs.
Medlicott, whose first career was in medicine, moved in 1988 to Port Townsend, where she and her husband, a retired physician, ran a bed and breakfast.
She is finishing her second term on the Port Townsend City Council, was named Citizen of the Year for her work with the Fort Worden oral history project and is involved in the fire district.
She volunteered to take over planning and preparing the senior meals in Port Townsend, which had fallen to rotating civic and church groups, to ensure the participants got a well-balanced meal.
Whipped gelatin is probably not on the menu.
More than 51⁄2 decades after graduating from Grace Lutheran Day School, all of the Grace Girls are involved in their churches and communities, because, as Medlicott says, that’s the way they were raised.
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Jennifer Jackson writes about Port Townsend and Jefferson County every Wednesday. To contact her with items for this column, phone 360-379-5688 or email jjackson@olypen.com.
