Picnics at the Waterworks Park in Topeka

When I was growing up my mother loved picnics. My father did not. It was an interesting fact that their rehearsal meal before their wedding was a picnic. On the nights my dad had a meeting and did not come home to dinner my mother took the four of us kids on a picnic. She gathered everything into a paper sack, took a can opener and canned beans, macaroni in a double boiler and we were off to the Waterworks Park, which was on the banks of the Kaw River. In the pictures I have of the picnics is a swingset and all the pools of the water department behind me. That is when little girl's pants always were about six inches showing under their dresses. My mother would open the canned beans. I still like beans straight from the can--unheated. My cousins went with us sometimes. They did not like cold beans. Out of the sack my mother had was an assortment of things. The macaroni stayed nice and hot in the double boiler. If I remember more I will add to this but that is my memory--fun, swings, canned beans and macaroni.