Nancy and the Pollution Parade

By Peggy McManus September  2025

It was early summer when Mom and Dad bought their first house and moved our family out of our single-wide trailer at Picnic Pines Trailer Park. I had just turned seven. 

I remember thinking that the new house wasn’t much bigger than our trailer had been, and I still had to share a bedroom with my sisters. The house cost $8,000, which I thought was an exorbitant price, especially since I didn’t even get my own bedroom. 

One day, not long after we moved in, a repairman showed up to do some work on our septic tank. He mentioned to Dad that he had a horse for sale, having no doubt noticed the empty barn and lush pasture behind our house. 

It so happened that a few weeks earlier, Dad had told my oldest sister, Kelly, that if she stopped whining about having to move, he might, one day, buy a horse. I doubt Dad thought “one day” would ever come, but since it had, he ponied up and bought the horse. We named him Huckleberry and called him “Huck” for short.

It turned out that Huck was a pretty old horse, so probably not exactly what Kelly had in mind, but all of us girls fell in love with him at first sight. He was rather robust, to put it politely, and my seven-year-old legs could barely straddle the width of his back, let alone grip his flanks. Because of this, I wasn’t allowed to ride him alone until I had grown a few inches. 

Truth be told, Huckleberry was mostly Kelly’s horse, and she rode him constantly. She rarely let me come along on those rides, and as such, Huck didn’t do much to relieve my boredom that first summer. By the time September rolled around, I was antsy to get back to school, where I could finally meet some kids to play with.

On the first day, Mom took me to school to help me find my classroom and meet my 2nd-grade teacher, Mrs. McCloud. She was young and seemed kind, so I didn’t mind when Mom handed me off to her and hurried away.

Those first few days in 2nd grade were pretty boring. I didn’t find any kids that could be considered decent friend material. I was starting to lose hope, but luckily, things on the friend front were about to start looking up.

A week or so into the school year, I was waiting at the bus stop, feeling like a dork in my new Brownie uniform. I was not optimistic about the day ahead, and was nervous about attending my first Brownie meeting after school. 

Suddenly, a girl about my age came bounding out of a house across the street from the bus stop. When she saw me there, she skipped over to where I was standing.

“You’re new around here, aren't you?” she asked. “What’s your name?”

“Peggy,” I answered. “We moved here over the summer. What’s your name?”

“I’m Nancy, and I live there,” the girl said, pointing to the large house she had just exited. “Where do you live?”

“Down the block in the white house with a fat horse in the pasture,” I replied. 

“Oh, I know that one!” Nancy said. “Rats, I gotta go or I’ll be late for school, but I’ll come find you soon!”

She must go to the school down the road, I thought, watching Nancy skip away. It was within walking distance. Since I was a measly 2nd grader, I still had to go to the K-2 school, which was several miles away and required a bus ride to get there.

I wasn’t holding out hope that Nancy would actually come looking for me. After all, she was at least a grade above me in school. But a couple of days later, a knock sounded on our front door, and I opened it to see Nancy standing there. “Can you come out and play?” she asked.

“Mom, I’m going outside,” I yelled in the general vicinity of the kitchen and rushed out the door, letting it slam shut behind me. “Let’s go!” I practically sang in my excitement to finally have someone to play with.

I soon learned that Nancy was in the 3rd grade and that she was the third youngest of nine children. Her dad’s name was James. He was tall and thin, quiet, and very hardworking. Her mother, Carol, was a stay-at-home mom who pretty much left us to our own devices as long as we stayed out of trouble and out of her way.

Nancy’s family, like mine, was tight on funds, and neither of us got a weekly allowance. But over the years, we came up with all sorts of money-making schemes, so we were never short on cash for long. We ran the usual hustles like lemonade stands and bake sales, featuring goodies from my Easy-Bake Oven. Eventually, we started selling horseback rides on Huckleberry when Kelly wasn’t around, which proved popular with the neighborhood kids and was quite lucrative. It was a quarter for a ride around the field, and more if you wanted to go further. Of course, kids couldn’t ride unless their legs were long enough to span the ever-growing girth of Huckleberry, which mine finally were by the end of third grade.

Even though it wasn’t our favorite job, Nancy and I would often kill potato bugs and slugs in Mom’s garden for a penny a kill and collect night crawlers for Dad to use as fishing bait for the same fee. The truth is, we worked most of the time, but as long as we were together, we didn’t really mind. 

In those early years, we spent most of our earnings on penny candy, pinball at the local bowling alley, or knick-knacks from the five and dime. On special occasions, we splurged and rode our bikes to Behm’s Creamery for an ice cream soda or sundae.

By the early 70s, Nancy and I had honed our money-making skills to the point where we no longer had to stoop to bug murder. Instead, we sold greeting cards door-to-door for a company that Nancy found advertised in the back of one of her older sister’s magazines. I didn’t think about it at the time, but she must have falsified some of our info, as it seems unlikely any legit business would hire a 4th and 5th grader to sell their products. We supplemented our card earnings by mowing lawns, babysitting, and perming our elderly neighbor, Mrs. Smith’s, hair.

In what free time we had, we rode Huckleberry through the many fields in our rural neighborhood or up into the nearby foothills. We played softball and kickball with other kids out in the empty lot behind Nancy’s house. On summer evenings, we played Kick-the-Can until Mom rang the cowbell, which meant it was time to head home. 

No one watched us. We watched out for each other. When we didn’t have school, we hurried through our daily chores, then raced off on our bikes in search of new adventures. 

One particularly interesting adventure came about because of something terrible that Nancy and I had learned in school — pollution was destroying the Earth; the air, the water, and the land were all affected. 

Even our own neighborhood was polluted! Litter lined our streets, and if you weren’t careful where you stepped with your bare feet, you could easily cut a foot on an aluminum pull tab from a soda or beer can, a rusty bottle cap, or a shard of glass.

But what could Nancy and I do about it? We were just two young girls from the poor part of town. We stewed on it a bit and came up with a plan.

What we needed was a Pollution Parade! Of course, it made perfect sense. We set to work hashing out the logistics, which included painting protest signs and recruiting neighbor kids, particularly the boy who owned a wagon, since we needed it to act as our parade’s float and trash container. 

After painting “Give a hoot, don’t pollute, and “Keep Our Air Clean ” on some makeshift cardboard placards, we rallied the troops and took to the streets.

“STOP, STOP, STOP POLLUTION!” we cried in unison, shaking pom-poms and the painted placards in the air. We marched through the streets, picking up trash and tossing it into the float, er, wagon. Around and around we went, block by polluted block. 

By the time the parade ended, not only were we exhausted and hoarse from yelling, but our wagon was heaped full of trash, and we learned that someone had alerted the press. 

It turned out to be my dad, a journalism professor at a local college who had contacts at the city newspaper. He also had a keen sense for a good feature story, and our politically correct parade met the criteria.

Dad lined us up around the wagon of trash we’d collected and snapped our picture. The next day, there it was, in the Features Section of the newspaper, along with a blurb about how a bunch of kids had taken the pollution problem into their own hands. 

All the neighbor kids who’d joined the pollution parade felt like movie stars. Their parents gushed over them for days, and after that, you’d often see one of them walking home from school with a handful of trash gathered along the way, or calling someone out for tossing a cigarette butt on the ground. 

Nancy and I let them bask in their glory. We were content with the outcome of our efforts. Our neighborhood streets were clean or at least cleaner. We could usually walk barefoot and not step on a nail or piece of glass. The parade had been a success, but it was over, and we were ready to move on to our next grand adventure.

Nancy's in the back row, just left of the "Keep Our Air Clean" sign, and Peg's on the far right holding a pom-pom.