This morning, like most mornings, the alarm rang, and I reached over to the nightstand to silence it and grab my radio headphones to catch up on the news of the day. I snuggled down under the covers and intended to get up once the news was over. The first sound I heard was the familiar childish voice crooning “On The Good Ship Lollipop” and I knew instantly that Shirley Temple was no longer with us. I listened intently as the newsman said she had passed away last evening of natural causes, her family by her side. I never heard the balance of the broadcast, since the news of her passing instantly took me back to an era of little girls’ giggles – both Shirley Temple’s and my own. Her death evoked a bevy of beautiful memories, almost too many to recount in the space of this blog post. Coincidentally, I just wrote a post about Shirley Temple last April 23rd after hearing an audio clip of her song “Animal Crackers In My Soup” which was played to commemorate her birthday: (https://lindaschaubblog.net/2013/04/23/zoo/. I’ll bet alot of people haven’t thought of Shirley Temple in many years until they heard the medley of a few of her movies and songs on the news today. When I was growing up, I would happily plunk myself in front of the black-and-white TV set in the living room to watch this iconic imp’s antics every chance I could. I especially loved her tap dancing routines with Bojangles Robinson. Shirley Temple’s movies were feel-good stories that made you smile and laugh out loud, unlike the Disney dramas like “Old Yeller” or “The Red Pony” that often made you sad. It seemed for years there were movie marathons featuring her films that could be watched on a lazy Sunday afternoon, followed by “Lassie” or “The Wonderful World of Disney”. My mom grew up watching the first-run Shirley Temple movies and had one of the original Shirley Temple dolls. She often quipped that had she known she would have had a little girl, she would have saved the doll and passed it down to me, Well, I wasn’t hard done by with my Thumbelina or Chatty Cathy, but it would probably be a collector’s item now. When I was a young girl, whenever there was a special occasion or sometimes just for Sunday School, my mom would spend the evening before painstakingly twisting strands of my light brown tresses into pin curls. She’d sit with her container of bobby pins and a comb for nearly an hour, then swaddle my head with its prickly bobby pins in a bandana so the pins didn’t poke my head when I went to bed. The next morning when the bobby pins were moved, each lock of hair was wound around my mom’s finger to make springy tendril curls, or “sausage curls” to resemble Shirley Temple’s hairdo. The picture above was my “Shirley Temple” look circa Christmas 1961 when I was five years old. I don’t know if my mom made me exactly 56 curls like Shirley Temple’s signature do, but alot of work went into lovingly fashioning those just-perfect curls that would bounce whenever I moved my head. Ahh, such sweet and precious memories of my youth and my fascination with Shirley Temple. In my mind I never thought of Shirley Temple as an adult, with a second “career” as the U.S. Ambassador to Ghana or as a married mother with the moniker of Shirley Temple Black. She was, and always will be, the precocious little girl who captured my heart as well as the hearts of many generations.