Four Arm Slings, Two Remarkable Sisters, and Another Memory From Growing Up in Ferguson
Part of The American Time Capsule — preserving the people, places, products, traditions, and everyday moments that shaped growing up in America before the digital age. This article explores the games, adventures, traditions, music, rites of passage, and neighborhood experiences that defined American childhood.
Growing up in Ferguson, Missouri, I didn’t have to go very far to find interesting people.
Sometimes I didn’t even have to leave the neighborhood.
Right next door to us lived the Penhale family.
They were our neighbors, which meant that to me they weren’t celebrities or historical figures or people whose names would someday turn up in books.
That was part of what made growing up in Ferguson, Missouri so memorable to me—the people who later became remarkable were once simply the neighbors we saw every day.
They were just the Penhale family next door.
Then something happened that was so improbable it apparently caught the attention of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
Somehow, all four members of the Penhale family ended up with injured arms at the same time, walking around the neighborhood in arm slings.
As I remember it, Mr. Penhale had the most serious injury. He had fallen from a ladder and broken his arm, which was in a cast and sling. I believe Sara and Polly had broken their collarbones.
Sara was a cheerleader and fell.
Polly slipped on an icy sidewalk.
What happened to Jane, their mother, has disappeared from my memory after all these years.
Whatever the individual circumstances, the sight of an entire family with their arms in slings was unusual enough to attract the attention of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
Not matching sweaters.
Not matching Christmas pajamas.
Slings.
Four People. Four Casts.
I wish I could tell you exactly how all four of them managed to accomplish this.
I think their Dad, George, fell off a ladder and broke his arm.
The two girls broke their collar bones.
And what happened to their mom escapes memory.
After all these years, I don’t trust my memory enough to invent the circumstances surrounding each injury—and the truth is, the picture itself is funny enough without embellishment.
What I remember is the result.
There they were: an entire family simultaneously bound up in white slings.
It must have looked like somebody had issued a family subscription to the orthopedic department.
And apparently someone at Ripley’s Believe It or Not! thought the same thing.
The story was unusual enough that the Penhale family became one of those strange little American oddities that Ripley’s specialized in collecting.
For most readers, they were probably a curiosity.
For me?
They lived next door.
That’s the part I find fascinating now.
Sara Wasn’t a Ripley’s Curiosity to Me
One of the Penhale daughters was Sara.
Sara and I went to school together from elementary school all the way through high school.
And I remember her very well.
She was supersmart, very cute and wildly popular.
I’m leaving that description exactly as I remember it because sometimes a seventy-something-year-old man ought to be allowed to describe what a twelve-year-old boy thought of the girl next door.
Sara wasn’t “the girl from the Ripley’s family.”
She was my classmate.
We grew up in the same neighborhood, attended the same schools and passed through those years together when none of us had the slightest idea where life was eventually going to take us.
That’s one of the strange things about looking backward.
At the time, everybody is simply there.
The kid sitting a few desks away.
The family next door.
The neighbor riding a bicycle down the street.
You don’t look at them and wonder what their Wikipedia page might say sixty years later.
You’re trying to get through school.
And Then There Was Polly
Sara’s older sister Polly eventually traveled considerably farther from Ferguson than most of us could have imagined.
She went on to become deeply involved in Antarctic science and research. Think about that for a moment.
One of the girls from the family next door in Ferguson ended up building a career connected to one of the most remote places on Earth.
As kids, the world seemed enormous.
Our universe consisted of our houses, our yards, school, neighborhood streets, friends, bicycles and whatever trouble we could find within walking distance.
Antarctica might as well have been the moon.
Yet one of the kids from next door eventually made that distant world part of her life’s work.
Nobody Knew Where We Were Going
That’s what makes old neighborhood memories so interesting to me now.
When you’re growing up, you don’t know who anybody is going to become.
You don’t know which kid will become a scientist.
Which one will become a teacher.
Which one will go to war.
Which one will become successful.
Which one will struggle.
Which one will leave town and never come back.
And which family will somehow manage to get four people into casts at exactly the same time and wind up in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
We were just kids.
They were just neighbors.
Ferguson was just home.
The People Next Door
Decades later, Ferguson means many different things to many different people.
But when I think about the Ferguson where I grew up, I don’t begin with headlines.
Looking back, some of the strangest and most enduring memories from those years came from things that seemed perfectly ordinary at the time—whether it was the family next door ending up in Ripley’s or a trip to Seymour’s Shoes and the machine that let us see our bones.
I remember people.
Families.
Classmates.
Neighbors.
Central School.
Backyards.
Kids wandering from one house to another.
And the Penhale family next door.
One day they were simply our neighbors.
Then all four of them wound up in arm slings and became a local curiosity.
Sara remained the supersmart, ultra-cute girl I knew from school.
Polly eventually followed a path that led from our little corner of Missouri toward Antarctica.
And I went off in directions nobody could have predicted for me either.
That’s the wonderful thing about a childhood neighborhood.
You never know who you’re growing up beside.
When we were kids in Ferguson, none of us knew where life was going to take us, Sara was just the cute girl next door. Polly was her sister.
Jane was their mother—the lady who made those wonderful popcorn balls at Halloween and who my mom named her youngest child after.
Jane was also part of one of my favorite neighborhood memories, you could hear her laugh from two houses away and because hers was one of the houses that made Halloween with popcorn balls feel so different from the way kids experience Halloween today.
George , their Dad, was the guy that could fix anything, an engineer employed by McDonnell Douglas.
And I was just another neighborhood kid who knew the Penhale house as the house next door.
We couldn’t have imagined Parkinson’s research, Antarctica, Vietnam, or any of the other places life would eventually take us.
Back then, the most remarkable thing about the Penhale family was that somehow all four of them had wound up in arm slings at the same time.
Ripley’s thought that was extraordinary.
Looking back now, that may have been the least remarkable thing about them.
In Loving Memory
Sara recently lost her battle with Parkinsons and passed away at age 76.
The girl next door that taught this 8th grade nerd to dance.
The little girl I sat beside reading comic books at age 5.
So many memories.
🗣️ Your Turn
When we were kids, the people next door were simply the people next door. We had no idea where life would eventually take any of us.
Did you grow up with someone who later did something remarkable—or whose life took a direction nobody in the neighborhood could have predicted?
Maybe it was a classmate who became a doctor, scientist, teacher, athlete, musician, business owner, military hero—or simply someone who made a difference in the lives of others.
Or maybe what you remember most isn’t what they eventually became. Maybe it’s something much simpler: the neighbor who always had time for the kids, the mother who handed out the best Halloween treats, or the family everybody on the block knew.
Who do you remember from your old neighborhood—and what became of them? Tell us their story in the comments. Sometimes the most remarkable people in our lives started out as nothing more remarkable than the kid next door.
📚 Continue Exploring
The Penhale family was part of a neighborhood filled with people and experiences that seemed ordinary when we were kids—and became much more meaningful when we looked back decades later. Here are a few more memories from that world.
✈️ The Day Dad Took Us Plane Watching
A simple afternoon with Dad near the airport became one of those childhood memories that somehow grew more valuable with every passing year.
⛳ When Golf Ball Hunting Was a Boy’s Summer Job
Muddy feet, discarded golf balls, and a boy looking for spending money became another little piece of growing up in an America where kids often made their own opportunities.
💡 Come Home When the Streetlights Came On
When the neighborhood belonged to the kids for most of the day and one simple instruction from Mom usually told us when it was time to come home.
⚾ The Games That Raised a Generation
Before childhood became scheduled and supervised, neighborhood kids created their own games, adventures, friendships, and memories.
🕰️ Return to the American Time Capsule
Browse the curated collection of stories, memories, people, places, and everyday experiences from the America we remember.
📚 Explore the Complete Time Capsule Archive
See every American Time Capsule article—including stories and memories that may not appear on the main hub.
⚠️ Bunker Rule
Old neighborhood memories belong to more than one person.
I remember the Penhale family as the people next door—the family who somehow ended up in casts at the same time, Jane’s wonderful Halloween popcorn balls, Sara as my supersmart and ultra-cute classmate, and Polly before Antarctica became part of her remarkable story.
Other people who grew up in Ferguson may remember them differently, know details I’ve forgotten, or have stories of their own. Those memories are welcome here.
Because this story also touches on illness, loss, and the lives of real people, please treat the Penhale family and one another with the same respect you’d want shown to your own family.
Add to the memory. Correct a detail if you know better. Tell another story. Just remember that behind every old neighborhood story are real people who lived it.
📌 Bunker Notice
This story is based partly on my personal memories of growing up next door to the Penhale family in Ferguson, Missouri, more than sixty years ago.
Some details have inevitably faded with time. Where historical records are available—including the family’s reported appearance in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and the later accomplishments of Sara and Polly Penhale—I want those details to be documented as accurately as possible rather than rely entirely on childhood memory.
Sara has recently passed away, so this story is also written with respect for her memory and for the family and friends who knew her far beyond the years I remember here.
The American Time Capsule preserves memories like this because a neighborhood isn’t really made from streets and houses. It’s made from the people who lived there.
Ripley’s may have remembered the Penhale family because of four casts. I remember them because they lived next door.