The Feedsack Dress

Smelling a feedsack dress

After reading The Feedsack Dress, library consultant Wicky Sleight, St. Louis, sent me the following note with her own recollections of a special problem.

I grew up on a farm in Carroll County (Carrollton) Missouri. My mother made my dresses out of feedsacks. I have always told my children that no one would sit by me on the bus because of the smell. You could never quite get that smell out no matter how many times you washed it. My husband contended it was a “rural legend.” My daughter always pictured me in a burlap sack. So, I have ordered four copies, one for each of my three children (30, 32, and 37) and one for my best friend, Carol. They will be wrapped for Christmas in feedsacks. 

Carol (now in Corvallis, Oregon) was a “townie.” When I talked with her this week and told her about the book, she recalled when she was invited to a birthday party by the class snob, her “Veronica.” Carol’s mother told her she was taking socks as the present. Carol protested and her mother said, very sternly, “Carol, these are perfectly fine socks.” 

Twas ever thus.

Doin' the tradin'

In the 1940s my parents went to town every Saturday to do the tradin’. They didn’t actually trade for anything, but those words lingered from the days when their parents or grandparents did. 

Usually the first stop was at the Missouri Farmers Association, where my mother would sell eggs and my father would buy feed or cattle salt. Often we’d go across the street to a filling station to buy a nickel bottle of pop—grape, orange, or strawberry more often than Coca Cola or Royal Crown Cola. All floated among ice in a red cooler tank. 

Then we’d park on the square or as close to it as we could get. My sisters and I would rush to the two dime stores, Woolworth’s and McClellan’s. Each had a toy section in the back. Few things cost more than a dollar, big money to us. We did a lot of looking and little buying. The stores sold dime comic books, and we would buy the latest issue of a favorite: Little Lulu, Nyoka the Jungle Girl, Archie, The Long Ranger, Donald Duck. We traded these with other kids in our school. 

My father visited the dime stores’ candy counters, a series of glass bins from which the clerk dipped candy to put into small white paper sacks and weigh. He always bought roasted Spanish peanuts and about half a pound of each of three or four candies, including circus peanuts, orange slices, caramels, cinnamon drops, lemon drops, licorice, mints, and chocolate peanut clusters. He made a game of adding up the total in his head before the clerk could do it on her adding machine. 

The other major visit was the grocery store, usually the one on the north side of the square. The whole store was about the size of a small-town McDonald’s today. My parents told the clerks behind long counters what to take from the shelves. 

My parents spent about half of their time in town chatting with neighbors and friends on the square (especially the shady west side) or the courthouse lawn or sitting in the car to say hello to whoever passed by. Farming was lonely work, and talkin’ was as important as tradin’. 

 —Carolyn Mulford

Saving a city under siege

Yesterday, November 9, 2009, Germany celebrated the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a concrete barrier that separated West Berlin from the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The communists built the wall to prevent their own people from “voting with their feet.”

The Allies divided Germany at the end of World War II, with the Soviet Union taking control of eastern Germany, except for a section of Berlin, Germany’s greatest city. June 24,1948, the communist government closed off West Berlin, attempting to force its 2 million residents to its will by stopping the flow of food, fuel, and other essential goods.

The United States responded two days later with an airlift of supplies. For more than a year that airlift remained one of the most dramatic ongoing stories in the Weekly Reader. Even when the communist government gave up and lifted the siege, it maintained a strict control over who and what went into and out of West Berlin. In 1961, it began enclosing West Berlin in a high concrete wall.

I remembered reading the dramatic stories about the Berlin Airlift in the Weekly Reader when I visited West Germany in October 1964. Two friends and I traveled across East Germany to West Berlin by train. Apparently the government limited the number of trains, for it was so crowded that we stood much of the way. Scowling conductors and guards checked and rechecked our papers.

We heard wonderful music and saw the exquisite bust of Nefertiti, but West Berlin—perhaps because a chilling rain fell almost constantly—seemed gray and bulky and self-obsessed. The fabled pre-war charm had vanished amid new buildings and heavy traffic and busy people. 

Then we took a bus tour of East Berlin, going through the infamous Checkpoint Charlie. East Berlin made West Berlin look great. On the communist side we saw some bleak new Soviet-style cement apartment buildings, many blocks of unmaintained old buildings, rubble from buildings bombed during World War II, and little activity on the streets. The people looked drab, depressed, destitute. We were relieved to return West Berlin.

I hope there’s still a Weekly Reader to tell kids why everyone should celebrate the collapse of the Berlin Wall and of Soviet-imposed tyranny.

 —Carolyn Mulford 

Choosing books from different states

When I was a child, my family never traveled anywhere you couldn't reach between the morning and evening milking. I learned about other places from books.

You can find a list of recommended children's books from the 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the Virgin Islands at www.loc.gov/bookfest/2009/toolkit/educators/greatreads.html#mo. Click on a state on the map or scroll down through the list of states and books below the map.

Last summer each state's Center for the Book selected a book as its recommended read at the 2009 National Book Festival. The national Center for the Book at the Library of Congress constructed the map, "52 Great Reads About Great Places." 

Click on Missouri and up comes The Feedsack Dress.

—Carolyn Mulford