The Feedsack Dress

Honoring our presidents?

In my school days George Washington’s portrait hung on every classroom wall and his birthday, February 22, was an official holiday. (Sometimes we got the day off. Sometimes we didn’t.)

It seemed unfair that February 12, the birthday of my favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, received less attention. After all, homely, humble Abe grew up in the wilderness, educated himself, and went on to preserve the union and abolish slavery. Even though Washington led rebels against fantastic odds, his picture and our tiny library’s information about him made him seem dull compared to Lincoln and even to Andrew Jackson, another of my favorites then.

Over the years I’ve visit many of the presidents’ homes, going to Washington’s Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello several times and quite willing to go again. All fascinate because of what they reveal about these men and their wives, about 90% of whom played major roles in their husbands’ rise to the presidency. The homes have spurred me to read the many excellent (and far more revealing) adult biographies.

Washington was anything but dull. Jackson, although intriguing, dropped from my favorites’ list, which now headlines Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman. Even our most obscure and least successful presidents (including James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding) are worth reading about. Most people don’t know that Herbert Hoover, dissed because of his failure to ward off the Great Depression, accomplished great things around the world before being elected.

I was dismayed when the country went from recognizing Washington’s Birthday on February 22 to ignoring him and his successors on Presidents Day on a Monday in February. Certainly we should honor all the presidents, but this three-day weekend celebrates none.

 —Carolyn Mulford

 

Wearing feedsack dresses

Writer Eva Ridenour sent me this recollection of wearing feedsack dresses.

My two sisters and I all had feedsack dresses that our mother made from the same pink flowered pattern. It had a plain white insert in the front and we wore them only when we were "dressed up." I have a picture of the three of us when I was about six or seven years old and my youngest sister was about two.

Although we were town kids dad raised chickens and hogs therefore, he needed to buy food at the feed store. Mom always went along to pick out the kind of print for the feed and saved up until she had enough to make the dresses.

I remember wearing them until I was about ten. Then I think feed started coming in paper sacks, or else she got too busy doing other things to make anymore feed sack dresses.

 

Starting school in the heat

Thanks to air conditioning, schools now start in August rather than waiting for September’s cooler weather as we did in the mid-20^th century. Living on the farm, I experienced air conditioning mostly by going to cowboy movies on Saturday afternoons and musicals on Sunday afternoon.

Even in September students—grade school, high school, and college—often had trouble staying awake in the afternoons. Teachers would open the high windows and the door in each classroom first thing in the morning to cool off the room and bring in any breeze. Some students used the paper fans passed out by funeral homes to produce their own breezes.

In grade school the heat didn’t stop us from playing full tilt at noon. We had 15 minutes to eat whatever we brought for lunch (no refrigeration) and 35 minutes to have fun before the teacher rang the hand bell. It warned us we had 10 minutes to run to the outhouses (one for girls, one for boys) and to line up at the well for a drink of cold water.

Our steaming bodies must have raised the room temperature several degrees when we came inside. The teacher would read us a chapter of a book to quiet us down. About 2:30 everyone woke up enough to run outside for another 15 minutes of play. That kept us awake until school ended at 4:00, when we walked up to a mile home to do chores.

No wonder kids went to bed early and slept well in those days.

—Carolyn Mulford

 

How I learned to hate sewing

Steaming July days remind me of how much I hated sewing as a child and how much I love air conditioning today.

My mother always insisted that I take sewing as one of my 4-H projects. Back then practically everyone sewed.

The first year project I didn’t mind so much. We made simple things like tea towels and pillowcases to teach us to sew a straight seam without the machine’s needle going through a finger. The hard parts were pinning the hems so they would be straight and threading the bobbin.

Each summer the required items became more difficult and more time consuming. The clothing started with aprons and basic play clothes. We practiced making them from the less pretty feedsacks. Inevitably I progressed to Sunday dresses (ones made from the new synthetic we bought in town) and, the item I hated most, slips made from a slippery synthetic that radiated heat.

Sitting at the sewing machine without even a fan on a hot, humid summer afternoon was bad enough, but other steps in the process were even worse. It began with

draping the tissue-paper pieces of the pattern over my body to adjust it to fit. That involved a lot of my turning and stretching while my mother pinned. Once she had the various pieces of the pattern adjusted, we pinned them to the cloth. The challenge was to pin them on so that the pieces would match in the end product while using as little of the cloth as possible. Tricky stuff.

I dreaded cutting out the cloth. An errant cut could ruin the whole thing. The cutting done, we did another fitting, usually with me standing on a kitchen chair. Then the sewing, And more fitting. And taking out any seams that weren’t straight. And more fitting. 

By the time my mother and the 4-H leader declared any garment perfect, I hated it.

—Carolyn Mulford

 

Warming the bed at night

When the temperature plummets to single digits, I always remember how cold penetrated our farmhouse in my childhood. No one who grew up on a Midwest farm in the early or mid 1900s forgets going to bed and getting up in numbing cold.

We spent most of our waking hours in the kitchen. When I was small, most of our heat came from the wood-burning cook stove. After electricity came and my mother bid a happy farewell to that, we kept a tall, round, black coal stove in the kitchen. One of my chores after school was to go to the coal shed and shovel all I could carry into the coal bucket.

During the day we shut the three bedroom doors. My parents would open up our two doors a little before bedtime, but those rooms remained giant ice boxes.

We’d change into our nightclothes in the kitchen while my mother heated water to boiling and filled a hot water bottle for each of us. A bottle was actually a reddish rubber pouch with a screw-in stopper. She would wrap a scrap of old blanket around it and put it in the bed to warm it. When we were ready to leap in, we shifted it to where our feet would be.

My parents banked the fire for the night and got up before we did to feed it. I don’t remember shivering for long in bed. We slept under a mound of blankets and comforters and quilts. Surplus wool, khaki-colored army blankets formed one layer. They were rough and ugly but warm.

I haven’t seen a hot water bottle for years. They warmed winter nights in my childhood, and I hope I never see another one.

—Carolyn Mulford

 

Recalling the salad days of JELL-O

The menu for Thanksgiving dinner at my sister’s house this year almost duplicated my mother’s menu in mid-20^th century. We had green beans cooked with bacon, corn, mashed potatoes, turkey, dressing, and—the star of the show—noodles. For desert we had pumpkin pie and chocolate cake.

Two big changes: My mother served chicken rather than turkey, which my family didn’t much care for, and at least one JELL-O salad.

JELL-O has been around for well over a century, but my family didn’t see it on our table until about 1949, after the electric line finally came to our house. You needed a refrigerator to make the JELL-O salads that had become popular among our city cousins in the 1930s.

Magazines contained lots of ideas for innovative ways to dine and decorate with JELL-O.  My mother was one of the many who experimented with colorful dishes. One of the worst was chopped cabbage in lime JELL-O. Even squares of quivering lime with a half pear embedded in each piece was better than that. She tried a variety of fruits, vegetables, and nuts and combinations thereof in the major flavors: raspberry, orange, strawberry, lemon.

Many salads made only one appearance on the family table, but two recipes survive. One is a carrot and pineapple salad (orange JELL-O, a cup of crushed pineapple, a cup of grated carrots). The other is a fruit salad (cherry JELL-O, a can of fruit cocktail, one banana sliced into 30 or so pieces). You can add marshmallows and whipping cream to the latter.

I see a lot of people wrinkle their noses at the thought of eating JELL-O alone or with anything. The salad days of JELL-O apparently have passed.

—Carolyn Mulford

 

Smelling wet chicken feathers

Yesterday I read excerpts from The Feedsack Dress to members of the Class of 1960, a group who grew up in the same rural Missouri area I did. 

I stirred up childhood memories of choosing chicken feed based on the sack it came in, of cooling off with paper fans provided by a funeral home, and of killing and plucking chickens. 

Everyone remembered the sight of a newly beheaded chicken hopping around and the awful smell after you dunked the bird into hot water to make it easier to pull out the feathers. 

Those are sights and smells you don’t forget. A dozen people shared their recollections of their mother or grandmother or aunt wielding a hatchet or swinging a chicken around and around until its head came off. 

These weren’t pleasant memories, but they brought home how much life has changed since the middle of the 20th century and how distant we now are from what we eat. One woman commented that her grandchildren didn’t even know chickens had bones until they were seven. 

They’ll never know the distinct odor of wet chicken feathers. 

 —Carolyn Mulford

Fearing polio

Nothing—not even the atomic bomb—frightened people as much as polio (infantile paralysis) in the middle of the 20th century. The disease came on quickly, and it killed or it paralyzed the victims.  

Polio seemed to spread from person to person, affecting mostly children. In the summer parents often kept their children away from crowds. Some places closed the public swimming pools and even the movie houses. 

Living on a farm in northeast Missouri, I wasn’t often in crowds and didn’t think much about it. My parents did, but they let us go to the movies most Sunday afternoons. The show in those pre-television days included a short news report called “The March of Time.” That’s where I learned about the horrors of polio. The film showed children and adults in machines called iron lungs. Resembling a cocoon, an iron lung covered everything but the patient’s head. Its purpose was to keep a paralyzed person breathing. Not everyone who got polio needed an iron lung, but almost everyone lost the ability to walk normally. Children with twisted legs wore braces, rode in wheelchairs, or walked with crutches. Naturally the ones in the news films were smiling bravely, but it was all too easy to imagine their pain, frustration, and bewilderment. 

The most famous victim of polio was Franklin D. Roosevelt, the man who served as president longer than anyone else. In 1938 he founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and asked people to give dimes for research to treat and prevent the disease. Eddie Cantor, one of the country’s most famous comedians, called the campaign the March of Dimes, a play on words from “The March of Times.”

We didn’t do many fundraising campaigns in schools in those days, but every year we brought our dimes to put in slots in small cardboard sheets. Most of those dimes were the ones with President Roosevelt’s portrait on one side. Those came into being as a tribute to him after his death in 1945. 

In 1955 researchers led by Jonas Salk announced the development of a vaccination against polio. Those dimes helped make the disease, the iron lung, and the fear go away. 

 —Carolyn Mulford

Discovering ourselves through history

I’ve loved history since the fourth grade. I time traveled as I read a historical novel or a biography. Years later I realized that these books did far more than tell a good story and taught me much more than history. 

My favorite books in fourth grade included a series by Lucy Fitch Perkins. The main characters were twins, always a boy and a girl, who lived in another country. I don’t remember any of the plots, but I know I read The Dutch Twins, The Belgian Twins, and The Scotch Twins. The last was a favorite. The twins had exciting adventure linked to some historic event, and they also had to cope with the problems of daily living, from unfamiliar ways of raising food to familiar ways of dealing with difficult people. Without being conscious of it, I learned circumstances and surroundings change a lot more than people do. You won’t find these books in libraries today, but you can read them as e-books (go to www.gutenberg.org). 

Among my other favorite subjects for novels were traveling the Oregon Trail, fighting and enduring the Civil War, and settling the West. Real people have great adventures, too. Biographies were about Sacagewea, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson fascinated me. Who would have guessed kids who led simple, isolated lives would grow up to accomplish great things? 

Historical novels revealed how individuals fit into and influence great events in a way textbooks never did. Fiction also showed me how major events can change a person’s life and a nation’s path. As a writer and a reader, I still get a thrill from time travel. —Carolyn Mulford

Playing games in winter

My one-room school dismissed at four o’clock. By the time my sisters and I finished such chores as feeding the milk cows and carrying in coal for the stove, it was too dark and cold to play outside.

We spent most of our evenings listening to our favorite radio programs (including The Lone Ranger, Red Skelton, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Aldrich Family, The Life of Riley, and The Judy Canova Show) and playing games.

My older sister and I played a lot of checkers, but after a few hundred games you’ve used every possible strategy for reaching the king row and taking the other person’s checkers. Chinese checkers presented more possibilities, and several people could play at once, moving their marbles across the board my father had made.

My younger sister and I played checkers occasionally, but she didn’t have my capacity for enduring loss at the hands of an older sibling. We played cards a lot, especially Rook, 7 Up, and Authors. If we had four players, we’d play Pitch, the game my father and his siblings sometimes played at family gatherings. Some people considered it a sinful game, although I couldn't figure out why.

One winter we played ferocious games of jacks—often with 20 rather than the standard 10—at school at noon on the teacher’s desk and at home at night on the kitchen table.

My parents, busy or exhausted, rarely played with us, but occasionally we could talk them into a game of Bingo. We shelled an ear of corn and put a kernel on each number that came up.

I still think these games—particularly jacks—can be a lot of fun.

—Carolyn Mulford