The Feedsack Dress

Riding the yellow monster

The first sight of a yellow school bus at the end of summer brings beautiful memories to some adults.

Not so for me and for many who lived on farms and had to ride for miles over rough gravel roads to get to high school in the 1940s and 1950s.

We bounced and slid around on the metal seats. In warm weather, we burned up. Windows opened to let in fresh air produced a gale that tangled hair and scattered loose papers. In the winter, with windows closed and fogged over, we froze.

My sisters and I were lucky compared to most. We lived only five miles (twenty minutes or so on the bus) from town, could catch it right by our driveway, and were among the last students picked up. We had to stagger to the back of the bus to find seats, but we didn’t have to walk up to a mile to meet the bus before the sun came up. If you weren’t at the appointed spot when the bus pulled up, the driver drove on.

Some kids rode more than an hour in the morning and again in the evening. For months they left before the sun came up and got home after it set.

However long the ride, we all arrived home to do homework and chores.

For years my parents and our neighbors fought the closing of our one-room school for grades 1-8. One reason was that it provided a center for the community. Another was the dread of putting little kids on that yellow bus.

—Carolyn Mulford

Searching for role models

Today, almost 89 years after the 19^th Amendment gave women the right to vote, Sonia Sotomayor faces questioning from senators who will vote on whether she will become the 111th justice of the Supreme Court.

If confirmed as expected, she will be the third woman and the first Hispanic American to serve on that august body.

 Judge Sotomayor has told interviewers that her role model as a child was Nancy Drew, the independent, courageous, and clever amateur detective. Why would a poor girl in Brooklyn see this fictitious, rich, small-town character as a person to emulate? Because even in the early 1960s smart, strong girls found few role models in public life.

In the 1940s, the situation was even worse. The only woman prominent in national politics was the beloved and despised Eleanor Roosevelt. For several years after her husband’s death in 1945, she devoted much of her enormous talent and energy to the infant United Nations. No woman served in the U.S. Senate, and few sat in the House of Representatives.

Where did girls find role models? In novels, Nancy Drew held the edge. Other books for girls featured Cherry Ames, a nurse who served bravely in World War II; Beverly somebody, a reporter; and Sally, the pilot of Sally Wins Her Wings. The only real women I remember reading about were Clara Barton, Edith Cavell, Marie Curie, and Amelia Earhart—all dead.

 I don’t remember knowing any woman who was a doctor or lawyer or police woman or community leader in the 1940s and early 1950s. Strong women didn’t show up much in the press, in the movies, or on the radio. One of my favorite radio shows was a daily soap opera, Portia Faces Life, about a woman lawyer.

 In what I saw of the world, men had all the power and boys had most of the fun. Even as a kid, I knew that wasn’t right. So, obviously, did Sonia Sotomayor.

 —Carolyn Mulford

Shoveling the grass

Shoveling the grass

 

The other day I needed to bag the grass that had blown onto my cement driveway the last time I mowed my yard. Knowing the rake wouldn’t work well on the hard surface, I thought of using a broom, but the grass would just stick between the bristles or float off.

Then I thought of my blue plastic snow shovel. Perfect for scraping the grass from the cement and dumping it into the bag. 

A neighbor driving by slowed and gawked, apparently wondering what I was doing with a snow shovel on a 70-degree day.

I laughed to myself and remembered that in my childhood on the farm we often used something intended for one task to do another. We didn’t have time—or money—to run to town every time something needed repair. Farmers adapted what they had to what they needed. Feedsacks, of course, were bought for one purpose—to hold feed chickens or other animals—and later used for another—to make clothing, aprons, curtains, quilts, etc.

The snow shovel wasn’t my only adaptation this weekend. An earpiece fell off my glasses and the tiny screw vanished. Nothing in my tool chest was small enough, but a threaded needle in my sewing kit would go through the screw hole. I sewed on the earpiece. The thread should hold until tomorrow when I can go an optometry shop.

As the old saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

 

—Carolyn Mulford

Documenting history on DVD

The stark differences between how students work today and in 1949 struck me again yesterday when I watched eight DVD documentaries prepared by middle school students.

The students were competing to represent Missouri at the national National History Day contest in June.

In 1949 few children lived in homes with typewriters or televisions. Even in city schools office staff were the only ones with typewriters. Almost no schools had a television. Farm kids attended one-room schools through the eighth grade. They wrote with pencils and fountain pens, and the major research tool was World Book Encyclopedia.

Yesterday Ken Burns workalikes introduced documentaries on people who had made a difference. Only the voice-overs indicated the producers’ youth. They brought together

·      still photos—including Marie Curie as a child, medical practices in the late 1800s, Hiroshima the day after the atomic bomb,

·      news film—including blasts into space, America Football League games, and 1960s civil rights demonstrations,

·      numerous quotations and much information from books and online sources,

·      videotaped interviews—including a doctor, a presidential library curator, and a NASA official,

·      background music.

To pull all of these elements together in a meaningful, interesting narrative required many, many hours of work, culminating in manipulating sophisticated software. A few years ago only professionals could have produced documentaries as sophisticated as those presented by kids age 12 to 14.

Did the kids do the work themselves? I’m betting that they did. I don’t think their parents or teachers possess the skills.

—Carolyn Mulford

Studying Latin

Today is the Ides of March, a day of infamy because of William Shakespeare’s account of the soothsayer’s warning to Julius Caesar. In Rome, the ides simply marked the middle of the month, and the day when you paid your bills.

The day reminded me of the vanished prestige of Latin. Up until at least the late 1950s, high schools encouraged anyone planning to go to college to take Latin. Even then many students refused to study a “dead” language. Not many studied a “live” language either. The schools offered few opportunities. Most students didn’t envision themselves ever working, or even traveling, in another country.

In my little world, you rarely heard or read a foreign language. Latin seemed exotic, a key to a secret world. That illusion soon vanished, but I enjoyed studying Latin and found it useful for several reasons.

1.     Many English words come from Latin. Even a limited Latin vocabulary helps you decipher unfamiliar words.

2.     Learning another language teaches you how languages work, including your own. We learn our mother tongue through imitation and don’t analyze it. By studying the structure of a foreign language, we gain a better grasp of the structure of our own.

3.     When you study a language, you study a culture—another way of thinking and behaving. You expand your world and become more tolerant of others.

4.     Studying Latin prepared me to study other languages, particularly such cousins as Spanish, French, and Portuguese but also such unrelated languages as Amharic and Chinese.

When I went to high school, most people concerned themselves with local affairs, not a global or even a national economy. Studying Latin—or any another language—is still a good way to prepare to live in this larger world.

—Carolyn Mulford

Learning about Lincoln

Happy birthday, Honest Abe.

President Barack Obama has brought additional attention to President Abraham Lincoln, but he has fascinated me, and most Americans, for many years.

My introduction to Lincoln came in first or second grade. Every day after lunch the teacher read a few pages of a book to the whole school—about a dozen pupils in grade one through eight. She read a biography focused on Lincoln as a boy. He faced tragedy early. His mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died not long after she taught him to read.

I remember the teacher reading about Thomas Lincoln bringing home a new wife, Sarah Bush Johnston, and her three daughters. She was not the wicked stepmother of Cinderella and Snow White. Instead she gave the lonely boy the love, understanding, and encouragement he needed to thrive in the tiny, isolated log cabin on the frontier. Many of the stories in the book told of his compulsion to learn and his search for books.

Since then I’ve read many books about Lincoln and visited his supposed birthplace, the reconstruction of the cabin in which he spent much of his boyhood, his home and law office in Springfield, the Soldiers’ Home where he escaped the heat of the summer during the Civil War, Ford’s Theater and the house where he died, and his tomb. We’ve made great efforts to feel close to and understand this unique man.

The poor boy growing up in the woods became one of the most complex, inspiring, brilliant men in all history. He embodies the universal dream of rags to power. Yet he remains unique in what he suffered, what he accomplished, and what he said.

On Lincoln’s birthday in my one-room school, we would cut out his silhouette and read the Gettysburg Address. Reading his words is still a great way to remember him. 

—Carolyn Mulford

Updating the phone system

In the days chronicled in The Feedsack Dress, the telephone was a wood box on the wall. It had an earpiece you lifted off a hook on the side, a speaker (a microphone-like protrusion) on the front, and a crank used to ring others or the operator on the other side.

No one had a private line. I don’t remember how many people shared our party line, but it must have been at least a dozen. Everyone had a different ring. Ours was two longs and two shorts. No one made a lot of calls, and few stayed on the phone long. We kids rarely were allowed to use the phone. If we did, we had to stand on a kitchen chair to reach the speaker.

People often listened in, sometimes because they happened to pick up the phone to make a call, sometimes because they were nosy, and sometimes because they expected news of trouble, such as an illness or a fire, that might require help. No one expected privacy.

The farmers maintained the lines. The poles were logs or the trunks of small trees less than half the height of telephone poles today. Glass condensers at the top of poles sometimes broke (or were shot out by some idiot) or lost the wire connection.

Electricity came to our farm in northeast Missouri in 1949. The new telephone system arrived about the same time. The box came off the wall and a black (always) phone went on a table. The receiver combined the earpiece and the speaker and you no longer needed a crank. It was pretty exciting.

We still had a party line for several years, but fewer people were on it and you could hear (as best I can recall) only four rings. At last we were allowed to call our friends without asking permission. 

—Carolyn Mulford

 

Celebrating Thanksgiving with what we grew

Thanksgiving grew out of the celebration of the harvest, and that’s essentially what it was on farms in the 1940s. We grew most of the food that covered the Thanksgiving table. 

We didn’t raise turkeys, but we had plenty of chickens. My mother chose a fat laying hen or an aging rooster to be the center of the meal. The chicken meat wasn’t the important part. What we loved were the noodles she made from eggs and flour and cooked in chicken broth.

Before we got electricity, much of the rest of the meal came from the cave, the storm cellar in which we stored the vegetables from our garden that we had cooked and placed in Mason jars. Our favorite vegetable was green beans, but we also had peas and corn and maybe pickled beets and bread-and-butter pickles. We always had a heap of mashed potatoes, made from potatoes we grew, cream from our cows, and butter we had churned. My mother used the leftover mashed potatoes to make potato salad. 

We didn’t have much luck raising pumpkins, so the pumpkin for the pie usually came from cans, but my mother made the flaky crust from scratch and used elbow grease to create the whipped cream. Often we’d have apple pie or chocolate cake, too.

If the weather was cold enough to freeze the ice in the ditches, we’d harvest that and make ice cream (mostly milk, eggs, and sugar) in a freezer churn. That was a great treat, and we had to eat the whole batch that day or it would melt. 

A lot of work into that Thanksgiving meal, work that began in the spring when we bought baby chickens and planted a big garden.

We enjoyed every calorie. 

—Carolyn Mulford 

Taking piano lessons

Today kids rush from one activity to the other—after-school programs, team sports, music and dance classes, tutoring, video games with friends, volunteering, etc.

In the late 1940s country kids walked home from school to do chores—gather eggs, drive the milk cows from the pasture to the barn, carry in wood or coal for the stove, etc. Our most common special activities were 4-H projects (see my post of May 31, 2008) and piano lessons.

The prosperity that followed World War II allowed my family, along with many others, to buy a secondhand upright piano that held a place of honor in the living room for many years. My older sister and I started taking lessons at the home of a local college student majoring in music. We practiced playing from simple books and performed for her once a week as her metronome relentlessly beat out the proper rhythm. I think my parents paid $1 for a thirty-minute lesson, a sum that forced us to take the investment seriously. 

At first I hated losing play time to practice, but later playing the piano became a way for me to get away from anything unpleasant and to think without being interrrupted. By the third year that I took lessons, I was practicing an hour a day. I particularly like the fortissimo pieces.

My mother told me to practice only when she and my father were at the barn milking the cows.

That struck me as reasonable. After all, I was playing the same scales and pieces over and over. I also knew that I played for my own enjoyment, not for others’ pleasure. That’s still true.

My five years of lessons didn’t turn me into a musician, but those years instilled in me a love of music. Every child should be so fortunate.

 —Carolyn Mulford  

Going back to school

Getting ready to go back to school took little time in the 1940s, especially if you attended a one-room school.

The school provided nothing but books (many of them old), but pupils needed little equipment. The big purchase was a Big Chief tablet, a nice thick one with a black line drawing of a chief on the red cover. Add to this several yellow pencils with No. 2 lead and an eraser.

About fifth grade you also needed a fountain pen and a bottle of ink. Ballpoints came in later, and the old desks—most bearing carved initials of an earlier generation—had a hole for an inkwell. Even the oldest kids, the eighth graders, took considerable care in filling their pens, which weren’t used all that often. One bottle lasted all year, as I recall.

Some kids also brought a tin cup rather than use the one that belonged to the school, which had a well rather than running water. We pumped a fresh bucket of water in the morning before school and another at noon. We filled cups from the long handled metal dipper or, when the teacher wasn’t outside, from the pump.  

Almost everyone had some new clothes, probably one new pair of jeans, two or three new blouses or shirts, a skirt or two, possibly a dress, and new shoes. Mothers, or the girls, made some of the clothing, part of it from feedsacks, part of it from cloth purchased in town.

The opening days of school were steamy, so some of us brought one other item, a cardboard hand fan distributed by a local funeral parlor.

Carolyn Mulford