The Feedsack Dress

Singing our way through Christmas in the 1940s

In my rural community, the Christmas season opened and closed with music. From a week or so after Thanksgiving, the radio stations played Christmas music almost constantly.

About the same time my one-room rural school began practicing a half hour or so a day for the Christmas program. A couple of the first or second graders would learn to recite a short poem, and one of the seventh or eighth graders would present “The Night Before Christmas.” Most of the older kids would take part in a short play.

Whatever else we did, we all sang. We did it not because we were talented but because everyone expected it. Those who could carry tunes through an entire piece sang solos or duets of some of the newer songs, like “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” With the teacher playing the piano, the whole school—up to a dozen kids—sang the old carols, particularly “Silent Night,” “O, Come All Ye Faithful,” “Little Town of Bethlehem,” and “Joy to the World.”

The rhythm band’s first choice was “Jingle Bells,” which we belted out as two or three kids shook little hand bells. The triangle got a good workout, too. The rest of the percussion section, the sticks and the sandpaper blocks, were more muted. You can’t do just one rhythm band number, so we’d often add “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” Everyone made as much noise as possible with their makeshift instruments, which meant we had to sing loudly to be heard over them.

Although our singing had more volume than beauty, our audience of parents and neighbors always loved our Christmas music.

—Carolyn Mulford

Roasting marshsmallows on Halloween

In the late 1940s Halloween wasn't a big deal in Missouri. We didn't drive from farm to farm to trick or treat. The costumes we wore to the one-room school consisted to of little more than a pirate's eye patch, a paper hat, and a sword carved from a stick; a ghostly paper-thin sheet with eyeholels; or a cowboy hat and a holster set.

The teacher might bring in a pumpkin to carve, but anyone who planted pumpkins used them for pies, not jack-o'-lanterns. Instead we cut jack-o'-lanterns and witches on brooms and ghosts and black cats from construction paper. We pasted these above the blackboards that ran across the front of the school. 

Some of us would bring in candy: colorful and super-sugary corn, black- and orange-wrapped taffy kisses with peanut butter centers, and caramels. We might counter the sweetness by eating the apples we bobbed for in a round tin tub.

The 4-H Club livened things up at night with a bonfire. 4-Hers would gather dry branches and sticks and build the fire somewhere it couldn't spread, typically in someone's fieldsor on the gravel drive at the school. Almost all of us carried pocket knives, and we'd find slender branches about four feet long, strip them, and whittle points at the tips. As the flames died down, you put a wiener on the end of your stick and held it over the coals. Usually we ate the hotdogs burned on the outside and cold in the middle, which described us as we huddled around the fire in the cold. 

The best part was the dessert, marshmallows roasted on the end of the sticks. I never minded if mine got burnt, as long as the inside melted to a gooey mess. Nothing matches the feel of a melted marshmallow on the tongue and the chilly night air on the skin.

—Carolyn Mulford

Celebrating the fall with a pie supper

When I attended a one-room rural school in the 1940s and 1950s, our big fall event was a pie supper.

The name was misleading, a holdover from the days when girls and young women baked pies and brought them to sell—anonymously—at an auction. Boys and young men bid on the pie baked by the apple of their eye. Before that, I’ve heard, young women brought full meals—a picnic supper—for the auction. That reflected the old saying of the way to a man’s heart being through his stomach—and the lack of opportunity for courting.

Each of the girls in my school, including the first graders, brought a box of candy purchased in town. Girls outnumbered boys, so often our fathers or grandparents ended up buying the boxes and we simply took them home. 

The real excitement for the kids came from the program we prepared for the jammed schoolhouse. We rehearsed for it for a long time, probably a couple of weeks. The day of the pie supper we pushed the teacher’s desk to one side, put curtains onto wires strung across the front of the school, and created a stage. We recited poems, sang songs (solos, duets, the whole school), played piano and violin uke solos, performed a short play, and played a song or two as a rhythm band. The musicians —every kid in school—played percussion instruments, including a drum, a triangle, several sets of sticks, and sandpaper blocks. We made the latter, covering small blocks of wood with sandpaper and playing them by brushing them together in an up-and-down motion. The teacher played the piano, or sometimes we provided the melody with kazoos or a black plastic one-octave flute called a Tonette. The violin uke fell apart long ago, but I still have my Tonette. 

The pie supper served as a fundraiser, so in addition to auctioning off the boxes of candy, we always had a cakewalk. The mothers and other women in the community baked the cakes (from scratch, of course) for this event. We wrote numbers on pieces of paper and taped them in a circle on the “stage.” Anyone who wanted to take part paid a fee (a dime?) and stepped onto a number. The teacher or a student played the piano as the people stepped from number to number. When the music stopped, someone drew a number from a hat. The person standing on that number won a cake. 

The whole community came to the pie suppers. The kids were the stars, or thought they were, but everyone had a great time.

—Carolyn Mulford

Correcting my mistake on Carolyn Keene

In a post in March I wrote about the people behind the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, the purported author of the Nancy Drew mystery series. Created in 1930 by Edward Stratemeyer, the series was shepherded for decades by his daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. As I said in a comment shortly after the post, I misremembered her last name, giving it as Evans rather than Adams. I’m posting the correction again because I detest such errors and want to emphasize the correct name.

The first writer of the series was Mildred Augustine Wirt, author of more than 130 children’s books. Early in her career she wrote as Mildred A. Wirt. Widowed, she married a man named Benson and wrote some books as Mildred Benson.

—Carolyn Mulford

Hiding the secret of Carolyn Keene

In the 1940s, many girls would have listed their favorite writer as Carolyn Keene, author of the Nancy Drew mystery series.

What few people knew at that time was that Carolyn Keene never existed. The name is a pseudonym used by a succession of writers who collaborated with a book packager to produce the books.

The identity of the writers was a better guarded secret than any in the books for 50 years, from the first one in 1930 until 1980. The use of a pseudonym had leaked out before that, but the truth emerged as the original publisher, Grosset & Dunlap, sued over copyright infringement when the Stratemeyer Syndicate made a deal with Simon & Schuster.

For many years the head of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, Harriet Stratemeyer Evans, maintained that Carolyn Keene was a real person. Supposedly she refused interviews and photos because of her desire for privacy. Later Harriet claimed to be the author of all the books, giving credit for originating the character and first outlines to her father, who died shortly before the first book came out.

Edward Stratemeyer wrote numerous books for children, but he became a huge success by creating characters for book series, outlining plots, selling the ideas to publishers, hiring writers to write the books, and editing the books before sending them on to the publishers. Among his successes were the Bobbsey Twins, the Motor Boys, Ruth Fielding, and the Hardy Boys. Each series was written under a pseudonym, with the real writers signing a contract saying they would remain anonymous.

When he sold the idea for the Nancy Drew series to Grosset and Dunlap on the basis of brief outlines for the first five books, he hired a young short story writer and newspaper reporter, Mildred Augustine, to initiate the series. An adventurous, athletic young woman from a small town in Iowa, Mildred combined his instructions with her own creativity. She felt that she created Nancy Drew.

Mildred continued to write the books after Stratemeyer’s death, following (and veering from) outlines provided by Harriet and her sister Edna. Mildred wrote the first seven books, refused a pay cut during the depression, and came back to write books 11 to 25 and 30. Harriet wrote many of the later books herself and outlined and edited most of them. She felt they were her own creations.

An incredibly prolific writer, Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson wrote numerous other books, some under her own name, and she wrote a newspaper column until the day she died.

In the last 25 years several writers have written under the name Carolyn Keene. I’ve met two or three of them at writers’ conferences. Writers don’t like to be anonymous, but they take pride in having written as Carolyn Keene.

You can find more about the writers of Nancy Drew on the Web, but for a full account of the early decades of Carolyn Keene, read Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, by Melanie Rehak.

Reading Nancy Drew

I’ve been reading Nancy Drew books to refresh my memory and figure out why this 18-year-old heroine has thrived since 1930.

Four generations have read the series of mystery books, which now number more than 200. When I looked up Nancy Drew in the local library’s catalog, 246 titles came up.

I read about five of the books as a kid, and all I could remember was that Nancy had a snazzy convertible (thanks to a wealthy, indulgent father), no mother or siblings, some adoring girl friends, a boyfriend who came at her request and never tried to kiss her, and an incredible knack for finding a mystery to solve.

I started with the first book, The Secret of the Old Clock. The library offered an updated edition published in 1959. I couldn’t figure out what had been updated. Nancy drove around on mud roads, saw little traffic anywhere, and went to visit people because they didn’t have telephones.

Here are some of the things I noticed in this book and found again in later ones.
• She had no job, no chores, no lessons, no regular activities, no pets, and little contact with friends. No wonder she solved mysteries. She was bored silly.
• All the good people were handsome or pretty or talented or smart or all of those. None of the bad people were any of those. Her world held no shades of gray.
• All the people she helped were poor. In 1930, that was realistic.
• She was a committed do-gooder, going far out of her way to help needy strangers and slight acquaintances, and modestly accepting their effusive thanks for her efforts while declining substantive rewards.
• She found clues everywhere she went. Most were things any eager amateur detective (or mystery reader) would notice. The most scientific crime-solving tool mentioned was the fingerprint.
• She took chances, rather foolish ones at times, and suffered physically as a result. The bad guys harmed her but didn’t threaten her life.
• The police came into the picture late, after Nancy had solved the mystery.
• She did what she wanted to do despite obstacles and discouragement, she undertook her sleuthing to help others rather than herself, and she triumphed in the end.

All those are important elements, but I suspect the key to her long life was this:
No one solved the mystery for her. While she occasionally needed a little help to bring the miscreants to justice, she didn’t depend on the kindness—or bravery or strength or intelligence—of others.

—Carolyn Mulford

Gathering at Gramma's house

We didn’t go over the river and through the woods, but every Christmas we went to Gramma’s house. In the middle of the 20th century, most people we knew made a similar visit.

My father’s mother lived about two miles away in a farmhouse only half a mile from where she was born in a log cabin. She lived in a world where holidays meant family and food. All but two or her eight children lived nearby, and even my aunt who lived in another state often made it to the family gathering with two or three or her large brood.

The family filled the house, and food prepared by Gramma, my mother, and my aunts filled the table. You could count on the big three (chicken, noodles, and dressing), mashed potatoes, green beans, corn, bread-and-butter pickles, and several kinds of salads, about half of which featured jello. My mother usually made my favorite carrot and pineapple salad in orange jello.

Sometimes we had to let the meal settle before tackling the array of desserts: pies (apple, pumpkin, minced meat, coconut meringue), cakes (chocolate with chocolate icing, white cake with a powdered sugar frosting colored with food dye, angel food), cookies (oatmeal, peanut butter, chocolate chip), and candy (homemade fudge and divinity and store-bought brightly colored hard candies).

The whole family couldn’t fit around the extended table in the large kitchen. The kids sat at card tables in the living room until graduating to the main table, where we usually wedged thigh to thigh on the piano bench.

After dinner the women remained in the kitchen cleaning up and talking while the men took over the living room and talked. With no room to play inside, the kids went outside or moved between the rooms according to where the best stories were being told. My oldest uncle bragged about meeting Harry Truman “over there” in World War I. Another uncle countered with stories of his marksmanship as a Marine sniper in World War II. The women’s stories weren’t so exciting, at least when they saw me listening, but they laughed more.

By the end of the day I had heard dozens of family stories and seen old tensions among siblings surface and sink. After each gathering I marveled that brothers and sisters so different had grown up in Gramma’s house.

Carolyn Mulford

When Rudolph took flight

Rudolph turned humiliation into triumph and, red nose held high, flew into every home on radio waves in December 1949.

Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, reluctantly recorded the new song telling how the least of Santa’s reindeer used the nose that Clement Moore’s eight reindeers’ ridiculed to save the night. People bought 2 million records, and every child in the nation seemed to have learned every word.

The other side of the record held another popular song, “Here Comes Santa Claus.” It did well, but it couldn’t keep up with “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” that year or in the years to come. Many others with better voices than the astute cowboy recorded it, and everybody sang it on Christmas shows. The Chipmunks’ version was a big hit in 1960.

Rudolph didn’t start out as the subject of a song. He sprang to life in 1939, the creation of advertising writer Robert L. May, who had suffered from bullies’ taunts because he was the smallest boy in his class. He wrote the tale for the Montgomery Ward department stores to pass out as a promotional gift. Ten years later his brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, turned the tale into a song that no one could escape.

Why are we still singing about a reindeer with an odd nose? Mr. May concocted a new take on an ancient theme, the triumph of the underdog. Hans Christian Andersen wrote touched on the same theme in “The Ugly Duckling,” Come to think of it, so did I in The Feedsack Dress.

Give Mr. May credit for naming his hero well, discarding such possibilities as Rollo in favor of Rudolph. We remember the little reindeer partly because of the repetition of the consonants r and d with varied vowels. The sound and rhythm make “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” fun to say and easy to remember.

Carolyn Mulford

When television was young

This week many commercials feature the new shows coming soon. You could watch television 24 hours and never see the same show twice. Or you could watch nothing but the same half dozen reruns of old shows, or of the weather and the news, around the clock.

No one imagined the number and variety of shows to come in 1949, the infancy of commercial television. Then the choices ranged from limited to none. Stations were clustered on the coasts and the major cities in between, and they offered shows only a few hours a day. Most rural areas had no access to television. That didn’t matter to the millions of farmers who had no electricity. For them the battery-operated radio provided entertainment and news. Radio dominated everywhere.

One of the big TV events of 1949 was the advent of the first sitcom, a popular radio show called “The Goldbergs.” It made the transition successfully, but in the next few years many long-running radio shows flopped on television.

One great radio favorite that didn’t survive long on televison was “Fibber McGee and Molly.” Sometime during the show Fibber opened his closet to find something, and the radio audience heard everything fall out. Seeing it just wasn’t as funny. Red Skelton took his many characters from radio to television, but Fanny Brice’s Baby Snooks didn’t work. Several shows failed because the actors whose voices were instantly recognizable from radio didn’t look like the people they played.

Many of the new television shows won’t survive either. The main reason: lousy storytelling.

Saturday afternoons at the movies

Cowboys ruled Saturday afternoon at the movies in the late 1940s.

That’s when kids filled the seats. The theaters—many movie houses had once staged live shows—lured them with low prices, double features, a serial, and a cartoon or two.

Most of the movies were low-budget black-and-white films, and the writers spent little time on plot or character. You had a villain, often a man in a black hat, and you had a hero. They had an encounter early in the film, some verbal fights or fisticuffs along the way, and a shoot-out at the end. The highpoints were chases and stampedes and gunfights with six-guns that fired an endless stream of bullets.

One of the great things in the movies was the horsemanship. Those cowboys could really ride. Even more remarkable were the many ways they could mount a horse. They would vault on by running at the horse’s tail, placing their hands on the rump, and boosting themselves right into the saddle. They would drop from balconies or rooftops or trees into the saddle, sometimes onto a galloping horse. They would leap at a horse and ride hanging on one side, clinging to the saddle horn with one hand and shooting over the saddle with the other.

The big rivals for the kids’ money were Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. They both rode beautiful horses, Trigger and Champion, who responded to spoken or whistled commands. Between chases both cowboys sang a couple of songs, usually one by a campfire and one on the trail.

In the 1950s the availability of television and of Technicolor movies and, perhaps, a change in taste ended the rule of king cowboy.