My life was very simple growing up.  Most of the people in our community lived the same way and were very friendly.  They shared every thing they had with each other.  A helping hand was all ways extended to each other.

 

HOME:

I was always told that the home I grew up in had been ordered from Sears and Roebuck and then assembled.  It was a beautiful 2 story home with a porch wrapped around most of the house.  Not one closet built in the house.  The attic was never finished and it was a great place to play and hide in.  There was a beautiful stair way built up the wall in the hallway.  The attic was used mainly for storage.  Not sure when the home was built but it burned on Thanksgiving night in 1949.  Never knew the cause of the fire.  We were in college and home for Thanksgiving and all we had brought home with us was lost in the fire.  It burned to the ground in about 20 minutes.  It was cold and all we had on were our night clothes and no shoes.  The neighbors heard us screaming and they came as soon as they could.  We went to our neighbor’s home and I put on her clothes and went to town and bought all of us a set of clothes.  My parents moved in with my grandmother for a few days.  We had left our home in Swift, MO, fully furnished when we went off to college.  It was located about 3 miles from where my parent’s home was located.  They lived in our house until dad got their new home built back in the same location.  They moved to the new home and took our furniture with them until they could afford to buy some new furniture.  Electricity had come to the area before the home burned and the new home was better arranged for electrical equipment.

 

KITCHEN STOVES:

We had to chop the wood that was burned in the kitchen stove mother cooked on.  I remember when my parents bought a coal oil stove and my mother just knew she could not cook on just 3 burners but she did and used the stove in the summer time.  Mom had a new electric stove in her new home.  It was so hot and no air conditioning in those days.

 

LIVING ROOM STOVE:

The living room stove was the only heat in the rest of the house.  Dad would bank a fire for over night. Banking a fire required creating a pile of new material next to a pile of red hot coals. This dries out the material making it more combustible.  The next morning dad would poke the banked fire and up would blaze a new fire for the day and he would add more coal or wood to the fire and the room would soon be warm again.  The ashes had to be removed from the bottom of the kitchen and living room stoves every day.

 

NO REFRIGERATOR:

Since we had no refrigerator, we kept our milk, eggs, butter, etc. in the Milk House.  Inside the milk house was a very large wooden trough with a cork stopper, the water had to be drained several times a day in the summer time and then refilled with cold water.  In that trough were gallon jugs with all these items, eggs, milk, butter, etc. inside them and they were resting in the cold water.  We had a water hand pump on the back porch and this made it easier to fill the trough.  The water was always very cool when pumped up.  Many people had to carry water since the pump was not near their milk house.

 

Since we did not have a refrigerator, dad bought a chest ice box and would go to town and buy a big block of ice to make ice cream and most of the neighbors would bring their supplies and make ice cream along with dad.  I remember having to set on the ice cream churn to keep it from spinning around when the crank would be turned after the ice cream started getting firm.  The blades were normally removed before packing the churn down.  Then more salt and ice were added and a heavy cover put on top and the ice cream and was left to get firmer.  They made all flavors of ice cream.  My favorite was blackberry; peach was delicious, banana, vanilla, pecan, etc. 

 

LEVEE

I grew up with a big levee in front of our house to keep the Mississippi River from overflowing over our land when it was out of its banks.  I got inside the chest ice box one day and went to sleep.   It did not have ice in it all time.  My parents could not find me and they called and called but I did not answer since I didn’t wake up and to this day once I go to sleep I do not hear noises.  The Mississippi River had overflowed up against the levee and my parents feared that I may have gone over the levee and drowned.  They formed a search party and they were getting ready to go look for me when I woke up and went out front where the people were and I don’t know if my parents wanted to spank me or love me.  Ever one was so happy to see me all right.

 

 

WATER BUCKET:

We had a washstand in our home and on that stand was a wash pan, bucket of water and a dipper in the bucket.  Everyone drank from the same dipper and if they did not drink all of the water they would pour the rest in the pan and then you could wash your hands in that left over water and every one dried their hands on the same towel.

 

LAMPS:

 

We had coal oil lamps.  Coal oil (kerosene) was kept in our Smoke House.  Coal oil had a lot of medicinal qualities.  When we got a cut or scratch, the wound would be cleaned with coal oil and seldom did we get an infection.  No antibiotics in those days so had to rely on home remedies.

 

My dad purchased an Aladdin Lamp one year and it had the brightest glow.  It was amazing how that improved our reading in the evenings.

 

We would clean the chimneys on those lamps by taking them off the base and blowing our breath in them and using the newspaper to wipe them out.  They had to be cleaned daily because they would get smoky.

 

We did not have electricity until I was a teenager and then it was a light bulb hanging down in the center of the room with a string to turn it on and off.

 

RADIO:

We had a battery radio but my parents only played it about 30 minutes a day to listen to the news.  My mother was a news hound and we always had a newspaper delivered to our home from St. Louis and my parents read that paper form front to back everyday with the light of a coal oil lamp.

 

 

PLUMBING:

We had no indoor plumbing until R.E.A., Rural Electric Association, came to our community so families could buy electric water pumps to pump water to homes.  Dad had the water run to the house from the pump at the barn.  Dad then enclosed part of the porch and made a bathroom.  That bathroom had a closet which was the only one in the house.  Dad put in a commode for us to use and a bathtub.  We did not get an electric water heater for years so would heat a kettle of water to pour in the tub to heat the water so we could take a bath.

 

BRUSHING TEETH:

I would fill a glass with water and go outside to brush my teeth and use just a glass of water.  No one went to the dentist in those days unless you had a toothache.  I lost several teeth because of no dental hygiene.  My mother was allergic to milk so I did not get enough calcium in my formative years.

 

ROADS:

Dirt roads were so rutted in the winter a car could not get through on them.  Horses or wagons had to be used to travel in.  The road to my old home is still horrible when it rains.  They still use the levee to get in and out of the area. 

 

 

BARN:

My parent’s barn burned in June 1947.  Dad had placed the electrical box for an electric fence he installed to hold pigs in onto the barn.  Lightening struck the fence and exploded the box causing a fire and burning the barn down.  All the animals got out.  Dad built a smaller barn back on the same spot.  Years later some children were playing with fire works and sparks set some grass on fire and burned the barn down.  This barn was never replaced.

 

 CATTLE:

Horses, cows and pigs had to be fed and watered at the barn.  Hay had to be pushed down from the loft of the barn.  Hay had been cut and baled in the fall and had to have enough to feed the cattle all year.  A huge circle barrel about 15 feet in diameter had to be filled with water each day using a hand pump to pump the water.  I used to cheat and soak some corn cobs in water and throw at the horses and cows to keep them away from the barrel so I could get it filled up and tell dad that it was full.

 

Cows had to be milked twice a day.  We only kept 2 cows.  Most of the time only one at a time would give milk.  The other would have a baby calf so needed the milk to feed it.

 

CHICKENS:

Every spring my parents would buy 200 baby chicks to raise to sell in stores in town and to neighbors.  We had to take very good care of them when they were small.  My parents had a brooder house in the backyard for the little chicks.

 

Eggs were gathered every day and what the family did not use were taken to the stores in town and sold.  Chickens were dressed and taken, also. So was milk, buttermilk and butter taken.

 

Shelling the corn in the barn to feed the chicken daily and calling the chickens, “Here chick, chick, chick, chick” roosters were very mean and we had to keep an eye on them or they would jump on us and claw us.

 

Roosters crowing in the early morning did not wake us up because we had heard them all of our lives.

 

OUTHOUSES (TOILETS):

Our outhouse was out behind the smoke house and it had 3 sizes of holes in it large, medium and small for the children.  The old Sears and Roebuck catalog served as toilet tissue and we used all of the plain pages first and not the slick pages.  We would crumple the sheet of paper in our hand to make it soft before using.

 

PLOWING FIELDS:

My dad and I plowed behind a team of horses/mules from sun up to sun down.  I had to go to the field since all my brothers went off to war as did the rest of the young men when WW II came along.  We had a small family farm and I was the only one to help my dad.  We raised cotton, corn and hay.

 

GARDEN:

Large gardens with every type of vegetables that could be thought of were planted and then all the food was canned.  We only had a hot water bath and meat could not be processed in a hot water bath but most of the vegetables could be.  As time passed, the pressure cook came out and my parents bought one and then they could can meat.

 

Onions were harvested in the fall and hung in the barn to be used all winter. 

 

ORCHARD:

We had a large orchard with different varieties of apples, peaches, pears, plums and cherries.  I would get the stomach ache every year from eating green apples.  I would climb up on the brooder house to eat cherries off the cherry tree.  We never washed our fruit because we got a lot of rain and there was not a lot of dust and pollution in those days.

 

The apples would be harvested and wrapped in paper and stored in the house under the stairs for eating in the winter.  They had to be checked every week for rotten apples since one rotten apple could ruin the whole basket full.

 

Most of the fruit was canned for future use such as pies, cobblers or just pour out of jar into large bowl to eat. 

 

Grape vines divided our vegetable garden from the orchard.  Some of the old grape vine still exists at my parent’s old home place.  My nephew, Victor Sample, owns the old home place and he takes care of this grape vine.  Jelly and Jam were made from those grapes.

 

Dad would go to the woods and pick black berries for mother to can and for us to eat.  Love black berry ice cream that dad made for us.

 

HOG KILLING DAY:

Hogs were butchered every fall when it got cool.  Many of the neighbors would come on “hog killing day” to help and some times they would bring their hog to be killed.  I still have my dad’s knife used on those days.  A large barrel was filled with boiling water and the hog was pushed up and down in the hot water after it was killed so the hairs could be scrapped off with knives.  Then the hog was cut up into parts with some being smoked in the smoke house, some cured in salt, some canned and skin was saved for its fat content.  The skin was cut into about 2 inch squares and cooked in a large kettle over a fire.  Then the pieces were put into a press and squeezed to get the grease out of them and this fat made enough lard for my mother to use all year.  Then the rinds were called “cracklings.”  Corn bread was made and those rinds cut into smaller pieces and dropped in the batter made for some good eating.                

 

SCHOOL:

Schools had split sessions in our area so the children could get out of school in mid-May to what we called “Cotton Chopping Vacation” because the planters in those days planted a solid row of cotton and the rows had to be thinned and weeds cut down.    We would go back to school the first part of July and get out in September for “Cotton Picking Vacation” by hand and go back to school in November after the harvest. 

 

Johnny Stride Swing caused an abscess under my left arm and it had to be lanced without any pain killer and it sure did hurt and I did not use that swing again.  I still have the scar under my arm where the abscess was lanced.

 

I rode a school bus 45 miles to school and 45 back home in high school. 

 

COTTON CHOPPING:

The width of the blade on the hoe was how much room was left between the stalks and then we would thin out the cotton to leave about 3 healthy looking stalks and cut down any weeds.  There were no weed killers in those days.  All the fields had to be hand hoed.

 

COTTON PICKING:

We would attach a long 9, 10 or 12 foot cotton sack strap around our neck and this strap had to be adjusted to fit the person pulling the sack and that we drug behind us all day and we would pick each boll of cotton and fill the sack up.  When the sack got full, we took it to the wagon or trailer to be weighed on scales attached to the back end of the wagon.  The weight would be recorded, the cotton emptied into the wagon.  The process would be repeated all day.  Your weights would be added up and you would be paid at the end of the week.  You would be paid about 10 cents a pound and some people could pick around 200 pounds a day and I did a few times but dad always made us pick clean cotton and would not let us go to the fields until the dew had dried off.  He always got a good price for his cotton but others that picked it wet and rough did not.

 

There was a large family that came every year from the Ozarks to help pick cotton.  They would stay in a one room building we had out back and go back home when the harvest was over.

 

On day, one of the girls came into the house to tell mother she had found her sweater that she thought was lost in a “poke.”  I had no idea what she was talking about so when she left mom told me that she had found her sweater in a paper bag.

 

HAY BALING DAY:

When it was time to harvest the hay, dad would set the one horse power hay baler up in the middle of the field after the hay had been cut and dried.  The hay was scooped up into rows and could be easily picked up with a pitch fork and loaded onto the wagon and taken to the baler.  The baler was run by a horse walking around in a circle dragging a bar that made the hay baler work. 

 

SOYBEAN HARVEST:

Soybeans were harvested with a combine and I can remember sitting in back on the combine and pulling the burlap bag from under the spout of flowing soybeans and attaching another burlap bag very quickly and then sewing up the burlap bag of seed and pushing it off on to the ground and do the same procedure over and over all day.  No mask was worn.  When I was about 10 years old, dad told me to get in the truck and drive it along the row of soybean sacks so he could pick them up.  That was my driver education class.

 

OTHER CROPS:

Our soil was very rich because it had been overflow land from the Mississippi River until the levee was built in front of our house.  Dad found a little patch of land that had some sand in it and he planted his peanuts, watermelons and cantaloupes on it.

 

We would take Irish potatoes and cut them up so an “eye” would be in each piece.  We would drop that potato down into the ground with the eye up that had been plowed and a trench made to drop the potatoes in.  After the potatoes were harvested, they would be spread out to dry and then stored. 

 

Sweet potatoes aren't started by seed like most other vegetables, they're started from slips. Slips are shoots that are grown from a mature sweet potato and can be found in nurseries or stores.

 

Dad always planted a few rows of pop corn for our home consumption.  My grandmother had a stove that opened in the front and she had a long handled wire mesh basket we could put the popcorn in and stick it in the stove to pop in a few minutes.  Soo good.  We popped our corn on top of the kitchen stove at our house.

 

CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS:

We spent hours stringing popcorn and red berries on thread to be wrapped around our Christmas tree.  Dad was very good at cutting a star out of card board.  We would save all the tin foil we could get from gum wraps, cigarette packages, etc. to wrap on the star.  For some reason the tin foil did not last from Christmas to Christmas so we had to make a new one each year.  We did not have aluminum foil in those days.  No Christmas lights since no electricity.  Mom did have some old Christmas Ornaments that we handled very carefully to keep from breaking them since they were very fragile.  Since I married before our old home burned, mom gave me some of those ornaments for my Christmas tree.  I still have a few of those ornaments.

 

CURLING IRON:

My grandmother had an iron that she could stick down into the chimney of a lamp to heat that would make waves in her hair.  It would take several times of heating the iron to do her hair.

 

RATIONING:

During the war some foods were rationed such as sugar, coffee, meat, fish, butter, eggs, cheese, etc.  We were only affected by the rationing of sugar, coffee and a few other items because we had the rest of the items on the farm.

 

Women could not buy nylon hose in those day and the only hose available were made of silk that was used to make parachutes.  We only had 2 piece stockings that were held up with a garter around our upper leg.  All hose had a seam up the back.  I still have my garters.

 

Shoes were rationed.

 

Gasoline and tires were rationed.  Cars were rationed.  My dad needed to buy a car because one of the boys wrecked his car and he bought a Kaiser.  The doors had no way for the water to drain out and all the insides of the door rusted and the windows could not even be rolled up or down.   How my dad hated that car but that is all he could get.

 

MEDICAL TREATMENT:

I have spent most of my life with a cough.  When I was growing up my mother would get a spoonful of sugar and drop about 3 drops of coal oil on it and give it to me.  It would stop my cough for a while.

 

One time I ran a piece of wire all the way through my foot and was screaming and mother came running and pulled my foot up off the wire and took me to the smoke house where the coal oil was kept and run coal oil over my foot and then tied my foot up with a white cloth and it never even got sore. 

 

LAUNDRY DAY:

In our back yard was a big black kettle for boiling water in.  It was propped up off the ground and I am not sure with what now but wood could be pushed under the big kettle to boil water on laundry day.  The water was used to make warm water for the scrub tub.  In the scrub tub was a wash board and a bar of lye soap my mother made from saved grease from bacon, etc. and lye.  It would get the clothes clean but tear the skin up on your hands.  Next to the scrub tub was 2 rinse tubs and the last tub had bluing in it to make the white clothes look brighter.  White clothes were always washed first, then light colored clothes and dark clothes last.  If there was a stain on a fabric such as mildew, the fabric would be laid out on the grass wet and left for the sun to shine on it and most of the time it would come out.  No bleaches in those days.  All of the clothes were put into the boiling water.  We then had to hang the clothes on a clothes line or all over the house on a rope in the winter time.  We had to hang the clothes certain ways such as shirts by shirttail, sheets by their hems, etc.

 

After we got electricity, my parents were able to get a washing machine to put on the back porch to do the scrubbing of the clothes with a big wringer on top that would catch your fingers if they got to close putting them clothes to be wrung out.  We still have to heat the water in the big black kettle in the backyard.

 

In the winter, the laundry was done in the kitchen and the water heated on the kitchen stove.

 

QUILTING:  

Quilting was usually done in the winter time.  The quilt frame was in our living room and when it needed to be put away it was lifted to the ceiling by winding cords around the four corners of the frame.  The ceilings in our house were 12 feet tall.  Different types of quilts were made.  The finer quilts were always made using the quilting frames and my mother and father would spend hours making small stitches to quilt the better quilts.  The tops of the quilts were usually made from scrapes of fabric left over from clothes mother had made.  She would use a pretty design and cut all of her pieces out and sew them together by hand and would try to get the color of the fabrics to coordinate with the rest of the pieces.  A large piece of fabric was used for the backing.  A cotton batting was placed between the top layer and bottom and then they would be tacked together to keep from slipping when placed on the frame and rolled up leaving a small area to quilt on.  Old quilts could be placed inside of other types of fabrics and this quilt would be tacked together every several inches with yarn.  They were very warm quilts.

 

FEATHER BEDS:

Mother would pick the under side of geese every year and save the down to make pillows and feather beds.  The feather beds were very thick and would only be used in the winter months.  The feather beds were stored all summer in the loft of the house to be aired.  We always had flannel sheets on the beds in the winter time.  When we would climb into bed and sink down in the feather bed, it was not long until we were asleep.

 

MY COLD FEET:

I have suffered from hypothyroidism all of my life and one of the side effects is cold feet and being cold.  My mother used to remove the eye, the "eyes" are the removable iron plates on the top of the wood stove, and wrap them in paper because they would have soot on the bottom of them and then a towel and place it at my feet to get them warm in the winter.  Most night my mother would wrap a blanket around the stove in the living room and run ahead of me and tuck me into bed with a warm blanket.  Our bedrooms were cold enough to freeze a glass of water in the winter.  No central heat or air conditioning.  The kitchen would be warm as long as the kitchen stove was burning but would quickly be ice cold when the fuel burned up. 

SMOKING:

Most men smoked when I was growing up.  Dad would take a small white bag from his shirt pocket, he tugged at the yellow string on the bag and poured tobacco into a cigarette a paper and rolled his cigarettes with one hand.  He did not smoke many years but long enough to destroy bronchial tubes and he suffered from bronchitis all the rest of his life.

We used the little tobacco bag to keep little items in such as marbles, coins, etc.

AUNT WILLIE:

My mother’s sister, Aunt Willie, took me when I was 18 months old because my mother was sick and had to have surgery.  I lived with my aunt in Tennessee and my parents were in Missouri.  My aunt and uncle owned the ferry across the Mississippi River so my aunt did not have to pay to cross the river to bring me to see my family but I never stayed in Missouri during that time.  I lived with my aunt and uncle until I was almost 7 years old and I started to school in Tennessee at Jeannie Walker Elementary School.  My mother was in much better health by then and it was decided that I would return to Missouri and live with my parents and brothers and start to school in November.  I was happy in both places but my aunt and uncle adored me and wanted me when I was small to spend every minute I was out of school with them and my mother let me go.  When I was 9 years old my aunt and uncle brought me to Phoenix to spend the winter with them and my aunt home schooled me.  My uncle came to Phoenix for his health and I loved it out here where there was no snow or cold weather.