| "Family" or "How We Got By" |
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| On "Wash days" there were always ham and beans cooking all day. Mom made cornbread and home made buiscuts. There were no washers and dryers then. We had to wash clothes on a '''washboard''' and boil the white clothing in lye soap to keep them white. We heated water for the clothes on a wood and coal burning stove and then have to carefully put the hot water in a wash tub, wash the clothes on a "wash board" and wring them out by hand. When we were finished 'washing' we'd empty that dirty water, and repeat the whole scenerio for the "rinse" cycle. I only had two pair of underwear in those days and would have to hand wash them at night and pray that they would dry before I left for school in the morning!! With no dryers back then, all clothes were clothes pinned to a clothes line outdoors. If it rained, you had to wait til it stopped to hang clothes to dry. If it started to rain before clothes were dried, we'd have to run outside and get all of them off the line and back inside...only to have to go back outside and rehang them all again! After all that work, it was not unusual for a bird flying by to drop his droppings on a freshly washed piece of clothes!!!! New shoes were a time to celebrate! If your family had many children, like ours, one child would get a new pair of shoes (Dad would only be able to afford one pair per month) and you wore them til the seams could no longer hold them together. We immediately took them off after school and had to go barefoot in order to make the shoes last longer. If you wore holes through the soles of the shoes, we'd have to use layered newspaper or cardboard inside the shoes to prolong their life. There were no grocery stores open on Sundays and no theatres. During the World War, my mother and I stood in line with rationing stamps for sugar and other grocery items, bread, flour and even nylon hose. There was a separate line for each and every item. It took forever! There were no sanitary napkins in those days. We had to use ripped sheets and believe it or not, we had to WASH them, dry then and use them again!! There were no such thing as Kleenex. You used a cloth handkerchiefs and yes wash them every week. There were no paper towels. The only soaps there were was Ivory Soap for bathing and lye soap for washing clothes. There was no such things as TOILET PAPER.....we used a SEARS CATALOG for that!! Most people had gardens in their yards and we canned everything (that way you didn't have to buy it at the grocers!) Sometimes we would forget to empty the water pan under the refrigerator and we'd get up one day and there would be ice cold water all over the kitchen floor. There were peddlers (salesmen) who would come around every Saturday, selling eggs and fresh chickens, vegetables. Milk and buttermilk was delivered to our front door in glass bottles. There was the "Fuller Brush Man" who sold brushes as well as men (never women) who come around selling rugs, blankets and a man called "Jewel T" who came around once a month selling vanilla and spices. There were no 'furnaces' when I was a child. We had a pot bellied stove which Dad stoked with wood every night and then shake the stove in the morning to release ashes to get the fire started again. We had kerosene lamps as there were no electricity. We had no bathroom inside the house so we had to use the outhouse. During cold weather, mom would find a pot with a lid so we could use that during the freezing temperatures INDOORS at night and then in the morning, one of us would have to carry this pot to the outhouse and empty it into the outhouse!! To keep cold out in the Winter, we'd put card board over the front and back doors and always push rugs up against them. Also, there was no inside plumbing so we had to get all of our water from a pump in the yard from an underground well and carry it indoors for everything....cooking, cleaning, bathing, washing clothes, etc. (Recontact for years) Submitted from Rose T. Colorado Springs, CO. |
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