My High School Classmates

We didn't used to look like this.  I can name about 4 of these people just by looking at them.  Well, probably they wouldn't recognize me right off either.

Thanks for visiting with me.

Kathi

Early Rising

Once upon a time, very few people slept late.  Everyone had to work in a factory at the crack of dawn or milk the cows and feed the chickens.  That's what roosters were for.

My father grew up on a farm.  He never got over it.  He would be up and dressed somewhere around 5:30 every morning.  Now and again he would call up the stairs, "You're missing the best part of the day!"

I hated that, especially in my teen years.

However, when I was in the lower grades, especially in the summer, I remember waking before anyone else, putting on some clothes and running outside with barefeet.  I would watch the sun rise over the neighbor's pasture with dewy wet feet.  What glory!

Maybe my father was right.  I've missed the best part of the day for years now.  It's just that I married a night-owl and I can't burn the day at both ends. 

Thanks for visiting with me,

Kathi

Reading

The first conscious memory I have is that of being tucked under my mother's left arm while she read me a book.  I leaned against her pregnant stomach.

My brother, incidentally, claims that's why he has a dent in his head.

We lived well outside of town, so I had my parents, a little brother, and eventually two younger sisters for playmates.  I was two miles down the road from anyone even close to my age. 

We invented our own fun.  Large cardboard boxes and clothes pins turned into castles.  With a folding table in the middle of the play room, blankets stretched from piano to couch making a room-sized tent.  We had a platform in one of the trees and a swing set.  We played baseball, badminton, and tag.  We had room to run, turn cartwheels, and hide from each other.

But my favorite thing was to read.  I read so much that my mother on several occasions took the kitchen timer and turned it to one hour.  She then told me, "You WILL go out and play until this dings." 

I borrowed books from the school library and the town library.  I was allowed four books at a time from the town library which was a small Carnegie building.  During the summer after fifth grade, I crossed the aisle from the children's side of the library to the adult side.  The first big book I borrowed was The Big Fisherman by Lloyd C. Douglas.  The librarian tried hard to talk me into sticking with the children's books.  I never really gave up the children's books (still read them today), but I loved the freedom to read whatever was available. 

A year later, my mother suggested a few books for me to tackle.  I read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.  Believe me, I used ever single footnote and word definition to get through it, but I understood most of it when I was finished.

Mother also suggested (almost required) that I read a few books that described the Holocaust.  I went through The Diary of Anne Frank, Baba Yar, and The Painted Bird.  On my own I read, The Day Lincoln Was Shot by Jim Bishop, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, and The Christmas Carol. 

It was pretty sneaky of my mother to let me read the classics before I found out that I wasn't supposed to like them.  In high school, while everyone else was moaning and groaning about the required reading list, I was checking off the ones I'd already finished.

I've gone through seasons of reading science fiction (favorites: Robert Heinlein and Anne McCaffrey), historical fiction both Biblical and other (the older, the better), mystery (many favorite authors - but more toward the cozy mystery side), and a couple of romance authors - Grace Livingston Hill comes to mind.

If you want to know what I'm reading now, check out Margaret Peterson Haddix (The Missing series) and Jan Bozarth (the Fairy Godmother Academy series). 

If I still had the time I had back then - well, I don't think I would change my habits.  I'd still read until someone set the kitchen timer on me and told me to go out and play.

Thanks for visiting with me,

Kathi

Watermelons and Stuff

During the Great Depression, my grandfather was a minister in South Dakota with 8 children to take care of.  Not many of his parishioners had spare money for the collection plate.  So they helped out in other ways.

Mother remembers that Grandpa was given chickens or flour as offerings.  One farmer kept one acre set aside for his annual offering.  Grandpa was allowed to chose between keeping whatever grew on that acre or the money that came from selling the produce. 

One time Grandpa drove up to the house in his Model A Ford with a big smile on his face.  A neighbor had offered him as many watermelons as he wanted out of the field for $1.00.  Mother says she saw six large watermelons in the back of the car and she remembers that they were sweet and juicy.

The children each got one pair of shoes per year.  It didn't matter if their feet grew or not.

The family raised chickens for the eggs and kept a cow for the milk.  They also tended a large garden and ate out of that as much as they could.  The children helped with all of the chores from a fairly young age. 

I've seen pictures of Mother and her siblings as they came of an age to enter the military or go on to college.  They were all lean - not bony or emaciated - but definitely not overfed.

Thanks for visiting with me,

Kathi

Child's Eye View of the Depression

My mother sent me several pages of stories about growing up during the Depression.  This will cover some number of blog postings, but here we go:

Feed sacks and flour sacking were used for clothing.  The material was printed with various patterns as they were intended to be reused. 

Mother remembers opening the sack to make a large flat piece of material.  She cut a strip from the long edge to use as the waistband.  The rest of the material was gathered some at the top edge and sewn so that the zipper was on the left side.  The waistband was added and the hem sewn at the lower edge.  This was not only acceptable, Mother says she loved doing it and wearing the final results.

My father's mother would make flour sacking over into aprons.  I still have one and the material is in excellent shape, sturdy and unworn about 80 years later. 

They used to make things to last.  And the current generation did not invent repurposing and recycling.

Thanks for visiting with me,

Kathi

Blizzard

I remember listneing to my mother's stories about her youth when I was quite young. 

When I was around 8 or 9, she told us the standard parent story about walking to school in any and all weathers.  In her case, she did not say that she had to walk uphill both ways.  In the part of South Dakota where she lived, there is no such thing as "uphill".  It's as flat as an ironing board.  In fact her father claimed that he could never go outside to pick up the newspaper in his pajamas because "his neighbor 34 miles across the field would be able to see him".

One thing Mother did say about walking to school was that they had to walk through or on a lot of snow.  She said that sometimes they walked on hard-packed drifts that were as high as the telephone poles.

Honestly, I didn't believe her.  I lived where we had snow every winter.  I'd seen blizzards and drifts.  I knew what it took to close down the streets.  And it wasn't enough to cover the telephone poles.

Maybe three or four years ago, I was watching the weather during winter.  They covered a news story about a huge storm crossing the Dakotas.  One picture that flashed across the screen showed snow as high as the top of the telephone poles. 

I apologized to my mother.

Thanks for visiting with me,

Kathi

Food and Me

I've been doing food for a L-O-N-G time!  lol

A Stitch from Time

My mother tried to teach me how to crochet when I was 8.  I learned how to make a great long chain, but I couldn't get any farther. 

My mother's mother sat down with me when I was 14 and taught me to crochet.  She started with a granny square pattern.  My first granny square was a triangle.  Grandma never laughed at my efforts or thought I was dumb for not counting correctly.  And I learned to crochet.

I have no idea how many people I've taught the basics of the craft.  I started in college and kept on going.  One of the first people I taught to crochet was left-handed.  I found the easiest way to demonstrate what I was doing was to sit face-to-face with the left-hander.  Mirror imaging works for opposites.  When I teach right-handers, I sit side-by-side with them.

I can do basic knitting, nothing fancy.  It's not my thing.  I'll crochet until I die unless my hands stop working. 

I have a couple of specialty stitches to master like the afghan stitch.  I don't know why it seems so important for me to learn.  The fabric it creates is so dense, it would keep you warm at the North Pole.  I live in a fairly warm climate and, assuming we move again, we'd end up in an even warmer place.  Maybe I just want to know I could do it if I wanted to.

I'm a little stubborn that way.  lol

Thanks for spending time with me,

Kathi

A Little Something in the Cake

I may have been three or four years old and my baby brother was - well - a baby.  Uncle Marcus came to stay with us for a couple of months after his tour of military service. 

My parents went on a date night (bowling, I believe) and Uncle Marcus stayed home with us little ones.  I remember thinking he was a super-hero.  I didn't have that word in my vocabulary yet and had never read a Superman comic book, but I thought the sun rose and set in Uncle Marcus' back pocket.

To thank my mother for letting him stay with us, Marcus decided to bake her a cake.  He tracked down a recipe for chocolate cake and started mixing ingredients.  Flour, sugar, and baking soda went in, all carefully measured according to the recipe.  But then he couldn't find the cocoa.  There wasn't any anywhere.  So Uncle Marcus shifted gears in the middle of the recipe and changed to a yellow cake. 

Although the recipe proportions were a bit different, this went along swimmingly until the recipe asked for vanilla - and once again, he couldn't find any.  Instead of giving up or changing to another new recipe, this time Marcus opted for a substitution.  In place of vanilla, he added rum.  (Since that wasn't something ever kept in our house, I have no idea why that was easier to find than vanilla, which I can't ever remember being without.)

The cake went into the oven and baked rather successfully considering what it had already been through.  Somehow, Marcus got the cake baked and frosted before my parents came home. 

I vaguely remember having a small piece of it on a plate at the kitchen table and stuffing a bit of it in my mouth with my fingers.  I've been told that both my baby brother and I thought it was a scrumptious cake. 

My mother, however, was a tougher audience.  She took one bite and said, "You put something in here."  And that was her last bite.  Uncle Marcus shared the rest of the cake with us little ones ... and we enjoyed every mouthful.

The Great Depression and The Dust Bowl

I won't be around to see if this holds true. 

The Dust Bowl occurred during a time of drought in the mid-1930's.  Admittedly, part of the effects were manmade - the deep plowing of the Great Plains, not planting ground-cover plants like clover, and cutting down the few trees that grew in the Plains. But a good deal of the problem was caused by hot, dry conditions.

In the 1970's, we had a cold spell and people were in a panic about a new ice age. 

Then the temperatures warmed up again, and now we are back to drought. 

I wonder, then, which way the temperatures will go in another 40 years.  I'm betting on another cold spell - assuming we are here to see it and no one has sparked a nuclear winter.  In that case, I would win the bet, but not for the right reasons.

Opinion time:

No matter what the climate change people think, and often in spite of them, I see cycles in the climate - natural, normal cycles that have more to do with solar influences than with anything we can throw at something as unstoppable as the weather.  After all, who caused global warming after the last Ice Age?  (I'm giving a freebie to the long earth history people.)

Check out information on The Medieval Climate Optimum.  The temperatures were warm, agriculture grew like crazy, everyone was well-fed with a chicken in every hen house.  Then temperatures dropped during the Maunder Minimum and people suffered with the cold between 1550 and 1850.  Not just the climate, but the cultures changed. Grapes stopped growing in northern Europe, so they switched to barley and hops to make beer.  The potato famine sent thousands of Irish to America looking for food and work.  Washington really did dodge ice when he and his troops rowed across the river to Trenton, and the winter at Valley Forge was a perfect misery for people living in tents.  And Stradivarius found wood grown dense in the cold climate which gave a perfect tone to his violins.

In every time and in every place, if you want to see why people expound on certain subjects and in certain ways, just follow the money.  If the global warming people stopped finding evidence of what they expound, they wouldn't be able to get government grants to do their research.

Thanks for your time.

Kathi

Mr. Nobodies

I am the oldest of four children.  We lived in the country and I had no near neighbors my age.  There were always toddlers and/or babies in the house who needed an afternoon nap.  And my mother appreciated a little quiet time. 

Even though I was supposed to rest too, I was allowed to do something quiet.  On occasion, I would work on a craft like weaving pot mats with Jersey loops. My favorite quiet thing to do was to sit cross-legged on the floor in the doorway of Mother’s closet and go through her box of family photos.

Her oldest album had a picture of her and four of her brothers and sisters seated on successive steps of the church in Centerville, South Dakota, where her father was the pastor.  Their ages ranged from about 7 on down. (At present, all five are still alive.)  The caption under the photo says “Mr. Nobodies.  They’re the ones who say they didn’t do it.”

The photo in front of me was taken in 1963 during a family trip to South Dakota to visit my grandparents.  My mother wanted to stop in Centerville to visit some of her old friends still living in the area.  It was hot. She had us stop at her father’s old church.  It wasn’t locked.  We got to see the inside. 

After our tour of the small, white, wood-framed building, she lined the four of us up from oldest to youngest on the same steps where her picture had been taken all those years ago.  I look hot and annoyed.  I was squinting in the bright sunlight.  The other three hadn’t spent time in the old photo box and didn’t recognize the connection, but I did.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to have a picture of me with the caption “The Current Mr. Nobodies”. 

What I remember most about that trip was that I could drink any water along the way – up to and including artesian well water - and my innards were perfectly fine until we got back to northern Illinois.  The water from home upset my system for a few days.  I thought it was odd that I got sick on home water.

Beginning Thoughts

My mother recently sent me 14 pages (in very small print) of stories and memories of growing up in South Dakota during the Depression, the Dust Bowl, and World War II.  I use the phrase "living memory" for that, since I can still retrieve those memories from someone who was really there.  After she leaves us, "living memory" becomes shorter - down to Truman and the Korean War, Eisenhower, and atomic bomb drills (as if going under your school desk would have protected you from an A-bomb).  We saw Sputnik and the rise and fall of Communism.  My generation first rode in the back of pickup trucks with the wind in our faces and old Nashes and propeller planes.  Before we hit 25, people had landed on the moon.

I am grateful that I have indoor plumbing rather than an outhouse.  I'm happy to have computers and other technology.  I'm excited that we don't die of polio, the Black Plague, and other horrible diseases.

I believe that my generation was the last one to experience a free and open childhood.  We were allowed to ride bikes on the road, climb trees and build treehouses without someone spotting us all the time.  We had chores, making us responsible.  We learned common sense - although my generation is also the one that threw it away and grabbed for drugs, an amoral lifestyle, and entitlements.

The smell of a milk house can take me right back to age five.  I climbed barbed wire fences and fed handfuls of grass to my grandfather's heifers.  Now my grandfather's farm has become a community of airline pilots with a runway for small commuter planes where we used to throw down hay for the cows.

We weren't so tightly scheduled as today's children are.  Sometimes I wonder, between music lessons, karate, track, and softball, when today's children find time to sleep or do homework. 

Schools have changed.  Phonics works.  Some of these other systems that purport to teach reading don't work.  There is at least one shelver at the library who isn't too sure of alphabetical order, and I've run across more than one store clerk who didn't understand math very well.

Cartoons have changed.  We had Fractured Fairy Tales with Edward Everett Horton and Mighty Mouse.  TV programs have certainly changed.  Robert and Laura Petrie slept in twin beds.  No need to explain what we are given as standard TV fare now.

Nietzsche declared God dead and the spiritual void has been filled with earth worship (paganism), psychic experimentation, and witchcraft.  (I know what is requested out of the religion section at the library.)  Prayer was taken out of the public schools and, at almost the same time, abortion was declared legal.  The value of life has been cheapened.

While I appreciate the benefits of living today, sometimes the exchange makes me sad.

We'll get to some happy memories next time.

Kathi

So Much Is Lost

Laura Engels Wilder began writing the story of her life when the world changed drastically during the course of her life.  She saw travel change from covered wagons to airplanes. 

I found the Beloit Mindset List and checked some of the things today's children reguard as ancient history - if they know about them at all.

People born since 1980 do not remember when we had to get out of our chairs to change the channel on the TV.  They never saw an eight-track tape or beta video tape.  They've never owned a record player. 

Other than a port-a-potty, they've never used anything except indoor plumbing and never had to haul water to do anything other than watering outdoor plants.

They've always had MTV. 

They have no idea who or what Farfel was, no active memory of Reagan's presidency, don't know that Reagan and the Pope were shot within two months of each other.  They don't remember what they were doing when John Kennedy was shot, when men first landed on the moon, or the Bay of Pigs occurred, because they weren't born yet.

I may not be Laura Engels Wilder, but I see incredible changes between my early years and now.  Since my mother is still alive, I can pull up stories going back to the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and World War II.  I think some of this is worth recording.

Please feel free to add your own recollections in the comment box.

Thanks,

Kathi