The Spattered Silhouette

Friday afternoon art classes

When I was a little girl attending Duff Valley District 4, we all loved Friday afternoons. (I'm speaking for myself and the half-dozen other students in our little one-room schoolhouse.) Of course, Friday afternoons were wonderful because the weekend lay ahead. And the other reason that they were wonderful was that we had art class after last recess.

We all did the same art project, no matter which grade we were in -- kindergarten, eighth grade, or anything  between. Some of us cut, pasted, and colored a lot better than others, but before we went home on Friday afternoon, everyone's project was pinned to a bulletin board where it would be displayed for the next week or two. Seeing my handwork in comparison with the others motivated me to cut, paste, and color more neatly.

And we did do a lot of cutting, pasting, and coloring. Sometimes the teacher used the hectograph to copy a coloring sheet, and sometimes, we drew our own pictures. Sometimes we cut pieces from construction paper and pasted the pieces together to make a valentine or a turkey or whatnot.

A lot of our art work was flat, but I do remember some three-dimensional projects:  flowers cut from egg carton sections or made from crepe paper, mosaics made with shards of Easter-egg shells, and even a sculpture of a cow's head made from crumpled aluminum foil.

Once in a while, our teacher got out the water-paint boxes or mixed up a batch of tempera paint. We all painted whatever she announced our subject would be -- such as "trees in autumn colors." And once in a blue moon, we did a finger-painting.

We painted just often enough to make us super-excited when we got to do it again. I am not sure whether we painted so rarely because paints were expensive or because our teachers hated the mess.

I remember quite a bit of spatter painting.  It only required one color of paint, and the paint was applied with the teacher's close supervision, outside if the weather permitted. It only took a minute to do the spattering. The procedure was this:

• Draw or trace a shape and cut it out. 
• Lay the cut-out (or several cut-outs) on a sheet of construction paper.
• Put on a very large shirt, backwards.
• Dip the bristles of an old toothbrush in tempera paint and scrub the toothbrush over a small window screen so little drops of paint spray all over the paper.
• Let the paint dry and remove the cut-outs.

The day that I made my silhouette the teacher set up the filmstrip projector while we were gone to recess. When we came back inside, we took turns sitting in the projector's bright light and tracing each other's silhouettes. Then we cut out our silhouettes and spatter-painted them. I think I was in third or fourth grade at the time.

I did dozens of Friday afternoon art projects before I left country school at the end of 8th grade, but the only one I still have is my silhouette. I found it in my mother's things after she passed away.

Mohair Memories

Romance in the fifties

Photo by knittiemarie on Flikr

When I was about seven or eight years old (in the late 1950s,) I began to notice that some guys and girls in high school were "going steady." As a symbol of their affection, they had exchanged class rings. 

I don't remember what the guy did with the girl's ring. Maybe he put it on a chain and wore it around his neck, or maybe he wore it on his pinky. But I haven't forgotten what the girls did with the guys rings.

Guys' rings were almost always a few sizes too big, so the girls wrapped them in yarn to make them small enough to wear. In a pinch, any yarn would do (so long as it was color-coordinated to the girl's outfit.) But given a choice, the girls preferred mohair yarn.

After the ring was wrapped in the fuzzy mohair, the girls brushed up the yarn fibers with a toothbrush, encircling the ring with a cloud of fuzz as large as a ping-pong ball. Anyone who glanced at the girl's hand  knew immediately that she was going steady.

When the girl had a few spare moments, she might get her toothbrush out of her purse and freshen up the yarn on her ring, just to keep it looking nice.

Pastel mohair cardigans were popular then, too, and I thought the girls looked beautiful wearing their soft, fuzzy sweaters with their boyfriends' rings wrapped in matching swirls of mohair. And of course, the guys were handsome too, with their crew-cuts combed straight up in front.

In fact, during a church service (my primary opportunity to observe teenage couples), I could get so busy looking at those guys and girls that I didn't pay any attention at all to the sermon.

The First President I Remember

I liked Ike.

Seen in a flea market in Cave City, KY

Dwight D. Eisenhower is the first U.S. President that I remember. We didn't have television in the 1950s, so I knew him from the radio and from pictures in magazines and newspapers.

President Eisenhower took office when I was one year old and served until I was nine.  I had the deepest respect and greatest awe for him that a little country girl could muster.

I remember telling my brother once that I wished we had television just so I could see the President.

Dwight was five years older than me and more sophisticated. He didn't share my reverence. "What would be so great about that?" he asked. His scorn shocked me!

I don't remember my reply, but I'm sure I didn't explain myself well. Even 50 years later, it's hard to explain the position of high honor that President Eisenhower held in my little heart and mind.

Related: 
I Grew Up In Radio Land

LST Ship Memorial at Evansville, IN

The ship that won WWII for the Allies

Isaac and I visited the LST Ship Memorial at Evansville (IN) about two years ago. We've been planning to take Dennis to it ever since, and this past Sunday, we finally made that trip. I enjoyed going through the ship again and hearing the spiel of a different tour guide. Dennis enjoyed the tour from his own unique perspective. He is a Navy veteran as well as a history-lover, and also, his father was a machinist in the Navy during World War II.

The LST (Landing Ship, Tank) was a World War II invention.  It was a flat-bottomed, high-riding ship that could be driven right onto most beaches. The big doors at the end of the LST opened and a gangplank flopped out, so tanks and other vehicles could drive off, ready to do battle. If  the ship couldn't plow up onto the beach, the tanks and other vehicles drove off via pontoon bridges. According to our tour guide, the LST was first imagined by Winston Churchhill, who knew that tanks would greatly the chance of every invasion's success.

Evansville, Indiana, was one of several places where the LST was manufactured in the U.S. Although Evansville had not previously had a shipyards, 167 LSTs and 35 other vessels were built there by the Missouri Valley Bridge and Iron Company. At the peak of production, Evansville was building 2 LSTs per week, and over 19,000 people were employed at the shipyards. After manufacture and christening, the LSTs were outfitted, sailed to New Orleans, and from there, put into military service. 

School Photo, Second Grade

The blogger at a tender age

I was in second grade when this photo was taken. I think this was the only time that a photographer came to Duff Valley District 4 for school pictures. It's understandable that photographers didn't want to make the long drive out in the country to our little school. I don't suppose we ever had more than ten kids in all eight grades. One year, we had just five students for most of the year.

My goodness, my bangs are short in this photo! My dad had an electric hair clipper, and when he cut my brother's hair, he cut my bangs too. I remember him putting one hand on top of my head to hold me steady while he buzzed my forehead with the clipper. Then he brushed away the prickly hair clippings with a little round brush. The clipper, some attachments, the brush, and a big bib for the victim all came with the set.

Later in second grade, I got my first pair of glasses. They were sky blue with tiny rhinestones along the top, and they hurt my ears terribly. But in this photo, little Genevieve is still unspectacled. I can look directly into her eyes, and I think I see that she is a bit dubious about smiling for the camera.

First Church of the Nazarene in Ainsworth, NE

Postcard from the 1950s

Some of the Nebraska folks who read this blog may recognize the building on this postcard even though it no longer exists. It is the First Church of the Nazarene in Ainsworth, Nebraska. The photograph was probably taken in the 1950s. About 1960, this building was torn down and a larger, stone building took its place on the corner of Third and Elm.

The building in the photograph is where I formed my earliest memories of going to church. I think I was about 3 years old  (definitely not more than 4 years old) when we started attending church there.

I don't remember Sunday School classes at all, though I am sure I attended them. I do remember the church basement -- how interesting! You could go down the steps in the church, walk through the basement hallways, climb the steps at the other end, and come out in the pastor's house.

I remember sitting with my parents in a big room in the basement and singing "This World Is Not My Home". Everyone sang, "The angels beckon me from heaven's open door..." and that reminded me of my Aunt Becky.

Outside this church, one night after prayer meeting, my brother Dwight punched a little boy who wouldn't let go of me. I was very thankful to be rescued. I asked Dwight about this a few years ago, and he still remembers it too.

Another time, one of the little church boys threw a tin can from the trash barrel at me. It cut my forehead between my eyebrows, and I have a small, faint scar from it to this day. I won't tell the names of those naughty little boys, but I still remember who they were.

At the Church of the Nazarene, people called each other "Brother" and "Sister". I believe I remember a Brother Roy Morrow who was the pastor when I was very young. (Hadn't my mother cautioned me that "roy" hamburger would make me sick? How odd that a man had that word for his name!)

After that, Brother James Tapley was the pastor. (Sister Tapley, his pretty, young wife, put a band-aid on my wounded forehead.) Later, as I recall, Brother Hiram Sanders was the pastor.* These pastors served in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The various parts of the worship service were planned and orderly, but there was always room for the Holy Spirit to move. People said "Amen!", "Hallelujah!", and "Praise the Lord!" whenever they especially liked the singing, praying, or preaching. Sometimes after the sermon, people went to the front of the church, knelt at the altar, prayed aloud, and cried, while the piano played softly on and on.

My mother was brought up in the Methodist church. My father was not brought up in any named church, but there were Holiness and Pentecostal influences in his childhood. I imagine that when he and my mom decided to start attending church, the Church of the Nazarene felt familiar and right to him.

My parents became members of the Ainsworth Church of the Nazarene about 1954 or 1955. We lived south of Johnstown, then. In 1957, we moved to the Duff Valley in southern Rock County. We still went to church in Ainsworth for a while, and then we began attending the little E.U.B. (Evangelical United Brethren) Church at Duff, just a few miles from our house.

The Ainsworth church was my parents' first Nazarene church. In the early 1980s, they helped to found a Church of the Nazarene in Wheatland, Missouri; it was their second Nazarene church. In other times and places, they attended various other churches, but they remained members of the Church of the Nazarene throughout their lives.

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*Brother Sanders was a pastor at the Ainsworth Nazarene Church after we moved to Rock County. He is remembered by my family for getting spectacularly stuck in the mud when he came to visit us one spring day.

Brother Sanders was from the East, and he had heard that, on the Sandhill ranches, a road might be nothing more than a faint trace of wheels. He was driving down our ranch road when he saw our house on the opposite side of a low, wet meadow. He decided he should leave the graded road and drive straight across the meadow to our house. He thought he could see a "road". Soon his car was buried in mud.

Brother Sanders walked to our house, but no one was there. He waited for a while, and still no one was around. Finally, he decided to start a tractor and pull his car out by himself. Soon he had the tractor stuck in the mud, too -- and then, another tractor. When we arrived home, he was thinking about starting the crawler. 

My dad winched his car out and got him headed back to town before dark. The ruts in the meadow are probably still there!

Scanning Family Pictures

My concerns about scrapbooks

In 1995, as my parents' golden wedding anniversary approached, they decided that they should organize their photos. So Mama and Daddy spent many hours, looking through their photos and newspaper clippings and arranging many of them in chronological order. They taped (yes, taped!) them into scrapbooks, and for a few of the photos, they wrote captions. They enjoyed making the scrapbooks, and they enjoyed showing them to the friends and family who gathered to celebrate their 50th anniversary.

My parents have both been gone for over a dozen years, but my brother, my sister, and I haven't divided the family pictures yet. I hope that day will come eventually, but for now, I'm scanning photos from a couple of scrapbooks that I brought home from my brother's house last fall.

The scrapbooks and the taped-down photos are a bit of a problem. I can't remove the photos from the pages for scanning, so I opened the hinges of one of the scrapbooks and took out the pages. I have to make two scans for each side of each page. Then it takes a fair amount of time with image processing software to crop the individual photos, straighten them, and save them. I have an older Canon scanner. It works well, but it doesn't do many things automatically.

The worst problem is that we can't divide the photos in the scrapbooks without destroying the scrapbooks. For example, it would be nice if I could have some of the photos in which I appear -- the original photos, not just scans of them. Pictures of me as a child won't mean much to my five nephews and their descendants, whereas my own children and grandchildren might value them. Is that more important than keeping the photos in the scrapbooks that my mother and father created?

The photographs probably should be cut loose from the pages, whether or not we ever get them divided among the three of us. I am very sure the scrapbook pages are not made of acid-free paper.

Scanning these photos has made me wonder about the scrapbooks that many hobbyists enjoy creating today. How will their children share the family photos and memorabilia that are embedded in fancy scrapbook pages? No one will want to ruin the pages, so one person will inherit each book and its contents. I hope that the scrapbook crafters are saving duplicates of the photos or creating similar scrapbooks for each child.

People like to decorate their scrapbook pages with embellishments that they purchase at scrapbooking shops. Little doodads of any thickness would be a problem on my scanner. If a page doesn't lie flat, I don't get a well-focused scan. I'm glad my parents' scrapbook pages are not lumpy!

I think I'll try to write some information on the backs of my own photographs, instead of putting them in scrapbooks. If the kids want them organized chronologically, they can do it themselves.

Let's Cook

1950s 4H recipe book for beginning cooks

In 1959, I joined the Rose Scouts 4-H Club and signed up for my first 4-H project: Let's Cook. To complete the project, I had to prepare each of the following, two times:

Cocoa and Cinnamon Toast
Fruit Desserts (Ambrosia or Apple Crisp)
Raw Vegetable Plate and Sandwiches
Cookies and Lemonade
Hamburgers

As you can see, the cover art on the Let's Cook booklet  is slightly misleading. None of the recipes in the booklet required the use of a rolling pin.

The girl looks cheerful, though. She's dressed for the job. and she knows what she's doing with the various utensils on her work surface. Utensils were very important in Let's Cook. They were listed in every recipe right beside the ingredients.

I was 8 years old, the summer that I completed the Let's Cook project. My mother was in the hayfield most of every day, mowing. Grandma Nora was staying with us to help with the cooking and housework and to watch my sister and me.

In the afternoons after the dishes were done, Grandma Nora and I had some fun and excitement with the Let's Cook booklet. I had fun, and Grandma tried to keep me from getting too excited.

Grandma had her own ideas about some of the techniques in the book. She wasn't too adventurous. She didn't approve of sifting flour, cocoa, and such onto a square of waxed paper; she insisted on sifting it into a bowl. She didn't see any need to squish a stick of butter into a measuring cup, when she already knew it was half a cup.

The booklet had a short list of procedures for washing dishes. It didn't seem very important to me, but Grandma thought dish-washing was part of every recipe. "Cleaning up the mess is half of it!" she told me, again and again. Grandma's been gone since 1980, but when I'm working in my kitchen, I still hear her saying those words.

The oatmeal cookie recipe in Let's Cook became my favorite recipe to bake for a year or two. Then I discovered that I could make the cookie recipes in my mother's cookbooks, and I forgot about the simple little recipe in my 4-H booklet. Mama was more adventurous about letting me experiment in the kitchen than Grandma was, even though she wanted me to clean up my messes, too.

In the next ten years, I completed six more food preparation and preservation courses in 4-H. I still have their booklets, too. but Let's Cook is the one that I remember with affection.

"Cooking is an adventure. It's fun to put together shortening and sugar and flour and turn out yummy cookies. It's exciting to see how meat and vegetables and salad become supper on the table... "


(Opening sentences of Let's Cook, an undated, unattributed publication of the University of Nebraska Extension Service, circa 1959.)

Telephone Service in 1950

A phone in every home, Bell urged

I pulled a few National Geographic magazines from 1950 off the shelf and looked through them this evening.

It was interesting to see the ads that Bell Telephone System was running. I noticed two frequent themes: 1) We're a big company, so you can count on good service, and 2) If you don't have a telephone, you need to get one.

Here are the texts of two persuasive ads of the second sort:

Big Value At Low Cost

The telephone is a big bargain in security, convenience and good times for every member of the family. Just in the steps it saves, it more than pays for itself. Its value in emergencies is often beyond price. Day and night, every day, the telephone is at your service. And the cost is only pennies per call.

Advertisement by the Bell Telephone System, in The National Geographic Magazine, January 1950.

Service That Never Sleeps . . . Whatever the need or the hour, the telephone is on the job -- ready to take you where you want to go, quickly and dependably. Telephone service is one of the few services available twenty-four hours a day -- weekdays, Sundays and holidays. Yet the cost is small -- within reach of all . . . Bell Telephone Service

Advertisement by the Bell Telephone System, in The National Geographic Magazine, February 1950.

In 1950 -- the year of these ads --  62% of American households had telephone service (source). Most of those households were served by party lines.  Many of the rural party lines were owned by small locally-owned telephone companies that had no affiliation with Bell at all.

The Bell ads show sleek black desk telephones with rotary dials, but the telephones I remember from the 1950s had crank handles. We didn't have telephones with dials in rural Rock County, Nebraska, until the mid-1960s.

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Related:
Prairie Bluestem: Rural Party Line Remembered

"Puzzle Pages" Workbooks Remembered

Reading seatwork series illustrated by Ethel Hays

In our one-room school, our teachers taught several classes for every subject. The number of classes depended on the grade levels of the current students. Sometimes there were half a dozen grades or more for ten or twelve students.

Usually, the teacher called the classes in order from youngest to oldest. "First grade Reading," she might announce, and the first grader/s went to the bench beside the teacher's desk with appropriate books and papers. After a few minutes of oral reading, the teacher assigned some seatwork and called the next class.

In the primary grades, we always had a page or two to do in the reading workbook, a few pages of practice reading from the textbook, a page in the phonics workbook, and the next page of Puzzle Pages.

Read and write, cut and paste

Puzzle Pages was a reading seatwork series. Besides the part of every page that had to be read, the work usually required some writing and some cut-and-pasted words or pictures from the back of the book. This kept our hands busy with pencils, round-tipped scissors, and globs of white paste. We were also expected to color all the pictures on the pages.

The cover of this Puzzle Pages workbook is exactly like the ones I remember. Just look how busy those children are. And so were we! My husband remembers this workbook, also.

One day, the children in the Puzzle Pages story went to the circus, so we had pictures of circus animals to cut and paste. When the teacher checked my page, she marked the elephant wrong, even though I had pasted it in the right place. She said it was colored wrong. Not having gray in my box of 16 crayons, I had made the elephant purple. Maybe she would have preferred light black.

Ethel Hays, artist and illustrator

ThePuzzle Pages workbooks were published by McCormick-Mathers of Wichita, Kansas -- a publishing company which appears to have gone out of business. Internet searches for "McCormick-Mathers" yield used books from the 1930s through the 1980s, but no website for the company.

The illustrator of all the various Puzzle Pages editions and revised editions was Ethel Hays. Her other work included a comic strip, Flapper Fanny, during the 1920s and magazine illustrations and comic strips during the 1930s. During the 1940s, she illustrated a number of well-knownl children's books, including The Little Red Hen (1942),  Little Black Sambo (1942), The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1942), The Town and The Country Mouse (1942), and others. She also illustrated the popular Raggedy Ann books of the same era.

Some Memories of Duff, Nebraska

The Duff school, bank, and E.U.B. Church

Duff, Nebraska, was located in the southern part of Rock County, in a broad Sandhill valley. Drained by the Bloody and Skull creeks, the area was originally called the Bloody Valley and now is known as the Duff Valley. The Duff road turned off to the west from Highway 183, about 26 miles south of Bassett.

By the time that we moved to Duff, Nebraska in 1957, the Duff store was closed and the Duff post office had been gone for several years. The post office operated from 1886 to 1901, closed briefly, and then was open again from 1903 to 1953, according to Perkey's Nebraska Place Names by Elton A. Perkey (copyright 1995, Nebraska Historical Society).

I attended Duff Valley District 4 school which was still in its original building, 3 miles west and 1 mile south of Highway 183. The records of attendance in the attic of the school building went back to the late 1800s, when the old people of the community were school children.

The Eldon Horner family lived in the old Duff bank building, about 1/2 mile northeast of the school. My friends and schoolmates, the Horner girls, had their bedroom in the room where the bank had done its business. This is what the Horner girls told me. I don't know when or how long the bank was in business.

The old store building was 4 miles west of Highway 183. Forest Saar lived in the storekeeper's quarters in the back, and the Duff Evangelical United Brethren (E.U.B.) Church met in the big room in the front of the building where the store had been. In the pasture just west of the building, there was a concrete cellar (I am sure it was concrete and I believe it was a cellar). It was all that remained from an earlier store that had burned. (See this link which mentions the Duff Store in 1910. )

The congregation of the Duff E.U.B. Church was very small. I think that on a good Sunday, we might have had 30 people. Some of the people in the valley went to the Methodist church in town, another family or two were Catholic, and others didn't go to church at all.

Our pastor, Brother Harold Koelling, served three country E.U.B. churches, of which the Duff group was the smallest. In 1962, the Duff church was consolidated with the Rose E.U.B. church. (Sadly, the Rose Church is also now closed.)

I have a fairly clear memory of the little Duff church. The room was quite large with wooden pews on both sides of a central aisle. At the front on the right side were the pulpit, a piano, and a communion table with the words "In Remembrance of Me" carved into it. I confess that I thought Arthur Zlomke was the "Me" of that phrase. A metal plaque on the bottom crosspiece of the table clearly stated that the table had been donated in his memory.

A low table and some chairs occupied the area at the left front of the room, where the children's Sunday School class was held. Between the Sunday School table (on the left) and the pulpit (on the right), there was a door that opened to Grandpa Saar's living room. He often came through the door and joined the congregation when it was time for the worship service to begin.

Grandpa Saar was a generous man. Besides giving the space for the church in the front of his building, he also loaned his kitchen and living room for Vacation Bible School classes. His living room window looked out into a lilac bush that was often in bloom during VBS week. One year, a bird had built its nest right against the window, and we could look into it from Grandpa Saar's living room and see the little blue eggs.

(I speak of "Grandpa" Saar because he was the grandfather of the "Saar kids," all of whom I knew well. Marion Saar's four children were my third cousins on my mother's side, and their cousins, Bill Saar's three sons, were relation's relation to me from another side of the family. In addition to all that, all of us were neighbors in the Duff community.)

I remember one series of revival meetings at the Duff Church very well. The evangelist was a man named Elmer Reimer and he was from South Dakota.

Brother Reimer had a collection of crystal wine glasses of all shapes and sizes. He had them lined up on a table, and each glass had a different amount of water in it. He talked about how the glasses had been converted from their former wicked life of serving alcohol to a new life of service to God. Then he wet his index fingers a little and ran them around the rims of the glasses to make a vibrating, resonating musical sound. By switching from glass to glass, he could play hymns and even create harmony. I can still hear the thin, high, warbling sounds.

When I drove through the Duff community several years ago, the Duff church was completely gone. I would never have guessed there had ever been a building there. Before long, no one will even remember it.

Related:
Photos of the Duff Valley
Henry Seier's history of Duff

A Traveling Salesman Remembered

The Minnesota Woolen Mill salesman

One hot afternoon every summer, the Minnesota Woolen Mill salesman came to visit in his dust-covered station wagon.

The back of his wagon was weighted down with suitcases, and the suitcases were stuffed with samples of all the Minnesota Woolen Mill merchandise for that year -- wool blankets, wool garments, and other winter items like flannel sheets, thermal underwear, and quilted nylon parkas.

When my mother granted permission, the salesman hauled the suitcases into our living room, and we sat down to hear his spiel and see what he was selling.

He had one sample of each item and a book of swatches to show the different colors available. In mid-summer, his goods seemed very warm indeed, especially when a sample garment was tried on to get an idea of the size needed.

If my mother decided to buy something, the salesman filled out the order form. Then he refolded his samples, packed his suitcases, loaded his stationwagon, and drove on to the next ranch. Several months later, a package from Minnesota Woolen Mill arrived at our mailbox.

Over the years, Mama bought several Minnesota Woolen Mill blankets. They were heavy and scratchy with a creamy white background and bold stripes. I still have the one that I used as a child, and it is still a heavy, warm blanket.

In my fabric scraps, I have a Minnesota Woolen Mill skirt from the winter that I was ten. It's a turquoise-and-gray plaid, with knife pleats all the way around, and it was an important piece in my winter dress-up wardrobe until I outgrew it. One of these days, it will become part of a wool quilt. For no practical reason, I will carefully remove and preserve its tag.

I think that the last summer my mother ordered anything from the Minnesota Woolen Mill salesman was 1967. She had thought for several years that the prices were much too expensive, and that year, she was disappointed in the quality of the merchandise.

For the first time, the Minnesota Woolen Mill salesman had skirts, dresses, and jackets made of bonded wool. Those garments did not have the usual nylon lining that was attached separately; rather, the fabric had wool on one side and lining fabric on the other side.

After my sister and I wore our bonded wool skirts a few times, the lining separated from the wool and the garments lost their shape. Furthermore, the wool was not as tightly woven as it had been in the past. Mama was irritated.

I don't remember the Minnesota Woolen Mill salesman stopping at our house after that. Perhaps he did, and my mother sent him on his way. Maybe the mill went out of business. Or maybe the salesman retired; his job surely demanded strength and stamina, and he was not young.

For many years, though, he brought a selection of quality winter goods to our living room, with an opportunity to see and touch that a mail-order catalog couldn't match.

Comic Book Memories

Smokey Stover, Little Lulu, and others

Collage Mama recently posted a link for Smokey Stover's website. I remember him from the color funnies in the newspaper when I was quite young. The website says that Smokey's creator, cartoonist Bill Holman, retired in 1973, but I think his strip was dropped years before that by the Omaha World Herald.

The website says that Smokey Stover's adventures were also published in "hundreds of thousands of 10 cent 'Big Little Books.'” I'm sure that's true, but I don't remember them. That may be because my favorite comic book characters were Little Lulu, Nancy, Little Iodine, and Casper the Friendly Ghost.

One time, my dad bribed me with comic books. We were going to Gordon, Nebraska, to visit Grandma Barb, and Daddy wanted to go in the El Camino so he could pick up something in Valentine on the way home. The problem was that there wasn't enough room for him, Mama, and three kids.

The back of the El Camino's seat flipped forward, and there was quite a large compartment behind it. That's where I rode, all the way to Gordon (180 miles) and all the way back home again the next day. I got four new 25¢ comic books as payment.

With my pillow, my comic books, and my library books, I was quite comfortable. I don't remember being either claustrophobic or carsick.

I suppose Dwight sat in the middle and Charlotte sat on Mama's lap. Back then, vehicles didn't have seat belts and proper infant seats hadn't yet been invented. I was probably in the safest place of any of us.

1952 South Dakota Blizzard Story

Historic snowstorms, survival, and death

I've heard many stories about the bad winter of 1948-1949 in Nebraska, when some snowdrifts reached second story windows and shed rooftops. My parents told of being snowed in for weeks at a time.

However, I am not at all familiar with the Blizzard of 1952 in South Dakota. The South Dakota Office of Emergency Management (OEM) compares that weather event to the infamous Schoolchildren's Blizzard of 1888:

Jan 1952 Blizzard -- This blizzard had many similarities to the one of 1888. The temperature dropped from 40°F to -8°F in a short period of time. The wet, driving snow clung to everything. Cattle were blinded and suffocated as snow covered their mouths and noses. Young country school children lost their way home and died of hypothermia. A few ranchers died when they tried to gather their livestock. Snow piled up to a point that people could walk along tops of REA power lines. In some isolated areas, people were snowed in for 4 months off and on throughout the winter. Planes were used to deliver mail, groceries, fuel, and feed for livestock. Snowtrack vehicles were used to transport doctors to isolated farm areas.

Source: South Dakota OEM Listing of Past Natural Hazards, Occurrences, and Disasters

We were living south of Johnstown, Nebraska, in Brown County in 1952, just 30 miles or so from the Nebraska and South Dakota state line. Surely, we had a significant snowstorm, but I've never heard any stories about it.

Just north of us in south central South Dakota, the blizzard was so intense that Mrs. Walter Hellmann wrote a little book about it: Blizzard Strikes the Rosebud, 1952, Winter of Disaster. The book is said to contain many photographs of the massive snowdrifts as well as the stories of the area residents.

An excerpt from Mrs. Hellman's book has been reprinted on a Longcor family history webpage. (Scroll down to "Ducks for Company in a Grain Bin", slightly past half-way down the page.)

The excerpt is the story of Clarence Longcor, who left home to purchase supplies at noon and was trapped on the road by the storm. He was unable to return home or to go forward, so he finally decided to follow the fences to a neighbor's house. He didn't find the house, but he came to a grain bin where he spent a very cold night with some ducks, afraid to sleep because he might freeze to death. This happened in the Millboro, South Dakota, area, just north of the Nebraska state line, northwest of Springview, Nebraska, and southwest of Colome, South Dakota.

When reading storm stories like this, one should remember that weather forecasts were not nearly as accurate 60 years ago as they are today.

"Young country school children lost their way home and died of hypothermia," the South Dakota OEM says in the storm description above. It's very sad that school children lost their lives trying to get home in a 1952 blizzard. I can't find any additional information about it, but surely the South Dakota OEM is a reputable source.

In northern Nebraska in the 1950s and 1960s, our teachers always had us bring cans of soup to keep at our country school. We were ready to wait out a blizzard at the schoolhouse if we had to do so. I didn't realize that this emergency preparedness was probably in response to the 1952 tragedy of South Dakota school children as well as the terrible loss of life in the Schoolchildren's Blizzard of 1888.

Related post: Blizzard of 1949 Stories

Who's Wearing Maternity Shirts?

Baby-doll tops don't appeal to this baby boomer.

One morning when I was in third grade, my brother told me that we didn't have to go to school for the next two weeks. "The teacher had her baby," he announced.

"Baby?" I wondered. "What are you talking about?"

My brother was amazed at my stupidity. "Didn't you know she was expecting? Why did you think she was wearing big shirts?"

"Nobody told me," I protested. And that was the day that I learned. If a lady wore big shirts, it could mean she was pregnant.

What do pregnant ladies wear, 50 years later? Well, some don't hide under baggy shirts. Their garb makes it clear that they are quite pregnant. Even little third-grade country girls could probably figure it out.

Traditional maternity styles are still available for those who prefer them, as well as tailored styles for business women, and much more. Fashion-wise, it's a great time to be pregnant.

And what do fashion designers offer for us ladies who aren't pregnant? Take a look at the style of this shirt and this one. No, they're not maternity shirts. They're "baby-dolls" (not to be confused with baby-doll maternity wear, of course.)

Baby-dolls are probably very comfortable, but you won't find me wearing one. I don't care if they are fashionable, retro, hippy, or what-have-you. I wore enough shirts like that when I really was pregnant.

I Grew Up in Radio Land

A childhood without TV

TV reception was poor, out in the Nebraska Sandhills where I grew up.The picture was snowy and the sound faded in and out. My parents decided not to waste their time and money on it.

Along with the mail, radio was our connection to the rest of the world. My parents listened to the radio news, farm market reports and weather report every morning, noon, and night.

My mother also had an informal agenda of radio shows on various stations that she enjoyed when she was working in the house.

One of Mama's morning shows was Ward Childerson on the Christian station, KJLT, of North Platte, Nebraska. He read letters from readers and played the recordings that they requested. One reason my mother especially liked his show was that a girl from our church (Carol Gurney) had married his brother.

Mama also liked Wynn Speece, the "Neighbor Lady" on WNAX radio (Yankton, South Dakota.) The Neighbor Lady talked about her family and home and things that pertained to housewives. Sometimes she had a guest in for a chat. During each broadcast, she read a recipe, very slowly, repeating each ingredient and instruction several times, so the listeners could write it down.

KRVN of Lexington, Nebraska, had the Back to the Bible Broadcast every morning at 9:00 a.m., and my mother listened if she possibly could. Back to the Bible was headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska. It had a wonderful studio choir, and it featured the conservative Christian preacher, Theodore Epp.

On Saturday mornings, Back to the Bible was aimed at youth and children. One of its attractions was the Danny Orlis serial story, read by Ord Morrow. Danny Orlis and his friends were the Christian literature equivalents of the Hardy Boys, always stumbling onto a criminal plot or getting into a scrape of some sort.

We also listened to Art Linkletter on Saturday mornings. In the last segment of the show, Art Linkletter always talked to a few children and tried to get them to say something funny -- a forerunner of "Kids Say the Darnedest Things" on TV. And on Saturday night, there was "Bohemian Band Time" on WNAX -- a half hour of accordion-dominated music.

After supper, we did dishes with Herbert W. Armstrong's "Plain Truth about Today's World News and the Prophecies of the World Tomorrow." My mom didn't agree with him, but she liked to listen to him. He gave her plenty of reasons to study the Bible.

When we could pick up KOA from Denver, we liked to listen to the children's story that was broadcast every night. There was one story about "ooo-black" that I never did get to hear all the way through. That story was always divided over two nights, and somehow we always missed the second night. When I started reading Dr. Seuss stories to my children twenty-five years later, I finally found out how the story (Bartholemew and the Oobleck) ended.

A relay tower for educational TV was built in Rock County about 1970, and they also boosted the signal of a commercial channel. We got a television set then, but I had already graduated from high school and gone to college.

To be honest, I was embarrassed about my home's lack of television when I was a teenager. When the conversation turned to television shows, I had no idea what everyone was talking about.

When I was a college student and I could watch TV cartoons every Saturday morning in the dormitory, I was disappointed in them. They weren't as funny and fascinating as I had imagined. That remains the case. A great deal of television's programming bores me, but I can nearly always find something interesting to listen to, on the radio.

Now I'm in my mid-50s, and I've decided that it's cool that I grew up with radio instead of TV. Most people my age don't remember Edward R. Murrow, Arthur Godfrey and Amos and Andy on the radio -- but I do.

Old Children's Game: Anty Over

A nearly-lost playground game

In one-room country schools, all the students played games together at recess. The rules and rituals of the games were taught to the young by the playground elders, who had been taught in that same way when they started school.

The passing-down of traditional games from older to younger children ended when the little country schools were closed. A few games have survived, but so many have been forgotten.

For example, "Anty Over" was a game that my schoolmates and I enjoyed playing when we attended a one-room school in Nebraska, fifty years ago. I doubt if my own children have ever heard of this ritualized ball game.

[H]e rose and strolled back again past the little schoolhouse, and it was recess. Long before he reached it he heard the voices of the children shouting, "Anty, anty over, anty, anty over." They were divided into two bands, one on either side of the small building, over which they tossed the ball and shouted as they tossed it, "Anty, anty over"; and the band on the other side, warned by the cry, caught the ball on the rebound if they could, and tore around the corner of the building, trying to hit with it any luckless wight on the other side, and so claim him for their own, and thus changing sides, the merry romp went on.

Source: The Eye of Dread by Payne Erskin. Published 1913, by Little, Brown & Company, Boston.

We played the game very much like it is described above, with one minor addition. If the attempt to throw the ball over the schoolhouse was unsuccessful, we yelled, "Pig's tail!" Then, when the next throw was attempted, we yelled "Anty anty over!" again. Or sometimes, "Anty eye over!" which was our way of saying it fancy.

After the ball went over the schoolhouse, a few moments of high suspense followed. We didn't know if the other team had caught the ball or not. If they hadn't caught it, they would call "Anty over!" pretty soon and throw the ball back. But if they had caught the ball, they were going to run around the schoolhouse and try to tag us.

When the other team came around, they usually split up and came from both sides of the schoolhouse at the same time. Because we didn't know who had the ball, we didn't know which way to dodge! The only escape was to run wildly around the schoolhouse to the side the other team had just vacated.

Our teachers always warned us to be careful of the schoolhouse windows, and I don't remember that we ever broke any of them, though we certainly rattled the window screens a few times with our badly thrown balls.

In Dialect Notes, published by the American Dialect Society in 1895, alternate names listed for Anty Over included Anty-anty-over, Antny-over, Anthony-over, Baily-over, Colly-over and Colly-up.

Hot Salt Packs Remembered

Old-time earache remedy

Earaches are part of my earliest memories.

There are two things I remember vividly about them. One thing is the unpleasant sensation of ear-drops trickling through the inside of my ear and down into the depths of my head.

My other memory about earaches is the hot salt packs my mother fixed for me. I could lay my head on their good warmth and feel the pain of my ear melt away.

The hot packs were simply homemade cotton bags, about the size of a potholder, filled with salt. My mother warmed them carefully in the oven, and they held heat for quite a while. The warm salt had a distinctive odor that only warm salt has. I would still know it if I smelled it.

I think the heat was naturally moist. Salt loves to soak up moisture, you know.

Apparently we didn't have an electric heat pad. It was the mid-1950s -- maybe heat pads hadn't even been invented yet, or maybe they were too expensive for country folks like us.

Hot salt packs were an old-time earache remedy that my mother probably remembered from her own ear problems as a child. An 1868 book of advice for mothers suggests this very treatment for earache: "Apply to the ear a small flannel bag, filled with hot salt—as hot as can be comfortably borne..."

Hot Cocoa Days

Memories of a mouth-scalding beverage

When I was a child in the Sandhills of northern Nebraska, most country folks still had a milkcow or two. Country kids grew up drinking fresh, unpasteurized milk, and lots of it. Most of our families had plenty of extra milk to make dairy-based treats occasionally -- such as hot cocoa.

In my memory, hot cocoa was served at every winter function where snacks were offered to the children. I can't think of 4-H meetings, for example, without remembering the community hall's kitchen steaming with hot cocoa and boiled hot dogs.

I'm quite sure that it was hot cocoa that we were drinking, not hot chocolate. I don't think any of our mothers bought bars of chocolate and melted them into hot milk or cream. No, I'm quite sure that frugal Sandhills ranch wives made cocoa for a crowd with cocoa powder.

I haven't drunk hot cocoa made from scratch for many years. I remember it well, though. I remember burning the inside of my mouth terribly, time and time again, with that beverage. Then, when the cocoa cooled a bit, it developed a scum that stuck to my lips when I tried to take a drink. And unless I stirred frequently, the bottom of the cup developed a brown, syrupy, cocoa sediment.

I am sentimental about many of the things I grew up with, but I honestly don't miss homemade hot cocoa. On the rare occasion (approximately once a decade) that I feel like drinking a hot chocolate beverage, instant cocoa is good enough for me.

Winter Memories

Winter weather on the ranch

When the temperatures drop and we get some snow, my thoughts always go back to bad snow storms on the ranch of my childhood.

We had a spell of cold, hard winters in Nebraska during the 1950s and 1960s. I mention those years because I remember them, but there were some bad winters during the 1940s, too, including the infamous Blizzard of 1949.

I remember that night temperatures often dropped to 20° below zero (or even colder) during cold spells. During the day, it might warm up to zero. I remember one instance of night temperatures close to 40° below. Extremely cold temperatures made things that should have worked turn sluggish and break easily. The diesel fuel in the tractors always wanted to turn to jelly.

Feeding the Cattle

The cattle had to be fed every day, despite cold temperatures, wind, or snow. In a blizzard, my dad, the hired man, my brother, and my mom, too, often worked the whole day just to get the cattle fed.

Before winter began, the haystacks were moved to a stack-yard in the corner of each meadow that was closest to the ranch buildings. The nearest haystacks were saved for the very worst days.

To get a haystack for feeding, the "underslung", a wide trailer with a tilting bed, was pulled to the stackyard and parked beside a haystack. Then, the haystack (usually five tons or so in weight) was winched onto the underslung. All of this was made far more difficult by snow and extreme cold.

Then the loaded underslung was pulled with the tractor to the area where the cattle would be fed. We pastured the cattle close to the ranch buildings during the winter to make it easier to feed them. We had nice shelterbelts, and the cattle gathered close to them during bad weather. They always knew when a storm was coming.

Being unable to feed the cattle would have been such a horrible thing I can't imagine it. However, about ten years ago, the South Dakota blizzards were so terrible that ranchers couldn't feed their cattle despite tremendous, heartbreaking efforts. Some people lost most of their herds.

Blizzards and Lots of Snow

We judged the severity of a blizzard by how far we could see. If we could see the road that led from our mailbox to our house, we had half-a-mile visibility and it wasn't terrible yet. When we lost sight of that road and could only see the fence of the milkcow pasture -- or maybe not even that far -- the storm was very dangerous. Once we even heard loud claps of thunder during a raging blizzard.

My mother tried to keep a six-week stock of groceries during the winter. When she was able to go to town, she replenished her supplies thoroughly because she didn't know when she'd be able to shop again. Even when the county snow plows cleared the roads, they might quickly drift shut again if the weather turned bad.

When the roads were impassable, our mail delivery was suspended. The rural mail carrier brought the mailbags to our rural store/post office where the mail was sorted. I suppose he delivered mail to the boxes along the highway, but he left the mail for the boxes on gravel roads at the post office. If you needed mail service before the county snow plow came through, you had to plow your own way to the post office.

It's hard to imagine all that now from Kentucky, where we have only a few inches of snow every winter.

(UPDATED to add links and headings and polish up the text a little. I think I'm done with it now.)