Video about the Rose Church

Community of Rose, Nebraska

Here's a short video about the church I attended during most of my growing-up years. I went to Sunday School and Vacation Bible School in the basement, played on the swings in the church yard, and took piano lessons in the parsonage. I know the people who talk about the church in the video. They are the parents of my childhood church friends.

It's so good to see that the Rose community is working together to preserve the little church!

I know that I have a few photos of the Rose Church that I took while visiting up there in 2002, but apparently I've never scanned them. The photo below shows the Rose Cemetery, right across the road from the church. Like the church, it has served the people of Rose for many years, and it continues to play an important role in the community.

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.

I Say "Ky-oht" and You Say "Ky-oh-tee"

Coyotes, wolves, and coy-dogs

After hearing the coyotes howl for the last few nights, I read a little about the animal. One bit of trivia I picked up is that the word "coyote" comes from the Aztec word "coyotl", which is often translated as "trickster."

I came across some interesting spellings of the animal's name in old books: "cayute," "cayota," "cayeute," and so on. Today we have standardized the spelling, but pronunciations still vary. According to Merriam Webster's entry for the word, the primary pronunciation is \kī-ˈō-tē\ but in the West, it's sometimes pronounced \ˈkī-ˌōt\.

Coyote in Yosemite National Park
Photo source: Wikipedia

Well, I grew up using the Western pronunciation \ˈkī-ˌōt\ . To me, "coyote" rhymed with "my oat." And I was equally comfortable with \ˈkī-ˌyüt\  (rhymes with "my boot".) These were the pronunciations of northern Nebraska.

On the rare occasion that I heard someone say \kī-ˈō-tē\ , it was obvious to me that they knew coyotes only from watching "Wile E. Coyote" on TV. To me, the three-syllable pronunciation was an overly-fancy version that only a dude would say.

Over the years, I've amended that preconceived notion because I've learned that many rural folks in other parts do say \kī-ˈō-tē\.  However, I haven't changed my own way of saying the word. The three-syllable pronunciation will never feel right in my mouth.

I've also heard lots of people call them "wolves." But in my internal dictionary, the word "wolf" is used only for the larger wild dogs. To me, calling them "wolves" would feel just as silly as calling them \kī-ˈō-tēs\.

I base my mental image of a coyote on the animal I knew during my Nebraska childhood. The average male coyote there weighed  maybe 30 lbs. But in the eastern U.S., the native coyote is a bigger animal -- at least a third bigger on average (10 to 15 lbs. heavier) -- than the Nebraska coyote. DNA testing has revealed that some eastern coyotes carry wolf genes as a result of coyotes and wolves mating with each other.

So my notion that no coyote should be called a wolf is probably wrong, too. I read that these crossbreed coyotes are called "coy-wolves." Now I wonder how they pronounce that first syllable, "coy."  Is it \ˈkī\ or is it  \ˈkȯi\?

Range map of the coyote
Image from Wikimedia

Related:
Website of Jonathan Way, Ph.D., a Coy-Wolf expert

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.

Discovery by Dowsing

Anecdotes vs. data

Along life's way, I've heard many interesting stories about water dowsers, and I've had a few personal experiences with the art.

• When I was growing up in Nebraska, my dad always called the Gudgel brothers* when he needed a new well. My dad showed them the general site, and they used a dowsing stick to determine the best spot before they drilled.
• At his ranch in Kansas, my brother successfully dowsed for underground water pipes and avoided some unnecessary exploratory digging. 
• Telling me about my brother's dowsing, my father put two wires in my hand and tried to show me how to use them. He wanted me to feel the electric current in the ceiling fan overhead. I was unable to sense it.
• I watched my Mennonite neighbor hold his pocket watch by its chain (a pendulum) and follow the underground water vein on which our old well in the yard was hand-dug. (At least, he said so.)

Woodcut from Georgius Agricolas'
"De re metallica libri XII"
(Wikimedia image, from a 16th
century German mining manual.)

Dowsers find many sorts of anomalies in the earth -- water and water pipes, sewer lines, septic tanks, buried cables, oil, veins of ore, graves, caves, tunnels, buried treasure, lost objects, and much more**. An internet search for "dowsing" will find hundreds (thousands!) of success stories.

Water dowsing is such a common practice that the U.S. Geological Survey, a branch of the Department of the Interior, has even published a pamphlet about it. In the early 1900s, they also published a book about the history of dowsing. While they discourage reliance on dowsing to find water, they don't outright condemn it.

But many scientists doubt that dowsers can find much of anything with their rods, sticks, pendulums, and so on. Stories abound, but stories are not data. When put to the test, it seems that dowsers find things mainly when they dowse in locations where it would be hard not to find those things.

During the 1980s, an extensive, well-funded study of water dowsing was conducted by a group of physicists in Munich, Germany. The group included members who were skeptical to dowsing and members who were sympathetic, so the study could not be called "unfriendly." Variables were carefully controlled, and double blinds were employed. The results were conclusive -- the dowsers were unable to detect water. In fact,  "it is difficult to imagine a set of experimental results that would represent a more persuasive disproof of the ability of dowsers to do what they claim." (J. T. Enright, "Testing Dowsing: The Failure of the Munich Experiments." Published in Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 23.1, January / February 1999)

I've read a dozen success stories tonight about grave dowsing, but I have to wonder how many of the found graves were opened to see if remains were actually there. A report by the Iowa State Archaeologist lists cemetery after cemetery where grave dowsing failed. In some cases, graves were indicated by dowsers, but no remains were found when the ground was excavated. In other cases, remains were found where dowsers said there were no graves. The State Archaeologist advises, "My final recommendation is for cemetery caretakers to stop using dowsing."

I had always imagined that dowsing was a natural ability that you might be born with, just as one might have an inborn talent for dancing or for learning foreign languages. I'm a bit disappointed at the lack of scientific evidence for dowsing. If I had to locate an underground pipe -- well, I guess I'd call 811 -- or my brother.

-----------------------
* When my dad was growing up, his family and the Gudgels were neighbors in the Nebraska Sandhills, south of Wood Lake and Johnstown. Amos Gudgel was one of the homesteaders of eastern Cherry County. His sons who were well-drillers were Francis and/or Bill (as I recall!)  I could definitely be wrong about their names, so please don't hesitate to set me straight.


** I learned in my recent reading about dowsing that it's not just a popular way to find water on the farm. Dowsing is also a New-Age, "spiritual", pagan art, practiced for power. Some even claim that they can predict the future, influence the actions of others, and find success and love through dowsing. To them, it really is "witching", another name that dowsing is sometimes called.

Old Tag Game: Three Deep

Did you play this, as a child?

Here's a game I remember playing at Vacation Bible School when I was growing up. I think we played it at VBS because that was one of the few times when we had enough kids together to make this game really fun!

In this game, the players are arranged in groups of two. All but one of the couples form a big circle facing toward the center, each couple with one player behind the other. There should be good wide spaces between the couples.

One of the two free players is chosen to chase the other. They run around outside the circle. If the one chased is tagged, he becomes the one to do the chasing. At any time, the one who is being pursued may run into the circle and take his place in front of one of the standing couples. This makes that group "three deep" and the third or outside player of the group must immediately leave it to be chased until he either is tagged or causes someone else to be chased by stopping in his turn in front of one of the couples.

If the game is played long enough and with frequent changes, everyone will have a chance to run.

It is not permitted to run across the circle, and the runner may only go into it at the point where he stops in front of a couple. Nor is it permissible for a third man to go directly to the couple immediately to the left or the right of the one he has left. He must run a bit at least. This game makes for alertness and speed in running and is good fun.

Source: Mabie, Hamilton Wright, Edward Everett Hale, and William Byron Forbush. The Young Folks Treasury Vol. X: Ideal Home Life. New York: The University Society, 1919. Print. This excerpt is from p. 159.

The Hayfield Water Jug

Cool water in a hot place

My dad prepared thoroughly for the haying season. He overhauled all the tractors and hay-making machinery and got each component into the best working order possible. He stockpiled sickle sections and guards, rake teeth, sweep teeth, belts, hoses, tractor gas, oil and grease, hydraulic fluid, and so on. In the back of one of the pickups, he mounted the gas tank for fueling the tractors. He also mounted the wooden carrier that held the big Igloo water cooler where a thirsty hay hand could get a drink.

I didn't participate in the pre-season work in my father's machine shop, but I did make a new hayfield water jug every year. In the hayfield, I worked separately, away from the group that was putting up the cured hay. I was on the mowing machine at the edge of the uncut grass. I needed a personal water jug so I didn't have to travel far to get a drink.

Here's how I made my hayfield jug. I raided Mama's collection of jars and acquired a big glass vinegar or cider bottle. Then, I raided her cloth scraps and acquired some rags and pieces of old jeans.  I wrapped several layers of rags around the bottle, fitting the cloth to the curves, and I tacked the layers in place with enough stitches to hold them together.

Then, I enclosed the bottle in a layer of denim that I cut from the old jeans. I made some  tucks and folds so the denim would fit the bottle's shape, and I sewed it in place as neatly, tightly, and firmly as I could.

I didn't invent this method of making a hayfield jug. I watched my mother make them when I was a little child.

Every day, before I went to the hayfield, I filled my jug with cold water, and I also saturated its cloth shell. When I got to the hayfield, I found a shady place to stash it. The evaporation of the moisture from the cloth wrapper helped keep the water in the jug cool.

In the hayfield on a summer day, the hay crew got hot and dirty. We didn't have air-conditioned cabs on our tractors. The only shade was from our hats. Dust and pollen and chaff stuck to our sweat-dampened skin  and clothing. Sometimes we got off our machinery and worked up an extra sweat by moving hay around by hand or fixing something that was broken. The hottest work of all,  in my experience, was to lie in the prickly grass stubble under my windrower and pull a hot, wet, sappy clog of hay out of the crimper.

Sunbaked, gummy with sweat and dust, my arms green with grass juice after a crimper episode -- then, how sweet it was to pull my still-damp jug from its shady nook and drink deeply. If cool water ran down my face and soaked my shirt as I tipped the jug, it was a well-earned bonus.

By the end of the hay season, the denim cover of the water jug showed hard use. It had been damp to some degree all summer. It had lain on the ground and rolled around on the grimy floor of the pickup truck, day after day. The stitching had come loose in places, releasing odd folds of cloth, and threads had raveled where the cut edges of the denim were exposed. It didn't matter. By then, the water jug had served its purpose.

I would make a new jug next summer, as we prepared again to go to the hayfield.

Thanks for reading this memory of my childhood in the Nebraska Sandhills.

- - - - -

Related:
Hayfields I Have Known
The Hayfield
Newport, Nebraska: Hay Town
Bull Stories
Horse-drawn Hay Rake
Horse-drawn Hay Sweep-Rake

Hayfields I Have Known

Meadows I've mowed

Around Christian County, KY, the first cutting of hay has been taken, and across the nation, many farmers and ranchers are making hay. If you pass a hayfield, you should slow down, open your window, and breathe in the sweet scent of fresh-cut, sun-warmed hay. Ahhh. Hay has smelled like that for thousands and thousands of years -- there's a nice thought to enjoy.

I grew up on a cattle ranch in some of the best hay-producing country in the world -- Rock County in the Nebraska Sandhills. Making hay was the main work of the ranch every summer. All of my family's energy and focus was directed toward harvesting enough hay to feed the cattle during the next winter.

I spent seven summers mowing in the hayfield. The first year, I had a little tractor with a six-foot bar. It broke down a lot, so the next year, my dad put me on a better tractor with a new mowing machine that had a nine-foot bar. Don Saar, a grown-up neighbor boy, ran the double-bar mowing machine, and I followed him -- together, we did the mowing. A few years later, my dad got a self-propelled windrower, and on it, I became the only mower of our haying crew.

This rig predates my mowing years.

Several areas of the ranch were primarily hay-lands, and we always hayed them in a set order. First we cut the Little Meadow. just east of our house. (I am capitalizing because this name was just as official as the Black Hills or the Platte River. We never called that meadow by any other name.)  We always made haystacks on the Little Meadow. In the fall, my dad moved the stacks to a "stack yard" (a fenced enclosure) near the house. He saved those stacks for feeding the cattle on the very worst days of winter, because they were closest to home.

"Under the 1785 [Federal land surveying] ordinance, section 16 of each township was set aside for school purposes, and as such was often called the school section. Section 36 was also subsequently added as a school section in western states. The various states and counties ignored, altered or amended this provision in their own ways, but the general (intended) effect was a guarantee that local schools would have an income and that the community schoolhouses would be centrally located for all children."  (Quoted from Wikipedia)

After we finished the Little Meadow, we moved the hay equipment across the ranch road to a piece of land we called the "School Section". (In the early 1960s, the State of Nebraska sold the school sections in Rock County, and my dad bought a tract of the local school section that he had previously leased. I think it was about a third of the section.) Bloody Creek ran through that piece of land, and it always produced a lot of hay.

When we were done making haystacks on the School Section, we stacked the Big Meadow, which adjoined the south end of the School Section. Then, we went to the west side of the ranch, and mowed the meadows along Skull Creek. I think we always baled (made hay bales on) the west side of Skull Creek, because the bridge was not wide enough to pull the stacker across.

And finally, we went back to the extreme east side of the ranch and baled the Long Quarter. The Long Quarter was so named because it was 1/4 of a mile wide and l mile long (a quarter section of land). We had to cross John Dearmont's long quarter to get to our Long Quarter, so we always waited until John had finished haying before taking our equipment across his meadow.

There, on the Long Quarter, was Bloody Creek again, somewhat bigger and wetter than it had been on the School Section. And there were the angriest bumblebees of all the meadows on the ranch! They had been building their nests and hoarding their honey all summer long, and they didn't appreciate any disturbances. Someone nearly always had a bad encounter with them!

This photo of my brother was probably taken before I was born.

It was always exciting to mow around the sloughs (or "wetlands" as people say now) of the Skull and the Bloody. The challenge was to mow as much lush grass as possible without getting your tractor stuck in the mud. There were no set boundaries for what could be mowed. It varied from year to year. Sometimes I got off the tractor and waded through the grass ahead to feel how wet the ground was. And I always watched the tractor tires. If water started dripping off them or they were muddy (bad news!), it was time to get back to higher ground! And another bad omen was when the ground beneath the tractor tires began to quiver. (The soil was so saturated just below the surface that it was like a huge pudding with a slightly hardened crust.)

My dad hated "streaks" -- narrow strips of grass left unmowed because the person on the mowing machine was being careless. I had plenty of time to think while I was driving my tractor around the endless patches of grass, but every time I let my attention wander too far, I left evidence. And once a streak has been left, it's quite difficult to back up, drop the mower bar into all that loose hay, and mow that little narrow strip. Mower bars like nothing better than clogging up in loose hay.

Looking back now at the summers I worked in the hayfield, I realize that was my first experience with work responsibilities. I particularly remember being disgusted one Saturday when I wanted to spend the day at the rodeo. It was good haying weather, and my dad didn't want to let me off my windrower. I had to mow as late as possible the night before and mow a while in the morning before I could leave. I hadn't thought my hayfield job was that essential -- but of course it was.

I understand it all much better now. Our very livelihood depended on the hay.

My dad welded the hydraulic arm that's
 lifting the hay -- and built the tractor cab too!

Related:  
Newport, Nebraska: Hay Town
Horse-drawn Hay Sweep Rake
Horse-drawn Hay Rake
The Hayfield 

Great photo of an old-time hay crew on Flickr

Cupboard Bed

Dutch bed in a wall

Isaac and I recently spent a few hours in the antique stores in the riverfront area of Paducah, KY. I bought this picture postcard at one of the shops, because it reminded me of the cupboard beds of Dutch children in my storybooks, when I was a little girl.

Oh, I would have loved a cozy bed in the wall like those little Dutch children always had. I thought it would be the perfect place for reading all day or playing with dolls or giggling with my sister. And I imagined that at night, I would climb into my bed, close the doors, nestle down in the blankets, and enjoy the most perfect and delicious sleep.

I looked at a few websites about cupboard beds tonight and found a very nice little cushioned cubbyhole that someone built.It doesn't have doors that close, but it does have a cool, round entrance. The lucky little girl whose bed it is looks happy with it. And here's another cupboard bed project that turned out well.

During my brief research, I read that in Holland and other European countries, entire families sometimes slept together, sitting up, in the home's single cupboard bed. Sometimes all the children slept in one cupboard bed, and the parents slept in another one. It seems that in real life, some children were a lot less private and a lot more snug in their little Dutch beds than I imagined!

This photo was taken in the Netherlands, so I presume that it shows an authentic, typical cupboard bed. I don't know the purpose of the open area beneath the bed. Isaac theorized that it might have been a place to set a pan of coals or some hot bricks that would warm the bed from beneath. It does look like there is a grate of some sort there.

Freddy The Pig, Rediscovered

Found at Florence, KY

When we took Isaac to the Cincinnati airport last summer, we discovered Half Price Books, a great bookstore in Florence, KY. We revisited the store on our way to Cleveland a few weeks ago.

Isaac sold a few used books and bought at least twice as many as he sold. I bought a couple of books for Dennis, and for myself, a copy of The Art of Freddy. It was well worth the $2 it cost, just for the memories.

Freddy and me

The Freddy series was written by Walter Brooks and illustrated by Kurt Wiese. Freddy is a pig. He and all the other animals on Mr. Bean's farm can talk. They are very good at solving mysteries and getting into complicated, dangerous situations that always turn out all right in the end.

There are 26 Freddy books (I know this from counting the book covers shown in The Art of Freddy, and Wikipedia verifies it.) I think the Rock County library had 15 or 20 of them when I was a kid, and I read every one.

I read Freddy's Perilous Adventure, dozens of time, because we owned it. It was a library book originally. I left it on the windowsill, and a summer thunderstorm soaked it. The cover was warped and the pages were wavy, so my mother had to pay the library for the book.

Freddy's Perilous Adventure was my main book for the rest of that summer, along with whatever I could find around the house to read, because I was grounded from the library. I was glad when I got back to school and the bookmobile! I liked Freddy and his animal friends, but I was ready for them to have a different adventure.

They're still adventuring!

Isaac was still shopping, so I enjoyed the illustrations in my Freddy book for a while. Then I walked out of the store to put my books in the car. After getting reacquainted with Freddy and his friends, it was a bit surreal to see these geese strolling across the parking lot. I wouldn't have been surprised at all if they had wished me a good afternoon or asked for directions.

Pioneer Stories of Brown County, Nebraska

Names in Brown County history

I've been lurking around eBay quite a bit lately, and not surprisingly, I found a book that I needed -- Pioneer Stories of Brown, Keya Paha and Rock Counties, in Nebraska, published in 1980 by the Brown County Historical Society. (Brown and Rock counties are where I was born and raised.) I bid on the book and was happy when I won it.

Today, the book arrived in the mail, and I'm a little disappointed. The title is misleading. The Brown County section of the book has 581 pages. The Keya Paha County section has 165 pages. And the Rock County section has 16 pages -- yes, 16 pages. The book should have been titled Pioneer Stories of Brown County, Nebraska and subtitled With Additional Stories from Keya Paha and Rock Counties.

Despite the shockingly-short Rock County section, the book is interesting. I don't regret buying it. Leafing through the Brown County pages, I see many surnames that I recognize. I don't know the people at all, but I know their names.

My dad's mother was a Brown County resident most of her life and an enthusiastic genealogist. Sometimes Grandma Nora came to visit us for a week or two at a time when I was a kid. I remember her sitting at the dining room table with her embroidery, talking on and on about who was related to whom. Because of her, I recognize Brown County names like Hulshizer, Schipporeit, Bejot, Kackmeister, Wolcott, Mundorf, and Klapper. (I think some of the Kackmeisters may be cousins of my family -- we may share a great-grandmother or our great grandmothers may have been sisters. Then again, I could be wrong about that.)

Some Brown County names in the book do have personal meaning to me. The Gudgels drilled many wells for my dad. When I was little, we attended church in Ainsworth with the Bollers and Lotspieches, and my parents were always friendly with them. The Babcocks and Mengers lived in the western expanses of the community where I grew up. And there are other names that stir memories of faces and experiences.

Regrettably, no one from my family wrote up any of our history for this book. My great-grandparents on my dad's side of the family were homesteaders in Brown County, too. My great-grandfathers' surnames were Clark and Hill, and my great-grandmothers' surnames were Fisher and Mapes.

Warp's Review Book for Arithmetic

Preparation for 8th grade exams

Tonight I came across a workbook, Using Arithmetic in Everyday Life, that I had in elementary school. The workbook dates from my 8th grade year, 1964-65.

Our teacher was getting us ready for our 8th grade exams, and she wanted to be sure we could do story problems. This arithmetic workbook has 126 pages, and except for the explanations and examples, it is entirely story problems. I'm sure I found the problems tedious to solve -- they often involved two or more steps.

This book, Using Arithmetic in Everyday Life, was published by the Warp Publishing Company of Minden, Nebraska, and copyrighted in 1942 and 1957. Everyday life in Nebraska, for many students in those years, was spent on a farm or ranch. The author acknowledges that fact with word problems like these:

Suppose your father should test his seed corn and find that 12 out of 72 grains did not sprout. What percent sprouted? If he should plant 45 acres with this seed, how many acres of this field would not have any corn on them?

Mr. White's corn yielded 50 bushels per acre. He sold one third of the corn through a commission agent who charged 3%. If corn were $1.25 per bushel, what was the agent's commission. How much did Mr. White receive?

No authors are mentioned on the workbook's title page, but when I searched for "Warp's Review Books", I saw that Harold and Ruth Warp of Minden, Nebraska, are credited for writing earlier (1929-1930) workbooks. Student workbooks were available for 17 different topics in 1931, and the Teacher's Examination Review Books covered another 20 areas of study.

The primary goal of the Warp Review Books was to prepare students for the 8th grade exams. That's why they were written, and that's why our teacher had us doing arithmetic problems in one of them.

The 8th grade exam was still a big deal in Rock County, Nebraska in 1965 when I took it. The newspaper always carried a photo of the two top-scoring students with their teachers. (This was as much an honor for the teachers as for the students!)

I tried hard on the test, but the top glory that year went to Curtis Ratliff and his teacher, whoever she was, at the Bassett Elementary School. I don't remember who had the second-highest score.  I had the third highest score, so the extra practice in the Warp's arithmetic book may have helped me. I just should have done a few  more pages!

Old Time Entertainments

Homemade amusements

A recent report says that sitting in front of the TV or computer for long stretches of time greatly increases our chances of dying . We'd be healthier if we'd turn off the electronics and move around a little more. Here's a thought: maybe we should cut back on the web-and-channel surfing and return to some of the old-time ways of entertaining ourselves!

Before television and radio made their way into living rooms, folks often invited their friends for an evening of parlor games. Many of the games involved mild physical activity, such as "Blindman's Bluff" and "Charades." Others required mental energy, such as "Twenty Questions" and "Hangman".  Competitions such as checkers, chess, and card games were also popular.

Party books offered plenty of ideas for fun with a theme. For example, a 1903 book of Halloween activities contains complete plans for several spooky parties-- invitations, decorations, refreshments, games, skits, etc.

I wrote a while back about music in the parlor -- inviting guests for an afternoon or evening of homemade music.  Anyone with a bit of musical talent might be asked to perform. People liked to sing and to hear music. Sheet music made the latest hits available to all.

Recitations were another favorite entertainment. When guests came for the evening, someone might volunteer (or be called upon) to "render" a piece of memorized poetry or a passage of funny or dramatic prose.

Books, such as the 1903 Comic Recitations and Readings pictured at right, provided material to memorize.  (Some of the subject matter would be considered unkind today.  Stuttering, regional and ethnic dialects, and the accents of immigrants were often imitated!)

When I was little, the cultural memory of rural Nebraska still recalled entertainments of the sort I've written about here. We played various parlor games at school recess when it was too cold to play outside. My friends and I memorized recitations for school and church programs. I remember dressing in a costume and reciting a humorous monologue at the high school gym for a large audience of extension-club ladies. My mother probably thought it would be a good performance experience for me and volunteered my services.

We've gotten away from these active, participatory sorts of entertainments now. We've parked ourselves in our chairs to absorb our entertainment from a screen, and it's not good for us. I've been sitting here far too long. I think I'd better stand up and do something!

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.)

My Grandparents, Harry Sees and Winnie Violet Eaton Sees

A 1920s wedding, some memories of my grandfather

My maternal grandparents, Harry Sees and Winnie Violet Eaton, were married in Gordon. Nebraska, in the spring of 1921. Here is a newspaper account of their wedding.

On Sunday, April 17th, at the home of the bride's parents occurred the marriage of Miss Winnie Violet Eaton and Mr. Harry Sees.

At five o'clock in the evening, this happy pair took their places opposite a west window in the living room, and there in the glow of the setting sun and in the presence of about twenty-seven friends, they joyfully took the vows that bound them into a life partnership. The beautiful double ring ceremony was impressively exercised by the Revernd J. M. Wingett of the M. E. Church.

The bride was charming in an exquisite gown of sky-blue silk taffeta and silk georgette, while the groom was appropriately dressed in a suit of blue serge. A delicious two course supper was served buffet style immediately following the ceremony.

The young couple departed for their new home in the country that night.

These young folks are well and favorably known in and around Gordon and need no introduction to the public. Mrs. Sees is the second daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Marcus Eaton and has for the past three years been a successful and efficient teacher of the rural schools of the community. Mr. Sees is the son of Mr. and Mrs. George Sees and is a prosperous young farmer.

Mr. and Mrs. Harry Sees will be at home to their many friends on a farm northwest of Gordon where they will begin housekeeping at once.

Source: A photocopy my mother gave me of an undated newspaper clipping

Harry and Violet Sees, about 1921

Grandma Violet died when she was only 32. She fell ill with influenza, and when pneumonia set in, she died within a few days. In those days, there were no antibiotics or sulfur drugs to treat pneumonia -- just quinine. The date of Violet's death was May 6, 1931. My mother was only eight years old at the time. Later, Harry married Barbara Weber -- my Grandma Barb.

I have several clear memories of "Gramp Sees", as we called him. One time, he brought my brother and I each a little cap pistol when he came to visit. It could be loaded with a roll of cap paper so that when the trigger was pulled, it made a bang and a smoky smell. For some reason, I buried my little pistol beside a tree stump. That night, Gramp asked me where it was. When I told him, he got a flashlight, and we went outside and found it. It never did work well after that.

One time, I got in trouble with Gramp for playing in his granary.  I remember opening the door of the bin and climbing inside. The grain was cool and slippery, so I piled it on my legs. About that time, Gramp showed up. He got me right out of that bin. I suppose that he was afraid the pile of grain might slide and bury me. I think the grain was oats.

I remember Gramp loading a big gunny sack (burlap bag) of potatoes into the trunk of our car when we were heading home from a visit. He raised seed potatoes on his farm, and his potato cellar was big enough that a truck or tractor and wagon could back down into it.

Gramp passed away on May 1, 1956.  He lived only a few months after he was diagnosed with leukemia. He was 63 at the time of his death, and I was just five. At that time, hospitals were very strict about letting children visit. At the Gordon hospital, my brother and I were not allowed to go to his room. We went to his window and waved to him from the outside.

I visited Gordon, Nebraska and drove out to the Harry Sees farm, about ten years ago. Two doctors had bought the property, and one of them was living in the house. The house was still strong and solid, the doctor told me. The carpenters who remodeled it had said that my grandpa built it very well. The doctor said he wanted me to know that about my grandfather.

Harry Sees was born on November 22, 1893 at Wolbach, Nebraska. Winnie Violet Eaton was born  at Marshalltown, Iowa on April 17, 1899.

If you are my relative and you would like a copy of my grandparent's wedding photo, please let me know. I am planning to make some prints, and I would be glad to make a copy for you, too.

Fire in a Pile of Hay Bales

Spontaneous combustion of hay

Our neighbor had some bad luck last week with a large stack of big round bales. Apparently the hay was not dry enough when he baled and stacked it. A few days later, the stack of bales ignited.

Our volunteer fire department responded and sprayed the bales with water. The farmer pulled the bale pile apart with a tractor to allow the bales to cool. The smoke from the fire could be smelled for a mile or more, and the bales smoldered for several days.

Hay fires like this are all too common, and they are usually caused by baling and/or storing hay before it is fully cured (dried). The hay can also self-heat and combust if it becomes wet in storage.

The problem is that bacteria and mold grow on wet hay, causing it to ferment and producing flammable gases and heat. Also, as the hay dries, it goes through a natural chemical process called "sweating" in which it releases moisture and heat.

In a stack or pile of hay, the heat from fermenting and sweating cannot escape. The internal temperature can increase to the point that the hay will blacken, smolder, or even burst into flames.

The hay is spoiled even if it just warms up and turns a little brown. It loses most of its nutrients, and of course, livestock prefer not to to eat it.

This sort of combustion can occur in a hay pile of any size. Some of us have seen this in small scale with green lawn clippings or a compost pile.

This farmer lost a lot of hay, but at least he didn't lose a barn. I remember a barn fire that was caused by wet hay bales when I was a child. I was with my mother when she noticed smoke coming from a neighbor's barn and alerted him. The men from nearby ranches gathered and fought the fire, but the barn burned down. (This was on the Ray Ranch at Rose, Nebraska, in the late 1950s or early 1960s when Jay and Martha Hixson were running it.)

Read more on the web:
Cooperative Extension System bulletin "Spontaneous Combustion in Hay Poses Danger"

A Good Sense of Direction

Internal compass, fairly accurate

I've had a good sense of direction since I was old enough to remember. I usually have a strong opinion about where north, south, east, and west lie, and I'm usually right.

Sense of direction is probably a skill I learned from my parents. I grew up in rural Nebraska where section lines and county roads are laid out in a checkerboard of square miles, aligned to the compass. I heard my parents speak of directions every day of my childhood -- the north wind, the cows in the pasture west of the creek, and so on.

Or, my cells may be blessed with a generous measure of magnetite and a genetic ability to respond to it. Magnetite is an iron oxide ( Fe₃O₄,), and it's the most magnetic substance known on earth. Man and many other mammals, including bats, have magnetite in their cells. Tests that expose bats to strong magnetic fields seem to show that bats navigate partly by responding to magnetism. Cows seem to orient themselves to magnetism, as well.

In a study of bird navigation, scientists exposed migrating birds to strong magnetic fields and then released them at night. All night long, they flew in the wrong direction, but when the sun came up, they did a 90° turn and headed in a different (correct) direction. This suggests that migratory birds are guided by magnetism, but they also orient themselves to the sun.

The position of the sun is an important indicator of direction with me, too. When I lived south of the equator for two years, I was constantly befuddled about north and south. Shadows fell to the south instead of the north, and cold weather came with strong south winds. The directional clue-gathering that I do subconsciously in the northern hemisphere was a mental juggling exercise in the southern hemisphere because the sun was shining on the wrong side of me. Thank goodness for maps!

Nor am I good at right and left orientation. If I ask for directions and someone describes a series of right and left turns, I have to write them down. I cannot remember the instructions, and I can't form a mental map of where they are leading me.

In Kentucky, most of the roads aren't straight. Country roads wind around the hills following ancient animal paths used by the Indians and early settlers. Major highways may be straight enough, but minor highways are just un-straightened, black-topped country roads. In most of the towns, the streets aren't oriented with the compass, and the blocks aren't reliably rectangular in shape. Roads radiate from the towns like spokes from the hub of a wheel.

However, I still drive around here with a good sense of the general compass direction in which I'm proceeding. At least the shadows are on the right side of the trees. Just give me a map, and I can find my way anywhere.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Related: A website about topographical disorientation (getting lost so easily that it is a serious handicap)

Shivarees Remembered

Fun at the expense of the newly-weds

I think that many older folks in the U.S., particularly those from rural areas, remember attending (or at least hearing about) a shivaree.

A shivaree was a loud, middle-of-the-night serenade of a newly-wed couple. A crowd gathered quietly outside the home, and then on signal, a terrible racket was raised with shouting and noise making instruments -- pan lids, cowbells, horns, whistles, and even guns fired into the air.

In most of the shivarees I heard about when I was young, the couple invited the crowd in and served them refreshments. They had been expecting a shivaree (or they'd received a tip), so they had a stock of candy bars or cookies on hand.

While inside the house, pranksters might tie knots in shirt sleeves, short-sheet the bed, remove labels from the canned goods, put salt in the sugar bowl, and generally do all the minor mischief they could.

At wilder shivarees, the crowd got drunk in preparation for the event. The newly-weds might be subjected to torments like being thrown into a water tank or left in a distant pasture to walk home.

I have a little scrap of memory about my Uncle Harold's shivaree. We lived south of Johnstown, Nebraska, then, and I was three or four years old. My newly-wed Uncle Harold and Aunt Evelyn lived farther south, near Moon Lake.

Late one night, we drove to the home of our elderly neighbors, Jess and Ivy McDaniel, who lived just south of us. They got in the car with us, and we drove together to my uncle's house.

Before we got there, we stopped and waited behind a hill with the lights turned off. It seemed to me that we waited a very long time. Finally I needed to potty, and my mother and I got out of the car. I don't remember it being cold there on the hillside, but I do remember the immensity of the quiet darkness.

I suppose that eventually a group gathered and the shivaree was carried off, but I don't remember all that. I was little, so maybe I fell asleep. My parents always said that someone threw my uncle's electric shaver (a bit of a novel luxury in the 1950s) into the wastebasket that night. It was burned with the rest of the trash the next day.

Some years later, we had a newly-wed couple living at our ranch -- Jim and Orpha Saar. They were shivareed one night by people from our church. It was a tame get-together compared to most shivarees I've heard and read about. The worst thing that happened was that the paint on the living room floor was scraped a little by a large lady's high-heeled shoes.

I've chosen to spell the word shivaree as I remember it being pronounced, but alternate spellings I found on the internet are charivari, chivaree, and even shivery.

As you'll note from the locations listed below, shivarees were held in many areas of the country. However, I believe the custom is dying out, and it's probably not a great loss.

Shivarees in Russell County, Kentucky
Shivarees in the Cumberland Gap area (Kentucky/Tennessee/Virginia)
Shivarees in Montana territory
A charivari in Superior, Montana (see page 4)
Okie Shivaree
Shivaree in Goodsprings, Nevada
Shivarees in Emmitsburg, Maryland
Shivarees in Alden, New York
Shivarees, shiverys and serenades in Orlando, West Virginia
Wikipedia's entry about charivaris

Does anyone else have a shivaree story to share?

"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.

The Cream Separator

A big advance in farm technology

The Cream Separator. — Another great change which has come into Nebraska farming, in the past twenty years, has been brought about largely by the cream separator, by which the milk fresh from the cows is separated into cream and skimmed milk, the cream going to butter factories, while the milk is fed upon the farm. Dairy farming, which was almost unknown in the early years of Nebraska settlement, is thus becoming one of the chief industries of Nebraska farming.

Source: History and Stories of Nebraska: With Maps and Illustrations by Addison Erwin Sheldon. Published by University Pub. Co., 1915

Many older people who grew up in the country remember the cream separator. At our house, it sat on a table in the corner of the back porch. I vaguely remember an old black separator, and I have a clearer memory of a later, smaller separator with an electric motor.

At the top of the separator was a big metal bowl that had a gridwork of holes in the bottom of it. A round, paper filter was fastened over the grid to strain out foreign matter as the milk drained. Then the filtered milk went into a centrifuge that spun the cream (butter fat) to the center and the "skimmed" milk to the outside. The two liquids were then dispensed through separate spouts.

Every time the separator was used, it had to be taken apart and washed. At our house, that was always once a day, and often twice a day. The milk from the morning milking was nearly always separated, and the whirr of the separator's motor woke me, many mornings. The milk from the evening milking might be strained and left whole, or it might be separated.

The separator had about a dozen stainless steel parts.I particularly hated washing the disks, a set of nested cones. I suppose there were 12 or 15 of them. Each disk had a little hole in its side, and a giant safety pin was slid through the holes to keep the stack of disks in order while washing.

We usually had just one or two milk cows, so my mother had a small cream can that held just a couple of gallons. We took the cream to the Rose Store to sell. When the Rose Store got out of the cream business, my mother did, too. She wasn't making enough profit to mess with taking the cream to Bassett, roughly 35 miles away.

Until I read the quote at the top of this post, I'd never thought of the cream separator as a high-tech machine. The cream separator was not considered a great marvel at our house. It was just an appliance. But, like many of the great technologies we enjoy today, I can imagine that it seemed miraculous when it was first invented.