Roses and Daisies

LIW or RWL?

2008-07-26T08:59:00.000-07:00

"Could you, I wonder, tell the story of those days and any special stories that you remember about things that happened then. Just tell it in your own words as you would tell about those times if only you could talk to me.
If you will do it, I will be glad to pay the stenographer for taking it down for me and I want lots of it, pages and pages of things you remember. As you begin to tell it so many things will come back to you about the little everyday happening and what you and mother and Aunt Eliza and Uncle Tom and Uncle Henry did as children and young folks, going to parties and sleigh rides and spelling schools and dancing school, if you did, or whatever young folks did do then. About your work and school too. Also about away back when Grandma was left a widow and the Indians used to share their game with her and the children, if I remember right."

As I continue on transcribing from letters, I find this particular one to be a real poser. It is typed. No other letter from LIW that I have seen has been typed.

LIW did have a typewriter. Nothing to stop her from typing this.

RWL was at Rocky Ridge at the time the letter was written. She was always looking for story fodder.

LIW was not feeling well at the time the letter was written.

I can see RWL telling LIW to write Pioneer Girl using an identical pep speech.

My hypothesis is that LIW wrote a rough draft of this letter. RWL volunteered to type it for her, and "ran it through her typewriter" editing as she went.

Everyone Has to Start Somewhere

2008-07-25T11:59:00.000-07:00

From the mid-sixties, written by a long-time De Smet resident.

I took your letter and one from Bill Anderson to the News office to see if Mr. Sherwood could answer some of the questions you asked, but there are some neither of us know.

1. You asked the names of people who lived in certain houses—I assume that you mean who lives there now as many different ones may have lived there over the years. I can give you the names of those who are there now:

The Ingalls home is now two small apartments and one is occupied by an elderly widow, Mrs. Ferguson and the other by Mrs. Marjorie McCaskell.
Loftus home-Mrs. C.C. Fritzel. The Loftus’ had one daughter whom I remember, she was grown when I was a child, but I thought she was beautiful and a very nice person. She married a Mr. Fritzel, but she passed away not too long afterwards. Mr. Fritzel remarried and his widow still lives in what was the Loftus home.

Boast home-the John Pitman family

Harthorn home-the Archie Satter family

The address of all these people is just De Smet.

2. I do not remember “Ma” Ingalls being very fat, except that she was matronly looking and perhaps her waist line was not so small. I suppose she was in her sixties when I first remember knowing her.

3. Rev. Brown’s family-I do not remember any of them but Mr. Sherwood gave this information:
Mrs. Brown is buried in the cemetery here; their son Mark started a newspaper here, had poor health, sold out to Mr. Sherwood’s father and left De Smet, and is believed not to have lived long. Not know if Ida Brown is of the same family.

4. Mary Power became Mrs. E.P. Sanford—I remember the family vaguely and assume none are living now. Cap Garland was killed in the explosion of a steam threshing engine in the early years. No information on Minnie Johnson.

5. Mr. Sherwood thinks Silver Lake must have drained about the time of World War I. It is now, sad to say, the city dump.

The surveyor’s shack into which the Ingalls family moved during the winter was moved into town many years ago and used a s a small home. A plaque has now been place there and also on the Ingalls home.

My New Philosophy

2008-07-23T08:11:00.001-07:00

Kind of speaks for itself, doesn't it...

I Read This Somewhere

2008-07-19T08:03:00.000-07:00

The westernization—called by Westerners the civilization—of Turkey is now proceeding rapidly, with enthusiastic support of all forward-looking Turks and the general approval of the West. Turkish women are opening the shutters of their houses, and throwing back the veils that formerly covered their faces—the first step, no doubt, toward hats. We are witnessing the beginning of the emancipation of Turkish women.

I believe no voices that carry weight are being raised against this. If there are protests in Turkey, they come from a generation which death will soon silence. Protest, in any case, would be futile. Trout and salmon swim up stream, but not human beings. Turkey will be westernized, and Turkish women. The word in use is “liberated,” and no one uses it more enthusiastically than Turkish women.

The value of the change can have only an academic interest, yet it interests me. To regard the emancipation of Turkish women as a parallel to our own is, of course, an error, because of the fundamental difference in Moslem and Christian society. The vanishing Turkish creed that woman’s place is in the home does not mean what it did with us.

Within the walls of the home—which was also large Eastern household, garden, garrison, and in some measure factory—the Turkish wife ruled. She had her own separate establishment, which men did not enter without her permission. She controlled inherited property. If she desired a divorce, her formal announcement of the desire gave it to her. If she desired education, books, music, nothing but limitations of her purse prevented her bringing them into her house. Entertainment was brought to her: she did her shopping in her own gardens where merchants brought their goods for her inspection and choice.

In the household were slaves and concubines. Their status was recognized as respectable. The concubine spent her youth in dancing, poetry and every art of pleasing, and her old age in comfort provided by her master. Her children were desired and legitimate.

“I advise feminists to borrow a few precepts of Mohammed concerning the rights of women,” says Armen Ohanian, the Armenian writer who knows Moslem society from Baku to Cairo, and European society from Vienna to Lond0n and Madrid. “Protected by these precepts, the condition of the European woman, slave to her husband and to his laws, would be much improved.”

This old order in Turkey is vanishing. Since the expulsion of Christians, the silk factories of Anatolia are filled with Turkish women workers; the beginning of economic independence in the factory system. Modern Moslem men are abandoning polygamy; the concubine of the old home becomes the prostitute of the new streets. Education progresses; the governess and tutor give way to the boarding school. Children were spoiled by too much love and attention in the old home, modern Turks will tell you.

There was a Turkish girl of Smyrna who envied Western women their independence. To the horror of her family, she walked out of the house and bought a railroad ticket to Constantinople, where friends sympathized with her ambition and sent her on to Berlin. After three years of struggle, living in cheap furnished rooms, underfed and thinly clothed in the winters, she completed a course in a college of dentistry. She returned to Smyrna, opened a dentist’s office, made her own living, married. She is now the mother of three children. In the morning she rises early enough to manage the affairs of the household, prepare the children for school, and breakfast with her husband, who is a merchant. They leave the house together; she drives him to his ship in her automobile and goes on to her office. She works there all day; in the evening she calls for her husband and they drive home, where she resumes her management of the house hold. It is a modern arrangement. I found her too busy to discuss abstract questions, but she is undoubtedly a good dentist, and her friends say that she is happy and that her husband is contented.

I am an American. I did not come out of a patriarchal household, and—in America—my point of view is that of a feminist. But I listened with interest to Armen Ohanian, who did come from a patriarchal household, who is now an independent Western woman, and who said with some bitterness, “Independence! Proud word, created to reduce the proudest to slavery.

The Glorious Fourth

2008-07-04T09:18:00.000-07:00

I prefer the manuscript version of a boy's life in Franklin County.

Father put the horses and buggy in their stall and locked the door. They were safe there even if the horses should be frightened at the noise of the celebration.

The town square of Malone was only part of a square, for the R.R. cut through it cornerwise. But what was left was fenced and green grass grew there. The crowd filled the square and the streets around it. Flags were flying and the band was playing.

The reading of the Declaration of Independence was over and most of the speeches. Almanzo was glad of that. He had to listen to one speech. Father said the speaker, "twisted the lion's tail and made the eagle scream." But Almanzo couldn't see any lion, nor hear the eagle and when he asked where they were, Father only laughed.

He like to see the band as it marched along the street, the men playing their fifes and drums and bugles. And what fun it was to watch the men load and fire the two brass cannon.

Kind of Like Under a Crib?

2008-06-27T15:16:00.000-07:00

Blackford, Holly. "Civilization and her discontents: the unsettling nature of Ma in Little House in the Big Woods.(Critical essay). ." Frontiers - A Journal of Women's Studies. 29.1 (Jan 2008): 147(41). General Reference Center Gold. Gale.

The attic's cornucopia of plenty meant everything to me, and I liked the book's evocation of being safe in a kind of maternal, edible womb.

One of the most interesting statements from the above article.

Prices are always too high

2008-06-26T16:37:00.000-07:00

Kansas City Post
May 5, 1910

‘Bread and Milk’ May Become High Luxury In Future
Bakers and Dairymen Can See No Immediate Lowering of Prices
Loaf Weight 14 Ounces
Present Prices of Milk to Remain-Loaves May be Cut Down

Bye, Baby Bunting,
Daddy’s gone a-hunting,
To get some nice, salt, greasy meat
So Babe can have a bite to eat.

“Milk and bread” is no longer a household necessity. It is a luxury. Only the babies and extremely rich can have it for their dinners if prices get much higher.

And speaking of the price of bread, it may be said in all sincerity that it is not loafing on its way up higher.

What is a loaf of bread?

It is an index of the economic situation, increasing or decreasing in value according to fixed laws controlling the cost of food materials, or is it a fluctuating value, juggled up or down at the will of the big bakers?

Five years ago a loaf of bread weighed a pound and a quarter. Today it weights fourteen ounces. The price to the consumer has remained the same.

“The only way we can increase the price of bread is by reducing the size of the loaf,” said the president of one of Kansas City’s largest bakeries. “The small retail grocer will not pay more than four cents for a loaf of bread. It is impossible for us to increase the price directly. We have to increase it indirectly by cutting the weight.”

“Two years ago the average weight of a loaf was fifteen and one-half ounces. Today it weighs fourteen ounces.”

Milk to Remain High.

The price of milk will not go down this spring, as it usually does in May. Last October, with the plea of increased cost in winter feeding of cows, milk dealers put into effect a general increase from 8 1-3 to 10 cents a quart in the price of milk. With the return of spring the cost has usually decreased to the former figure. This spring, however, milk dealers will hold the price to 10 cents a quart. The reason for this action, they say, is the recent campaign of education among milk men. Following the testing of the quality of milk many milch cows have been sent to the slaughter house, and milk men generally have decided that selling a better quality of milk at a higher price will pay better than the old methods.

From the clipping file

2008-06-25T08:26:00.000-07:00

John Bass is a one man crusade to place markers at forgotten LIW related sites.

Too Many Snakes

2008-06-24T21:45:00.000-07:00

The Writer
An Author’s Monthly Forum
Volume 40 Number 5
May 1928
Page 143

How I Wrote “Yarbwoman”

By Rose Wilder Lane

Edward J. O’Brien chose “Yarbwoman” for the “Roll of Honor” in his collection of “The Best Stories of 1927,” thus placing this story in that small group which he believes to possess the “distinction of uniting genuine substance and artistic form in a closely woven pattern with such sincerity that these stories may fairly claim a position in American literature.”

AS I WROTE Mr. O’Brien, “Yarbwoman” is not a story I myself would include in a collection under the adjective he has chosen. It is to me merely a good job of carpentry, not the best even of my own stories. But it does illustrate my method of producing a story which has for its first motive the necessity of paying the rent.

In the middle of the last century the bluffs on Lake Pippin in Wisconsin were infested by rattlesnakes. A man was bitten by one, and died. His brother wore his boots, and also died. The snake’s fang was found imbedded in the boot. My mother’s father, Charles P. Ingalls, was a hunter and trapper on Lake Pippin at that time. He told the story to my father in Dakota Territory in 1870, and my father happened to tell it to me in Missouri in 1923.

Now I have half a hundred notebooks, which I constantly intend to put in order. Each is neatly lettered on the outside, but inside they are as orderly as hash. Quotations from my reading, expense accounts, ideas for stories, names that strike my fancy, songs, descriptions of scenery, weather, people, analyses and criticisms of stories and plays, are helter-skelter in all of them. They follow me around the world by parcel post.

One white-hot summer day in Tirana, Albania, I confronted the necessity of selling a story. My immediate future was practically penniless unless I did. Before I sold a story I had to write it, and not one of the ideas simmering in the back of my mind was ready to jell. I tried several on the typewriter, but they would not crystallize. So I began to read the notebooks.

I do not think that this is the correct way in which to write a story. Nine tenths of the ideas jotted down in notebooks should die there. They may be perfectly good ideas for some one else to use, but the idea that should make a story will not lie inert in a notebook. It will have some indefinable affinity with the writer, so that it will sink into his mind and slowly take form there, take on a kind of life of its own, and demand to be written.

Real stories come out of the subconscious, eventually, and write themselves. Nevertheless, the rent must be paid, and if only a story will pay it, and no story is ready to write itself, one must be written by main strength and awkwardness.

A page of my notebook said: Pagan renaissance begun in Italy by Leonardo and Guido Bruno—England, by Shakespeare and Bacon—reached Germany with Schilling, Goethe, and Hegel. Schiller pantheistic.—Idea. Rattlesnake bites man, he dies. Brother wears boots, dies. Snake’s tooth imbedded in boot.—Ambassador Morgenthau says of Turks that Europe “could not uproot their inborn preconception that there are only two kinds of people in the world—the conquering and the conquered.” Is there a people that is neither?

I said, “I’’ use that snake idea.”

There was a demand for more of my Ozark stories, so I decided to put this story in the Ozarks. But I must invent a reason why a man wore his dead brother’s boots. The Ozark hills are muddy only in seasons when snakes are sluggish and don’t strike quickly. I must have a swamp. This troubled me, because I know no swamps in the Ozarks, and did not know the Ozark dialect is used where there are swamps. But that was pure luck.

Having the swamp, I had to provide some motive which would take the characters to it, one after another, so that they would wear the boots. This problem was entirely too much for my staggering mind; I left it to work itself out. I must also provide some false explanation for the successive deaths—some point on which not only the characters, but the readers would fix their attention, so that the boot would not be suspected. If the characters looked at the boot, they wouldn’t wear it, there would be no story and no check. If they suspected an enemy of causing the deaths, they would arrest him for murder, and that brought in too many complications. The deaths must by mysterious. There was nothing for it but the supernatural.

But Ozark folk are not superstitious. They are a shrewd, hard-headed, humorous lot, who would suspect any ghost of being a joker under a sheet. There are not ghost in the Ozarks, perhaps because even ghosts would dislike being so misunderstood. Stop! why not a yarbwoman? Far in the backwoods, among people simpler and more ignorant than any to be found in the Ozarks today, a yarbwoman might be regarded with fearful awe. Especially if there were something unusual about her, in addition to her skill with herbs. Suppose she liked snakes? Solved!

Many sympathetic persons admire and even like snakes. I do. And in California the alfalfa farmers keep black snakes to eat the gophers.

At this point I stopped conscious thinking, I had the story as clearly as I have any story before writing it. I had the kernel of the plot, I had an Ozark yarbwoman, a Florida swamp without its Spanish moss and alligators, the snakes, and two or more unsympathetic characters—they must be unsympathetic, because they were to die of snakebite, and their deaths must be no sorrow to the reader. I stopped thinking, and began to brood, to dream.

Fiction writing is essentially an auto-hypnotic process. No story is real to the reader unless it is real to the writer, and the only experience which we know to be unreal but feels to be real is a dream. The writer is a person whose mind will split in two, so that he can dream and be awake at the same time. The writer’s true task is subjecting in the very delicate control of this precarious mental process. There is more to be said about this, but not here.

I brooded on this place in the Ozarks until I saw it, felt it, smelled the swamp and the forests. The river, the hills, the roads and trails, the fields, the weather, came quite clearly, and my attention focused itself on the yarbwoman’s cabin. I repeat, this is a semi-hypnotic process; all writers use it, more or less, with more or less awareness of what it is.

The focused attention sees everything, every detail, with more keenness of perception than the eye ever has—and with no discrimination whatever. I could have written fifty thousand words about the yarbwoman’s cabin. But the part of the objective mind that is still functioning, that is not cut off, selects. It carries on a search for the essential, a discarding of innumerable non-essentials, swiftly done but very gently, deftly, not to disturb the dream. Out of this double process, the subconscious seeing and the conscious selecting, the first sentence—that blessed miracle!—at last comes.

When I was a younger writer, I sometimes wrote and discarded pages of first sentences. Now I seldom put down a first sentence that does not stand. After that, the story “marches.” It has a life of its own, like a dream. It is a dream—a controlled dream.
Harrison rather surprised me by coming into “Yarbwoman.” I had not known he was there until he appeared, and had no notion what he would do. He was very useful later, taking me back to the yarbwoman’s cabin for the final scene. (Transitions always halt me; they are the hardest points at which to control the dreaming without quite waking up and losing the story entirely.) And as I saw Harrison more clearly and knew him better, I liked him. He was an element that sweetened the story. He added a pathos to it, too, and his being there developed Martha-Rose’s character more definitely. If I had thought of him, I would have put him in. But I didn’t; he simply appeared.

My stories are never rewritten; I have done all the rewriting of which I am capable before they are on paper. The first copy would be the final one, if the delicate mental equilibrium could be maintained without wavering. As it is, I sometimes type a word which fails, more lamentably than all my words do, to express the sensation I feel; then I em it out and hand suspended there until a better word replaces it.

The story was written in two days of about fourteen hours each. On the third day a clean copy was typed and hopefully posted. Two weeks later I tore open a cable from Carl Brandt, my agent, and read; “sorry Yarbwoman refused stop they say too many snakes stop cheer up am trying Harper’s.”

Cheesecake!

2008-06-22T12:01:00.000-07:00

I have not been a participant in the LIW crafty blogathon. Crafting is not my reason to live.

But I can't resist offering a recipe from my mother's box. Handwriting is all hers.

I get my sense of organization from her.

The Hunting of the Source

2008-06-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

Every time books or scholarly articles about LIW or RWL are published, the page I anticipate most is the page of citations. Will there be an article that I have never heard of before? Or will it cite Zochert? I was excited when I read that the author of a recently published LIW book had visited William T. Anderson, and had been granted access to his files. After reading the book, and combing through the footnotes and citations I was disappointed. She had only used correspondence from readers of WTA!

Mr. Anderson receives photo credits for photos of LIW and family not seen anywhere else. He also gets credit for documents and articles from his private collection. I have a hunch he has a collection that would be the envy of all LIW researchers across the globe. He is under no obligation to share his collection. But I think he could fund his retirement years with ease. If Stephen W. Hines has found a lucrative business in literary prospecting, with what is out there for anyone to find if they try, Mr. Anderson would have a bonanza with the one of a kind items in his possession!

Soggy Vinton, Iowa

2008-06-11T21:40:00.000-07:00

Vinton, Iowa, home to the College for the Blind, now known as the Iowa Braille school, suffered flooding today. Hope all are well there.

Random Randomness

2008-06-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

I am merrily transcribing today--here is a fragment from a letter.

Vinegar pie as I have made it
1 cup of water-1/2 cup vinegar, 1 egg beaten, spices, brought to a boil and thickened with flour, two tablespoons, until like a thick gravy. Poured into a pie crust shell and backed like custard.
There have been some fancy receipts for vinegar pie in the magazines recently but this you see is very simple and cheap and will work.
It is only a very thick gravy made with water and vinegar and seasoned with spice.
I should think you would be so sick of the darned story, you would gag. Sorry it has been so troublesome. And you must use your judgement about what to do with Mrs. Nelson.
Surely by now you have my letter describing the crab, crawdad that lived under the rock, I assure you he was enormous.

She did indeed know every word of it

2008-05-30T16:34:00.000-07:00

The Independent 4th Reader.

"Do you know the Fourth Reader?" Teacher asked.
"Oh, yes, ma'am!" Laura said. She did indeed know every word of it.

Got Liberty?

2008-05-29T18:02:00.000-07:00

Poking around at the Mises Institute website I found pdfs of two Rose Wilder Lane books.

Give Me Liberty

and

The Discovery of Freedom.

Why not take a look, and then go purchase your own copy? A good addition to any library.

Hopps, Hopps and More Hopps

2008-05-27T21:12:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting online newsletter about Skagit County, Washington. And there is quite the Little House connection, too. Skagit county neighbors Whatcom County, home of Mary Power Sanford.

Memorial Day

2008-05-26T12:17:00.000-07:00

Thel Keane, the inspiration for 'Mommy' of the Family Circus died this weekend. Anyone who has or has had an elderly member of their family suffer from Alzheimer's or other dementia related disorders, will sympathize with the Keane family.

My condolences to the Keane family.

Photo is from The Family Circus Album A 25th Anniversary Celebration by Bil Keane.

Memorial Weekend 2008

2008-05-24T08:51:00.000-07:00

It isn't a complete visit from cyberbessie unless rosebunting drags her to a graveyard. And rosebunting has to drive in circles over unmarked roads that always seem to have forgotten railroad tracks that are real, working railroad tracks. And there is a rule that arrival concurs with the cemetery office being closed due to emergency, so each row has to be walked to pinpoint grave location.

Gravesites pictured are in Bellingham, Seattle and Sumner, Washington.

Surnames on graves visited include:Burd, Harthorn, Hopp, Johnson, Power and Sanford.

Very...Dry...Reading

2008-05-18T18:58:00.000-07:00

Little House, Long Shadow by Anita Clai Fellman.

Penny Linsenmeyer hit a home run in the book, she is mentioned in the main body of the work, in the chapter notes and in the bibliography about article she wrote:

Linsenmayer, Penny T. "Little Settlers on the Osage Diminished Reserve: A Study of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie." Kansas History 24 (Autumn 2001): 168-185.

Sarah Sue Utoff is mentioned in the chapter notes.

Frontier Girl message board is mentioned in the chapter notes.

No mention of any of the listserves of days gone by.

The above is the interesting to me part of the book.

Most of the chapters had been published in the past in various periodicals. A part of me harbored a hope that the book was a work in progress, and the read would improve in the final state.

The print is real, grown up sized small typeface, there are no illustrations or photographs.

There must be a happy medium between the William Holtz hatchet job of LIW, and he didn't really do RWL any favors either, and the William T Anderson books written for the 6th grade level reader.

An unsung writer named Fred Erisman has done the best job thus far. He wrote a booklet for the Western Writers Series, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Another excellent read by him was:
Erisman, Fred. "Farmer Boy: The Forgotten Little House Book." Westen American Literature 28 (August 1993): 123-30.

The booklet and article are short, but they are both full of content.

My verdict on the Anita Clair Fellman book:

If your library purchased it, leaf through it first to see if you want to add it to your collection. As a bedtime book you won't have nightmares from reading it.

Ms. Fellman does not mention any email groups, I have given up on them. Groups seem to go "dead" on a 3-4 year cycle, and another group forms. I have been through 6 group changes since 1997, and I never get invited or hear about the new group until after all the interesting stuff goes down. Figuring that people's blogs will mention anything interesting happening is the route from now on.

And in advance, no thank you, nothing wrong with whatever email group might take offense, just don't seem to enjoy the format myself anymore.

thanks to cyberbessie for the bibliographic citations.

The Good Old Days--NOT!

2008-05-16T17:35:00.000-07:00

My aunt was interviewed for the Neighborhood History Project in Portland, Oregon. The interviewer was Jim Poplack in 1976.

The photo is her official passport/emigrant image. The hoop, shoes and dress were all rented from the photographer. She didn't have a deluxe photo, you could rent jewelry for a bit extra.

My Aunt was Carmela "Mildred" Terrana Battaglia. (1905-1978) This is how the common immigrant family lived. A Sicilian dialect of Italian was spoken in the home until my father started school in 1920, he was born in the US and spoke more English than Italian. My grandfather decreed that only English would be spoken at home by the the children. My aunt would have been 15 at that time. Her grammar is not perfect, but she didn't need a translator to vote or shop.

"...it took years to pay back all he owed, buy meanwhile, he sent for my mother, so we came here in 1910.

There was no electricity, and the toilets were outdoors, no lights. We had to carry those globes from one room to another. The wood ranges--we'd warm up on one side, then turn around and warm up on the other side. On Mondays was the wash day which was the worst day of the week. Mother would put the copper boiler on the stove and boil the clothes and all that.

Recently I was talking to my granddaughters and they wanted to know my life history, and I says, 'Honey, I'll tell you: I put in fifteen or twenty pieces of wood, I had to do the washing. At 3:30 I'd come home and find there was overalls to was, there was black stockings to wash. Then in summertime I had to help can and I had to take care of all the different things.'

Another thing I used to have to do that I didn't like: they used to have tickings in their beds, they were split, and they had all this wool. I had the job in the summertime, of spreading it, fluffing it up. We had four beds with two double tickkings in it and I had to do that ever summer. I was sick and tired.

I says, "So now, youse girls have wonderful beds, you don't have to do nothin' you just press the button. You go to the refrigerator and you take out what you want. Ice cream's at your hand. We didn't have ice cream, we didn't know what ice cream was. We didn't have an ice-box; we didn't have a telephone. You girls are livin' in luxury, so don't crab at what you've got.

We lived at 21st and Powell between Brooklyn and Tibbets at what is now the People's Food Store.

We called it Terrana's Feed Store. I guess he stayed until the horses were gone, and the chickens and all that. Everybody, in those days had chickens, horses, rabbits, cows, and some had goats. He sold flour, oats, and hay. People came and got it in their horse and wagon or he delivered. His territory went up to 52nd.

Father bought most of his stuff from Albers Feed Store. I worked in the store to sell chicken food, but my mother did most of the big stuff. Have you ever been in there? Well, in the back there is a kitchenette. In one sections clear to your left, they had hay clear to the ceiling. He had flour another section and one place they had scales where they weighed the hay and the flour, and then, on this other side, they had shelves, where they had display. That's our old home We used to live upstairs.

If they wanted little items like a five pound sack of cracked wheat, I could weight that out fore them. Anything bigger, I had to get my parents.

(interviewer asks how clothes were washed)

Oh yes. You had a great big tub of zinc, you put it on two chairs and filled it with hot water. The water was warmed on the wood range and then we had this old scrub board. And we washed the sheets, then put them on this old copperboiler on the stove. They whipped up the sheets in there to boil them, get the stains out, sterilize them. Meanwhile, while those were boiling, you was washing another batch which was towels. You didn't throw the firset batch of water away because that was clean yet: the water was precious. When you got through with that water, you threw that out. Meanwhile those clothes that had boiled, youused that water to wash your shirts, and your coveralls. Course, that was a long process, with seven in the family, three or four beds, and sheets, so that took quite a while. As I said, at 3:30 , my mother saved the overalls, the dirty black stockings for me so I could learn to wash.

In those days, every child had a job.

Breakfast:...Mother set before us, nine slices of bread warmed on the wood range, and there was always lots of peaches which we canned, and we had rolled oats for breakfast every morning.

Next, I had to make the beds, I had to wash the dishes, and then I had to sweep the floor; then it was 8:30 and I had to go to school. The boys had to have the wood cut and into the kitchen so my mother wouldn't have to go out and carry the wood. That's why I say the children of today are living in the lap of luxury and don't realize it. What the children have today, I wish I had it then. But, I cannot live in the past. I cannot let my children and my grandchildren live in the past, because that is gone; life had to go ahead.

As my father told me, he says: 'I am training you for yourself and your children, so someday they know better than what I do today. You see, I come from poor parents, so I want to give you better advantages than what I had.' ( he went to school until age 10)

And he did. As I say, we all had a grammar school education and high school. (all graduated from high school with the exception of rosebunting's father, who dropped out one semester before graduation due to the Depression. )

We did get that though we was never rich.

We had plenty to eat, we had plain food, we didn't have no dessert, no cakes, no pies, but we had bread, homemade bread; fifteen, sixteen loaves of bread was baked every week, and that's what we ate. Long rolls of bread, then sometimes we'd come home for lunch and didn't have nothing else to eat, so she'd split one of those hot loaves down the middle, take it out of the oven, butter it, put grated cheese on it, and oh! It was delicious. Two loaves of bread would go in just two minuts. It stuck to your stomach. You didn't pinch it or squeeze it like you do today. Today you squeeze a loaf of bread and there's nothing there.

(what did you do on Sundays)

In the house, around the stove, tell stories about the Bible, our religion. We weren't rich, like I said, but there was no fights. There was no squacking--there was not such thing. We were all nice, quiet, because we didn't have anything to fight over. We shared everything what we had. Also, we'd go to Sunday school every Sunday. Then in the afternoon we'd visit friends. We had no babysitters like we have today. Where we went we had to be nice. We sat around the terrace and were quiet. Because your parents wanted people to say, "Come back again and bring your family." I have known people to bring their children and tear the house apart. Etiquette--the most precious thing we got...

(what hours did your father work?)

I would say 17 hours a day, get up at 4:00 in the morning -7:00pm. He delivered orders, food and stuff and some times he had to go and get his hay and flour. Then he had to take care of the store. And then he had his horse and his rabbits and things and then he went to bed.

toothcare:

First we brushed with salt on the brush and that is a very good deal for your teeth and cleans your teeth just like Pepsodent. Good old salt goes a long ways.

(why did your father settle in the 21st Street area?)

Because that's where they took him when he got off the train, all his friends lived here. He could speak and be understood.

The Unmentionable Topic

2008-05-15T18:52:00.000-07:00

Every now and then the topic of hygiene and how it was handled in the days of pops up.

First off--Laura Ingalls Wilder never, ever mentioned toilets, periods or underarm odor. The sole exception that I have found is in a letter dated January 25, 1938 from LIW to her daughter, RWL. The girls were never allowed near where the men were working at Silver Lake camp because the men would 'do their jobs' publicly. The grass was short, and all could be seen, according to Manly.

Dress shields were part of getting dressed. If you were wearing a garment made of material that would be ruined by perspiration, the little padded cloth half moons soaked up moisture.

Odor-o-no, or some such brand may have been the first deodorant. My father called it by that name. He was born in 1913, and in the time and place of his upbringing believed that real men did not perfume their armpits. He was the 5th child in his family, Saturday night was bath night. The girls were bathed first. The boys next, in age order. The same bath water. He was last. As an adult he would never take a bath, only showers for that reason.

There was plenty of water in Portland, Oregon. Why the one washtub for all the children?
Fuel. It takes a lot of wood to heat a tubful of water. Most likely there was only one tub heated for the Wilder and the Ingalls family, but modern readers would have thought they were not clean people.

Photo of the Day

2008-05-12T20:15:00.000-07:00

Photo by cyberbessie

What Iris, the recess monkey is reading. My Iris is leaning over the edge of my cat basket now LIW doohickey holder. The cat thought the cat basket made a neat object to avoid at all times, so now it has a new use.

My Saturday

2008-05-11T21:16:00.000-07:00

This is what I did yesterday!

The School Board's Visit

2008-05-11T10:32:00.000-07:00

...She had been so angry that it was hard to remember exactly what she had said. "I said that you have as much to say about the school as anybody. Then I said, 'It's too bad your father doesn't own a place in town.Maybe if you weren't just country folks, your father could be on the school board.'"

"Oh, Laura, " Ma said sorrowfully. "That made her angry."

"I wanted to," said Laura. "I meant to make her mad. When we lived on Plum Creek she was always making fun of Mary andme because we were country girls. She can find out what it feels like, herself."

"Laura, Laura," Ma protested in distress. "How can you be so unforgiving? That was years ago."...

Pa said..."So Nellie twisted what you said and told it to Miss Wilder, and that's made all this trouble. I see...Well, Laura, maybe you have learned a lesson that is worth while. Just remember this, 'A dog that will fetch a bone, will carry a bone.'"

Littl e Town On The Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. 1941 Harper and Bros.

Little House, Long Shadow

2008-05-10T20:50:00.000-07:00

Little House, Long Shadow is a new book by Anita Clair Fellman. The mail carrier brought it to me as I was sitting in my front yard, holding a fundraising yard sale for a local woman. The blank looks as I opened it, oooed, and said what the title was. I don't even really know what it is about. And I am as tired as Ma after the New England Supper. If I read anything tonight it will be the Mary Engelbreit's Home Companion that also came in the mail.

Night, night everyone!