The back door of the house led to steps down to a brick courtyard.  I don’t know how wide it was, but it led to the wash house.  The wash house sat on top of the storm cellar, considered a necessity in Kansas, especially in the days before radar, etc.  There were two hinged doors to the cellar covering steps leading down to the dark damp interior which was lined with shelves, usually weighted down with jars of canned goods which Grandma and Mom had preserved during the growing season.  These jars were a point of pride among the ladies at the sewing circle, with the recitation of how many quarts, pints, etc. had been canned.  I must admit, we were never hungry!  The wash house itself had a gas hot plate for heating the water used for washing.  It also contained a wringer washer and three tubs on stands.  The wash board for removing stains and ground in dirt hung on one wall.  I will in a future blog tell what I remember about wash day….including the pot of ham and beans that was always the noon meal on wash day.

There was a large stump by the cellar door.  It was probably twenty inches in diameter and was used as a chopping block for killing chickens.  I guess I will tell about that memory in the future, too.

But today, we are on a visual tour.  The outhouse (yes, it was a real outhouse) was on the east side of the yard .  I assume the location was guided by the prevailing winds which in Kansas in the summertime are from the south and west.  I, of course, had no idea about that as a kid.  There was a tool “shed” quite a way south of the outhouse.  It was fairly large, probably fifteen by twenty feet.  There was lots of “stuff” in it.  I imagine most of it was very important “stuff”, but I didn’t know or care about that.  To the west (across a brick walk which led from the house to the back fence and gate) was a teeter-totter which had been fashioned from sections of telephone poles.  There were three of them.  Two tall ones and one shorter one.  The two tall ones had a pipe between them which served as an exercise bar.  The teeter totter was a two x twelve mounted by U-Bolts to the pipe.  There was a big tree in the  back yard and a tire swing was hung from one limb.  There was also a “sack” swing hung from another limb.  For those of you who may be unfamiliar with sack swings, they are straw filled gunny sacks tied to the end of a rope.  The yard was fenced with 4×4 woven wire and there was a gate in the back and on the side yard.  The gate in the back led to the barnyard.  The main thing I remember about the back gate, which was fixed with a weighted system so it would close on its own, was that Grandpa would yell at you if you swung on the gate.  And when I say yell, I mean YELL!  Somehow the side gate wasn’t as attractive to swing on and it led to the driveway on the west side of the house.  The driveway was lined with large elm trees.

The front yard, also fenced was like a formal living room.  The front porch was used for visiting,  and the front yard was used for Easter egg hunts, but the playing was done in the back yard.  There were two rows of large cedar trees in the front which led from the front door /porch to the fence at the road.  Star of Bethlehem plants defined the grass walkway between the trees.

The odd thing about these memories is that yesterday I had trouble remembering what order to put the ingredients in my bread machine, yet these childhood memories are so vivid…Go figure!

But this blog isn’t going to be about Larry.  It is going to be about my memories of past events.  

I made an angelfood cake this week…in fact I made two of them…because of a fund raiser we were having in our community.  As I used my electric mixer to beat the egg whites, I could almost picture my Mom sitting in the kitchen, a bowl of egg whites in her lap as she used a wire whisk to beat them to the proper consistency.  My Mom had very strong wrists which were made even stronger by milking cows by hand.  She used to arm-wrestle with my uncle Dayton and she often won.  Anyway, angelfood was my favorite cake (I also liked chocolate) and every year for my birthday, I requested it for my birthday cake.  We had chickens and always had a lot of eggs, so that was no problem.  During the war, the lack of sugar was a problem, but the coupons were saved for special occasions like birthdays.  

One year Mom made me what she called a Sunshine Angelfood Cake.  I don’t know exactly where she got the recipe for it, and I think she made it up, but it was filled with a delicious cream filling that if I am correct had a vanilla pudding base with whipped cream folded into it.  It was absolutely scrumptious.

The family thinks of Grandma Sumner as being an excellent pie maker, and that she was, using that same whisk to whip up the meringue for the cream pies.  But she was an excellent cake baker, too, and baked cakes for all the nieces and nephews on their birthdays.  She made a banana=-nut cake to die for.  It was a white cake frosted with a cooked fluffy brown sugar frosting…like a seven-minute frosting only using brown sugar.  I have tried to duplicate it, but couldn’t as this was another thing she made up without a recipe.  I remember it was a three layer cake with sliced bananas and pecans   on each layer of the cake before it was frosted, and then pecans on the top in a decorative placement.  

It sounds from this blog post that I am hungry.  That is not the case, but I wouldn’t mind having a slice of that banana nut cake again.  

She was two years older than I and had a childhood much unlike mine.  Her father was an alcoholic and her mother was in a mental hospital.  She had just moved to Independence from a small town about forty miles north.  I know very little about her before I met her, but she was a special person who had had a hard life.  I now think that she had possibly been abused by her father, although she never said anything about that.

Her father worked in a beer joint in Independence he and she lived in a small apartment above the tavern.  She was a senior in high school when we became acquainted.  The apartment she lived in was about four blocks from the high school and we started going there for lunch daily.  I remember that we always had canned Campbell soup for lunch.  Our favorite was vegetable, but sometimes we had chicken noodle or tomato . We often had Twinkies for dessert.   Funny how those lunches tasted so great, but it was probably the companionship that made it so.

I remember also the smell of that apartment.  It smelled of stale beer and stale smoke. We entered the apartment by a door beside the tavern.  We would go up a dark stairway and into a dark smelly hallway.  The first door on the left was the door to their apartment.  I really don’t know how many apartments were in that hallway, but there were probably at least two more.  Hers was the one right above the tavern.

She kept the apartment immaculately clean.  She had a knack for doing great decorating with very little money.  She was also very talented at sewing, knitting, and other needlework… but not such a great cook. The apartment had her touches on everything, down to the hand-painted towels in the bathroom.  I know her father didn’t appreciate what she did, as he made her life miserable with criticism.  His lack of cooperation in keeping the apartment neat  also added to her work.  He also did nothing to help her and I don’t remember ever seeing him without a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.  I don’t know enough of his or her past to know why he was the way he was, but there must have been a time when he was not that way.

After she graduated from high school, she got a job with a local law firm as a private legal secretary.  Her shorthand and typing skills were excellent and she was also very intelligent.  She saved her money and as soon as possible rented a small garage apartment of her own.  She was eighteen and was totally on her own.  Sometimes when her father was drinking heavily, he would come to her apartment and ask her for money.  She was afraid of him.  She began spending more and more time at our house with Mom and me.  Finally, Mom convinced her to move in with us.  She lived with us for at least a year.  Mom was somewhat formidable and her dad didn’t really want to mess with her, so he left my friend alone.

She finally gained the courage to go back on her own, and she made a home for herself again.  I visited her frequently at her apartment and she and I did a lot of things together socially.  I was also working and we would go shopping together and sometimes by matching outfits.  I was never as good at crafts as she was, but I tried, and we had a lot of fun doing them.  She learned how to knit argyle socks and sweaters, and I couldn’t even do a chain stitch.

She married my late husband’s best friend, and the four of us did a lot of things together.  She and her husband moved away, my husband died, I remarried, and our friendship became a long-distance thing.

I called her because I had been thinking about her one day, and got her answering machine.  Her husband called me later in the day and said she had been taken to the hospital and diagnosed with brain cancer.  I sent her flowers, and was able to talk with her the day before she died.  I know the connection we had was the reason I called when I did, and I am thankful to God for allowing me to say good-bye to her.

Friends like her don’t happen too often in a person’s life.  When they do, we need to cherish them.

When I look back at Christmas past in my life, I remember two years particularly.  One was the year all of us cousins received a baby doll.  There were four of us girls and as the youngest, I got first choice of the dolls.  They were identical except for the colors of their dresses and bonnets.  We were at Grandma and Grandpa’s house.  After the evening Christmas meal was finished, the dishes were washed, and the house put back in order, only then were we allowed to open the drapes to the parlor and see the decorated Christmas tree .  The tree was a cedar tree that had been brought in from the pasture earlier in the day and decorated by the adults who were not involved with making the Christmas dinner.  The wrapped presents were under the tree…except for the dolls…they were in the branches of the tree.  I was three or four years old at the time, and I still, believe it or not, have a mind picture of that tree and those four dolls.  I chose the one dressed in yellow.  I do not remember anything else about that Christmas.  I don’t know what Santa brought to my house, if anything.  I only remember those dolls.  Many years later, I was told that Uncle Leo and Aunt Jean were responsible for the dolls.

Another Christmas I remember was the year that Montgomery Ward introduced Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  We went to the local Montgomery Ward store and were given a book containing the story of Santa’s new reindeer.  I vaguely remember that Santa was in attendance and handed out the books in the basement of the local store.

When I was twelve, I wanted a bride doll.  I had picked out one from the catalog and hinted about it a lot.  I got a kind of raggedy ann doll instead.  I remember the disappointment, but lived through it. I know now that my parents couldn’t afford a fancy bride doll, and the raggedy doll was the best they could do that year.

Today television lets children know what the most wanted toys should be.  It really was not much different when I was growing up as Sears and Montgomery Ward both put out Toy Catalogs.  These catalogs were full of toys of all kinds.  One of the games my cousin and I liked to play was to go through the catalog and pick a toy from each page.  We made our lists for Santa by looking in the catalog.  We never got everything on the list and , in fact, we got very few of the things….usually one major gift…and by major, I don’t mean expensive.  Sometimes a gift might be something someone had made for us.  It was also something we needed.  I do remember that every year there was a really big orange in my sock and usually some nuts and candy.  I loved the really big orange as that was the only time in the year that we had them.

I do remember getting roller skates one year.  They were metal, with metal wheels and clamps that attached them to shoes.  These skates were held on by tightening the clamps with a skate key.  I also remember getting a red bicycle one year.  This was during the war and the only bicycle available was a boy’s bike.  I learned to ride it with difficulty as it was really too big.  Lots of skinned knees from falling over learning to ride.  It was a 26 inch bike and the only one I ever had.  It lasted forever!

Christmas is important to children.  It is also important to parents.  Hopefully, the pressure  of the economy won’t diminish the joy of the holiday this year.  We have all had times when we couldn’t afford to do what we really wanted to do at Christmas. By being creative, maybe we can all make this year a Merry one and one when the joy of the season and what it really stands for will take the forefront of our celebration!  Merry Christmas to all!

Toys were also wooden, or metal.  No plastic.  Oh, there was celluloid which was a teeny bit like plastic.  The main things I remember that were celluloid were cupie dolls.  Cupie dolls were little dolls with feathers on their heads and also on their teeny little costumes.    I don’t know why they were named cupie dolls.  I just researched then on the internet and found they were also called kewpie dolls.  And they were nude!  Not anatomically correct, though, as that was unheard of back then for dolls.  They looked a bit like “Betty Boop” who was a cartoon character.

Back to plastic or paper.  If you can, try to imagine your world today without plastic.  No Tupperware or imitations.  No plastic bottles for soda, water, or milk. Everything was glass.  The glass soda bottles required a deposit and were returnable.  A good way to get money to go to the movies was to gather up soda bottles and turn them in.   Glass containers with lids, stackable to fit in the refrigerator for leftovers.  Glass milk bottles which were delivered to your house in the city full of non-homogenized milk complete with the cream which had risen to the top.  Cardboard egg cartons in the store which were collapsible.  Then there were metal containers.  Ice cube trays…where electric or gas refrigerators were available…were made of metal.  An exception to this was a rubber ice cube tray put in Frigidaire refrigerators.  Yes, the ice had a rubber taste.

Cars were made of metal and glass.  Glass windshields and windows and metal bodies and parts.  This may be why some of the early cars are still around today as antiques.  They had to be very heavy, no doubt.  They were not streamlined looking like they are today.  Plastic can be molded into more streamlined shapes.

We lived “green” and didn’t even know it.  To tell you the truth, when they give me a choice between paper and plastic, I’ll take plastic every time!  Shame on me!

In thinking of Kristen, I was reminded of my Aunt Jean.  My Uncle Leo, George’s Dad, was a professor at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.  After the death of George’s Mother, Leo later married again.  Aunt Jean was a school teacher.  I was very much in awe of their lifestyle.  We visited them a couple of times if I remember correctly.  I loved their house.  It was cute.  I was about six or seven at this time, so keep that in mind as you read this.  Aunt Jean subscribed to Better Homes and Gardens.  My mother read Capper’s Weekly.  I couldn’t help but notice the difference in everything about Aunt Jean’s house compared to ours.  Aunt Jean’s house was in town and ours was in the country.  Aunt Jean’s house had a bathroom.  Our house had an outhouse.

My Mother was a great cook.  She had an old Lighthouse Cookbook and used recipes from it for special occasions.  I remember one I liked particularly well was called City Chicken.  It was made of cubes of pork on skewers which were then dipped in egg and bread crumbs and then cooked.  She also made Egg a la Goldenrod.  It was made with hard boiled eggs.  The whites were added to a cream sauce .  This was served over toast with the grated egg yolk sprinkled on top.  I loved it.!  But usually Mom made plain food.  Roast beef, round steak, pork chops, chicken..both fried and made into chicken and noodles.  Our vegetables were those we grew in the garden..peas, green beans, corn, crowder peas, tomatoes,  cabbage, and once in a while, okra.  For her plain cooking, she didn’t use recipes.

When we visited Aunt Jean, she cooked sophisticated recipes from the Better Homes and Garden Magazine.  I remember that I ate broccoli for the first time at Aunt Jean’s.  I loved her cooking and everything was served in little individual dishes.  She even had salad bowls for the salad.  At home, we just put the salad on our plate with the rest of the food.  The dessert was in  little bowls or on smaller plates.  Very  fancy.

When we got back home, Dad would always praise Mom’s cooking and remark that at Jean’s half the time you didn’t even know what you were eating.

I now wonder if she always cooked like that or if she used the fact that her in-law’s were visiting to cook a little fancier than usual.  I would imagine that might be true.  I know that I, for one, was very impressed!  I have been a subscriber to  Better Homes and Garden magazine for about forty years now.  I cook with recipes from the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, but my favorites are the recipes I have in my head that have been handed down to me from my Mom and my Grandmother.  Not necessarily fancy or sophisticated, but very tasty!

My father’s friend was in the social swing of things and attended the big party that was held in the Civic Auditorium.  It was a costume party  and  she invited me to attend.  Apparently she had two girl’s costumes and we were supposed to be twins.  I think there was some contest or something involved.   The costumes were period costumes of the 1500′s.  I really don’t remember much about the costumes  but that they were fancy and I had to wear a mask.  I know my folks didn’t go to the party and I attended with Dad’s friend from work.

I wish I remembered more about the party, but I think I was completely out of my element.  I do know I was not comfortable there.  It made a little bit of an impression on me and I felt scared because everyone was masked.  I might enjoy a party now like that… I doubt it…but I sure didn’t then.  I liked to play dress-up, but in the safety of my own home.  I didn’t like playing dress-up with people I didn’t know.

After the divorce, Mom, Walt, and I moved into town.  Mom got a job at Sutton Nurseries east of Independence and Walt went to a country school near the nursery.  I was in Junior High and after school I would walk to the library in Independence and wait for Mom to come and pick me up after she got off work at five.  I don’t really know why this was the arrangement, because the school was closer to our house than the library was.  I suppose Mom didn’t want me to stay by myself and I was somewhat supervised at the library.  I do know that the custodian at the library went to our church.  He and I were good friends and maybe that was the reason.  (His name was Mr. Saferite, and when he died, his wife asked me to sing at his funeral.)

Anyway, I would do my homework and then I would read.  I read books, fiction and non-fiction, periodicals, and newspapers.  I loved books and since I had plenty of time, I read a lot of them.  I know I had a library card and that I checked books out, too, but mostly I read them at the library.

I have probably mentioned it in my blog before now, but I read Gone With the Wind in one week-end at home.  We had a big over-stuffed chair and I would lie back with my feet over one arm of it and my head resting on the other arm and read.   I must have been eleven or so and Dad kept telling me, “Get your nose out of that book and get your chores done.”  I would go and do what I had to do as quickly as possible and then come back to the book.  I loved that story and felt so sorry for all the people in it.  It really didn’t have a happy ending, but it was realistic fiction and that is the genre that I liked then and still like.

One of my favorite books was Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.  Another pretty heavy book for a young person to read, but one again that left me wishing things could have been changed for the characters.   I struggled through Little Women, but never really connected with any of the sisters in it.

It was while I was staying after school at the library that I learned the meaning of the word, pregnant.  I was reading the serialized story “The Voice of the Turtle” in Collier’s magazine and one of the characters was pregnant.  I looked the word up in the big Webster’s Dictionary at the library and found out what it meant.  I can’t believe I didn’t know the meaning until then.  I did learn there were a lot of words in the dictionary that were quite interesting.  Some of them were not to be used in Sunday school, if you get my meaning. ( By the way, I have no idea at this time what the story “The Voice of the Turtle” was about and I am surprised that I still remember the title and what magazine it was in.)

I had the complete set of The Wizard of Oz books…sent to me by Aunt Anna.. and had read them all.  I have often wondered where they ended up after the divorce, but at the time that was the least of my worries.  Probably the least of my parents’ worries, too.  My favorite of those books was the one about Glenda, the good witch.

I was at Barnes & Noble this morning to buy the book Pioneer Women by Joanna Stratton.  Luckily they did not have it in stock and I will now go to Amazon.com and buy it used.  I have read it several times, but wish to read it again now that I have time to enjoy it.

I read two books yesterday.  One was When We Were Colored and the other was Montana 1948.  It was a rainy day and I had the day off so I thought I would read.  If I like a book, I don’t want to put it down until I finish it.  Montana 1948 was definitely one of those books.  I finished it at midnight last night.  Sadly, those books don’t come along too often.

As Kathy and Kristen know, I did sell my copy of Gone With the Wind on Ebay.  But that is another story and one that tells me that my love of books has been passed down to my children.

After we moved to the farm across from Grandma and Grandpa’s house, they bought a Hupmobile.  Talk about ugly…it was as ugly as the name.  I didn’t realize at the time, but do now, that it was war-time by then and cars were probably in short supply.  I imagine you got what you could.  But a Hupmobile…I may be mistaken in the spelling, but I am not mistaken in knowing it was ugly.

When he was in High School, George had a 1925 Model-T.  There was some way you could make it go very slowly by doing all the stuff with the gas and the spark and whatever.  Anyway, sometimes he would get out of the car and then get back in while it was still running.  I remember his doing that coming up Grandpa’s driveway one time.  I thought that was really the equivalent of what is now ‘”cool”.  This car had to be cranked in the front to start and I know there was sometimes a risk of getting an arm broken if the crank “kicked back” or something.  That car was one I really liked.  It, too, was black, the only color it came in.

Uncle Dayton was a mechanic and had a gas station and repair shop in Independence.  The MaGees had a big Packard…either a 1926 or 1929, I’m not sure which.  It was a really neat car.  It was also black,  but the paint was oxidized on it and it looked navy blue.  The thing I remember best about that car was that the windows opened and closed with a strap.  You pulled the big strap out of a slot on the inside of the door and it raised the window.  To close the window, you lifted the strap up and then let it go into the slot and the window closed. The strap worked on some kind of rachet. The MaGees had that car forever.  I’m not sure whatever happened to it, but Uncle Dayton kept it running like a fine watch.  It would have been a real find for a collector.

The car I remember best was the one Mom and Dad had and that Mom got in the divorce settlement.  It was  a black (what else) 1935 stick-shift Ford four-door sedan.  I learned to drive in that car.  The way I learned was that Dad would hitch a small trailer to it and then take hay down to the pasture to feed the cattle.  He would put the car in low gear  and then get in the trailer and throw the hay out while I steered the car.  He had given me a few lessons before he trusted me to drive while he was out of the car.  At the time we started, I could barely see out of the windshield.

Later on, I learned the H gear shifting model and only a few times did I crunch the gears while shifting.  We then went out on the road in front of the house.  This road didn’t really have any ditches on the side as it was a hill.  It did have high clay banks on each side and my job was to steer the car between the two banks.  I soon learned the art of subtle steering instead of cranking the steering wheel from side to side.  I was thirteen years old at the time.  One time, Dad let me drive to town and we were going to the Glencliff Ice Cream Store.  There was a large plate glass window in the front of the store and when I pulled in to park, I hit the gas instead of the brake.  We went over the curb, but I did get the car stopped before we hit the window.  That little incident scared me to death….I can imagine what it did to Dad!

I hated that car because it was old and had a stick shift.  It was the car we had until I graduated from High School.  It was one reason I took the bus everywhere I went and walked where the bus didn’t run.  I was ashamed that we had a car that old when my friends parents had new cars.  By that time, Dad also had a new car and I really resented that fact.  Aside: ( I know my girls are thinking about the Ranchero now, and I do understand.)

Every year Easter meant new clothes and especially new shoes.  New shoes meant white patent sandals most years.  Often it rained Easter and many times it was really too cold to wear sandals, however, usually rain or shine I  wore my new Easter shoes.  One of my friends had a pair of patent leather shoes with black bows on the front.  I coveted them as they were beautiful.  I have always been a shoe person and if I remember correctly this particular incident took place when I was six or seven.  Joyce, my friend, wore the shoes everywhere and something on the inside of the bow caused a sore on the top of her foot.  She didn’t tell her mother and her mother didn’t notice until the sore became infected.  Joyce ended up with blood poisoning.  Keep in mind this was before antibiotics were in use and the treatment for infections was iodine.  She did recover from the infection, but it was one of those things that my parents used as an example to me.

Easter was a time for church and then off to Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house for dinner (as usual on Sunday) and the afternoon was spent with the cousins and hunting Easter eggs.  Of course, we all got Easter baskets with the expected chocolate bunnies.  There was always the disappointing moment when the discovery was made that the bunny was hollow.  Much as I loved, and still love, chocolate, my favorite Easter candy has always been “Peeps”.  I love “Peeps” and especially when they get a little old and chewy.

I remember the Easter eggs were hidden in Grandma’s front yard.  The best place to hunt for them was in the flowers that were called “Star of Bethlehem”.  They were little white flowers with grassy leaves and Grandma had them growing on either side of a path all the way to the road.  Easter usually marked the beginning of Spring, which is the best time of year in Kansas.

I have lots of happy memories of Easter holidays.  Nothing special happened, but it was a delightful time spent with family.