Papa Grammer owned two properties in addition to his “home place.” The other two were the “Ward place,” less than two miles
west on the south side of the road toward Granbury, and the “prairie place,” a few miles north near
Waples. My dad worked the 17-acre Ward
place, as well as the 120-acre Grammer home place; a tenant, Mr. X.A. Myers,
lived and worked on the prairie place.
I was too small for heavy farm toil (we left Acton before I turned
eleven), but helped with chopping firewood, feeding the livestock, hoeing corn
and peanuts, or chopping cotton – although, when using a hoe, I worked only one
row while my dad worked two alongside me.
Chopping cotton and hoeing corn were fairly easy tasks, but pulling
grass from among peanut vines was harder.
I “drove”
the wagon when my dad (often assisted by Virgil) gathered corn or loaded
peanuts from windrows (where they had dried after being plowed up) for hauling
to a central point for thrashing. I
seldom helped with plowing, perhaps because I had once jumped off the go-devil (a sled-like device with three disks on each side of the two
runners to turn dirt toward the peanut row being plowed) when the team of mules
was somehow “spooked” and started running across the field. My dad was upset with me; I assumed it was
because of concern that I could have been cut by the disks had I not jumped far
enough, but it’s possible he was just as concerned about the peanut vines being
cut up; I’m sure he thought I should have tried more vigorously to stop the
team before “abandoning ship.”
I liked the rural environment and living within walking distance of the
homes of both sets of grandparents.
Life wasn’t as enjoyable for adults, for work to be done often tended to
exceed the time available for doing it.
Men spent warmer months at plowing, planting, cultivating, hoeing,
harvesting, and putting away crops; cold weather offered little respite, for
non-agricultural tasks (such as equipment maintenance and cutting wood for
cooking and heating) had to be done.
My dad’s
mechanical skills (I’ve mentioned his training as an auto mechanic) were
valuable, not only in maintaining farm equipment, but also in keeping our Model
A and Papa Grammer’s car in good operating condition (e.g., he overhauled the
engine in our car).
I recall a few times, after crops were in and before the next year’s
crops were planted, when my dad did temporary work with county road maintenance
crews, producing a little extra income.
He also served as an election clerk occasionally, and amused Twila and
me at those times by stentoriously imitating poll-opening announcements, “Hear
ye! Hear ye! The polls are now open!”
◊◊◊
Farm wives stayed busy cooking, washing, ironing, sewing, and
supervising children. My mother made
all the dresses and underwear she and Twila wore, undershorts and shirts for my
dad and me, plus other outerwear for me (e.g., knickers). I don’t think I had a “store-bought” shirt
while I was growing up.
I never
complained about homemade clothes; Mother was a great seamstress, and the
clothing she produced looked good and fit perfectly. I did complain about knickers, as noted earlier, but not because
they were homemade; I just didn’t want to wear them.
Laundry tasks occupied most of two days each week. Monday was wash day; items to be laundered
were sorted by color category, then, by group, were boiled in an iron wash pot (using lye soap as the cleansing agent), scrubbed by hand on a rub board, rinsed
in #3 washtubs, hand wrung, starched (if appropriate), then hung on lines to
dry.
Twila says
our washday supper menu featured pinto beans, because they could be slowly
cooked for hours with little attention required. I don’t remember that Monday menu, but it makes sense, for
washing procedures kept a housewife too busy for time-consuming meal
preparation. Our suppers on other days
were usually either (1) leftovers from lunch or (2) cornbread crumbled in
either sweet milk or buttermilk. I
suppose we reversed the procedure on washdays, but have no specific memory
thereabout.
Items to be ironed (cotton dresses/shirts/trousers) were sprinkled down
Monday evening. Ironing was done on
Tuesday, using flat irons heated on top of the wood cook stove; as one was
used, another was being heated. Summer
ironing was hot work.
Wrinkle-resistant
fabrics (e.g., rayon/nylon/dacron/polyester) were either unknown or hadn’t yet
been invented; most daily wearing apparel was of cotton, thus needed ironing
after being washed. Some cotton
outerwear had to be starched (for best appearance); those items were hot-starched after washing
and before being hung out to dry, then collars and cuffs of dress shirts were
cold-starched (for greater stiffness) when they were sprinkled down for
ironing.
Some farm wives’ activities included gardening and milking cows. Each of my grandmothers handled the latter
chore for her household, but my mother didn’t, perceiving milking to be men’s
work (she took responsibility for work inside the house, and left most outside
tasks to my dad).
Mother‘s aversion to cows extended to most other animals. As noted in an earlier segment, she feared
horses, and I don’t remember having seen her feeding or otherwise tending our
hogs, as her mother (Mama Grammer) did.
Mother wasn’t a pet-lover (in contrast with both my grandmothers), but
she permitted Twila and me to accept the gift of a little white Spitz dog when it was offered. Our
new puppy looked like a baby polar bear, so we named him “Cubby.”
Cubby’s life was short, and beset with misfortune. He once chased a horse too vigorously, was
stepped on, and received a broken leg for his efforts; my dad taped the two
back legs together, using the good leg as a splint, and Cubby walked around on
his two front legs while his broken leg healed.
Later, while still relatively young, Cubby sickened (poisoned?) and
died after two or three days; Twila and I were devastated, but the sad event
wasn’t without humor (although we kids didn’t appreciate it at the time). As Twila tearfully mourned Cubby’s death before family and relatives, she
was told she could have another dog.
“But I want a Spitz,” she blubbered. “Well, go ahead and spit,” Mother
told her. Twila and I saw nothing funny
about the misunderstanding, but everyone else thought it hilarious.
I learned while writing these RAMBLINGS that Cubby’s death
story must have been publicized around the Acton community (or, at least, among
relatives), for, as I discussed long past happenings with my cousin, Emma Mae
(Rash) Childress, she mentioned Cubby and recalled details of his death without
my prompting. I was surprised Emma
remembered, after about seventy years, our little dog’s existence, much less
his death and the reactions Twila and I had.
Twila and I held a memorial service for Cubby, singing the songs we
heard at funerals; my dad buried Cubby in a small plot (fenced in on three
sides) near our house, chiseled “CUBBY” on a rock headstone, and placed it at
his grave.
I looked
for the headstone at Cubby’s gravesite a few years ago, but it was no longer
there. I was a bit surprised to find it
missing, for its niche was in an unused/unusable location.
The emotional pain engendered by Cubby’s
death was untreatable, but most physical ailments I experienced in those days
brought on home remedies, usually unpleasant:
·
My colds
almost always included chest congestion (they still do), which was treated
externally with mustard plasters concocted by Mama Grammer and internally with mixtures of either
kerosene or
turpentine with sugar (for cough relief).
Mustard plasters went on cold, but turned fiery hot, and the cough
remedies tasted terrible. [Our family
discovered Ben Gay (or Montgomery Ward’s “analgesic balm” equivalent) at some point during those
years; it was less onerous than mustard plasters, but probably less effective.]
·
I was given
castor oil for
abdominal distress. My parents tried to
hide its taste by mixing in orange juice, but the disguise didn’t work well; I
developed a dislike for orange juice that lasted for years (I could taste
castor oil in plain orange juice).
My chronic earaches received professional
attention the year I was nine. My
parents took me to see Doctor Davis, the physician who had removed my tonsils when I was less than three years old; one tonsil had grown back
(part of a root had remained from the original removal). He removed adenoids and the regrown tonsil,
and the earaches ceased.
[Dr.
Davis removed my dad’s and Twila’s tonsils (one right after the other, on the
same day) at his Fort Worth office in late summer 1938, the day before we
started a five hundred mile trip to the Rio Grande Valley (where we had moved
the year before); Dr. Davis’ normal fee was $25 per tonsillectomy, but his
“group rate” for Twila and my dad was $35.
Neither of them felt well for several days, although my dad drove part
of the long trip home; Twila upchucked “across the alley from the Alamo,”
literally (“Across the Alley from the Alamo” was a popular song at that time).]
Twila and I experienced more pleasures than
pains while living on the farm, but our pleasures were simple. We “manufactured” much of our fun, for we didn’t
have a room full of playthings; Twila had dolls she seldom played with, and I
had a few indoor toys, but we played outside a lot:
·
Our small
house was ideal for “Annie Over;” the game was even more fun on those infrequent
occasions when other kids were there to play with us.
·
Twila
occasionally played marbles with me, but with little enthusiasm.
·
I had a
scooter and tricycle (brought from Fort Worth), but the soft sandy soil made
them almost unrideable anywhere except on the short front sidewalk at Mama and
Papa Grammer’s house.
·
The soil was
ideal for other activities: (1) We made
mud pies; (2) I dug troughs in the dirt to simulate sorghum-cane processing
operations I had seen at Mr. Farmer’s place, filled the troughs with water, and
pretended the muddy concoction was molasses; (3) I hauled sand wherever needed,
for whatever project, in my “little red wagon.”
·
One spot
about thirty yards from our front door wasn’t sandy; a clay slope dropping off
to the entry lane became very slick when wet, so one rainy day Twila and I,
fully clothed, used it as a mudslide. I
expected Mother to fuss at us for getting so dirty, but she said nothing that I
remember.
The
slope wasn’t ordinarily available as a playsite, because our Model A was
usually parked at its top, ready for its engine to be fired without using the
starter (i.e., turn on the ignition, depress the clutch pedal, put the
transmission in second gear, let the car start rolling down the incline, then
engage the clutch and let momentum turn the engine to start it). That, of course, couldn’t have been done
with an automatic transmission, but automatics hadn’t yet been invented.
Our pleasure times included hours spent at
our grandparents’ houses. The Grammer
house was less than a quarter of a mile from ours; Mama and Papa Miller lived
about a half mile from us; we had fun at both places:
·
At the
Grammer house I learned the shapes and locations of the forty-eight states
(Alaska and Hawaii hadn’t yet been admitted to the Union) by repeatedly
assembling a jigsaw puzzle of the contiguous United States.
·
Mama Grammer
played “I Spy,” “Go Fishing,” and dominoes with Twila and me; Twila says she
learned to add by playing dominoes at Mama Grammer’s house and in playing Hull
Gull with me (she also learned subtraction playing Hull Gull).
·
Mama Miller
told interesting stories from her youth (some involving Indian raids).
·
Both sets of
grandparents received the Fort Worth
Press by mail, so we kept up with the “funnies.”
·
We liked
reading. I especially liked Horatio
Alger books at the Miller place, where the “library,” kept in a glass-fronted
bookcase in Mama Miller’s bedroom, also included a number of religious books,
some graphically illustrated; one included a picture of old Satan, in red, with
pitchfork and horns. Some of their
books were purchased through door-to-door salesmen of The Southwestern
Company of
Nashville (a sales approach still followed by that organization). [Twila acquired the “library” after the
Miller farm was sold in the late ‘60s, and tells me she later returned the old
Southwestern books to company headquarters, for its archives.]
·
We enjoyed
viewing three-dimensional photographs of nature’s wonders and other sights (e.g., the Grand Canyon and San Francisco’s
1906 earthquake damage) through Papa Miller’s stereoscope; such scenes from around our nation helped
us learn about the world beyond Hood County and Fort Worth. (The old stereoscope has been passed on to
me; I occasionally take it down from a closet shelf, to view again some
remembered photo.)
·
Good snacks were always available; each grandmother had a
“safe” containing leftovers put away from earlier meals. (I can almost taste the leftover slice of
country-cured ham, or a piece of cake, as I key these words.)
An
unlikely sounding snack was the cornbread Mama Miller made for their dog. The batter she prepared, using coarse corn
meal (homeground for the livestock at a mill near the barn), contained generous
amounts of bacon grease, so was quite flavorful. It was great when hot, fresh out of the oven, in those days
before I knew about packaged goodies.
◊◊◊
Although the nation was in economic depression during our Acton years,
and many people (particularly in cities) were hungry, we didn’t lack for food,
being able to grow most of what we needed.
Our menus were limited to foods requiring no refrigeration, but we had
plenty.
We ate little beef; calves produced by our milk cows were more often
sold than slaughtered. On those
occasions when we killed a calf for our own consumption, we canned (or
preserved in glass jars) the portions we didn’t eat immediately; canned beef,
as Mother prepared it, tasted as good as any smothered steak I’ve ever
eaten. (Twila remembers our canning
chickens and sausage, but I have no like memory, perhaps because I wouldn’t
have liked those as well as canned beef.)
Pork, from hogs we raised, was a source of protein throughout the year,
because bacon, hams, salt pork, and sausage could be
preserved in the smokehouse. I don’t
remember much about raising hogs, other than associated odors and noises, but I
was often asked to take the “slop bucket” (full of table scraps
and kitchen waste) to the barn, add wheat bran or shorts to its contents, then
feed the mixture to the greedy porkers.
The “slop
bucket,” ordinarily kept on the back porch just outside the kitchen door, is
not to be confused with the “slop jar” kept under the bed for nighttime
relief. The slop bucket was an ordinary
galvanized metal container, while the covered slop jar (chamber pot) was porcelain, with a flared and rounded top for the
user’s seating comfort.
Speaking of hogs, as I was before digressing to distinctions between
slop buckets and slop jars, my aunt Ruth told me Papa Grammer had an immutable
rule: “The fatted hog must be killed on
the first freezing Saturday of each fall or early winter.” I wasn’t aware of that rule when we lived on
his farm, but hog-killing day was a special event to me, regardless of the way in which
scheduling was determined:
·
My dad separated the victim from the rest of the hogs, shot
him with his rifle, clubbed him in the head with a sledge hammer, inserted a
butcher knife in his throat to let the blood escape, tied a singletree between
his feet, dragged him into the yard, then lifted him (using a block-and-tackle
suspended from a handy limb) above and into a waiting 55-gallon barrel of
boiling water to loosen the hair.
·
He was removed from the boiling water, scraped clean of
hair, then cut up.
·
Hams and sides of bacon were salted down and hung in the
smoke house, tenderloin cuts were removed for eating fresh or canning, fatty
portions were rendered into lard in a cast iron wash pot (cracklings floating to the top of bubbling hot fat were a crispy
treat), and most of the rest of the usable parts of the hog were ground into
sausage (Mother had earlier sewn cloth bags in which to insert the sausage).
I really liked fresh tenderloin and sausage or cured ham as long as
they lasted, but fried salt pork eventually lost its appeal, for it was likely to be the only meat
we had unless a chicken was killed – and that was a pleasure usually reserved
for Sunday dinners or company occasions.
Our
pastor, Brother Turner, was our most frequent guest. I enjoyed his visits, not only because I knew we’d have a good
meal, but also because he entertained Twila and me. I learned one Sunday, as we waited for Mother to get dinner on
the table, that one always puts his left shoe on last – he puts on a shoe, then
puts on the one that is left. He was
the first person to present Twila and me with the riddle, “Railroad crossing,
look out for the cars, can you spell that
without any ‘R’s?” I believe it was
after the blessing before a Sunday dinner that he introduced us to the little
poem, “Amen/Brother Ben/Shot a goose/And killed a hen.”
I never tired of fried chicken, even though it was always the meat
served at “big” or “company” meals; chickens could be caught, killed, cooked,
and eaten during one meal cycle, thus required no refrigeration.
Preparation
began with beheading the victim. At our
house we used an axe, at the block where we chopped wood; my grandmothers,
however, wrung chickens’ necks. (“I’m
going to wring your neck” took on real meaning as I
watched my grandmothers execute chickens; I could visualize myself, as the
wringee, flying from the hand of the wringer, then flopping around like a dying
fryer.)
Both
grandmothers plucked the feathers from a chicken, then cut it up and fried it
with skin still attached. My mother
liked to remove (or have my dad remove) the skin before cutting a chicken up
and frying it. I preferred the skinned
variety, but liked it either way.
(Mother’s preference for skinned chickens wasn’t concern over fat, for
few, if anyone, knew the consequences of, or worried about, fat content in
food.)
Even though fried salt pork, the meat we had most
often, lost some of its appeal by summer, we still had good things to eat,
including fresh vegetables of all sorts, blackberries, cantaloupes, watermelons,
apples, apricots, peaches, plums, pears, mulberries, persimmons, cherries, and
grapes. Peanuts in early fall, and
pecans in late fall, were added treats.
(I could eat all I wanted of anything we raised – even watermelons and
peanuts, which were cash crops.)
Blackberries were so plentiful along several fencerows on the Grammer place
that the Andrews family (both parents and three boys), of the nearby Shady
Grove community, came every year to pick blackberries on the halves.
Watermelons grew well on both granddads’ farms. Papa Miller’s favorite, and I think my dad’s
as well, was a yellow-meated, round melon; Papa Grammer preferred red-meated
melons (Tom Watsons, as I remember). I
liked all of them (and still do).
Watermelon season was my favorite.
Each afternoon at break-time my dad halved a big, ripe melon, then we
all grabbed spoons and “dug in.” Any
day with a watermelon break was good, but the best were those in which the
melon had been chilled in our hand-dug hard-water well.
Water from
the hand-dug well backed up the supply from our deep soft-water well, and was
used to water livestock when winds failed and soft-water supplies were depleted
(at which times my dad climbed the windmill tower to manually turn the blades
and pump soft water for household use).
I liked the taste of cold, hard water freshly drawn from the well, but
the adults preferred soft water, and it was much better for washing clothes;
homemade lye soap didn’t lather well in hard water.
Our milk cows also enjoyed the watermelon breaks; Alice and Belle could
smell freshly cut watermelon from the farthest pasture, and would be standing
just outside the yard fence waiting for the rind before we could finish
eating. Our hogs also got in on the
good times, but we fed them only those melons deemed unsuitable for sale or
human consumption, which we kept in the wagon bed in the barn runway; I didn’t
necessarily agree that the hogs’ melons were unfit for human consumption, for I
often crawled up in the wagon bed, broke upon a melon, ate the heart, then
tossed the rest to the perpetually hungry swine.
We sold watermelons to Mr. Grady Parker, for resale at his fruit stand
north of Acton on US 377; Mr. Parker came to our place and bought the melons he
needed, carrying them away in the bed of his Model T pickup truck.
Papa
Grammer occasionally sold watermelons house-to-house in nearby
communities. I went with him to Cresson on one venture, thinking I was only along for the ride – until he
asked me to knock on a door and try to sell a melon. I didn’t make the sale.
He told me that in telling the lady we fed some of our melons to the
hogs I cast doubt on the quality of our products; I don’t think I got a second
chance at making sales pitches (and didn’t want one, for my interest in
watermelons was as a consumer, not a marketer).
◊◊◊
Homemade ice cream was a special treat enjoyed at warm-weather celebrations (e.g.,
Independence Day, Twila’s birthday in August, or mine in September). Preparation for freezing ice cream began by
acquiring a twenty-five pound block of ice at the store and quickly carrying it
home (on the car bumper), where my dad placed it in a burlap bag and crushed it
with a baseball bat; my mother and/or grandmother mixed the ingredients
(milk/eggs/sugar/vanilla extract – plus fresh peaches when they were in season)
and filled the freezer can while he was getting the ice ready.
We kids sometimes “turned the crank” during the early stages of the
freezing process, but the job was always finished by my dad, who cranked until
the paddles wouldn’t move, to be sure the mixture was well-frozen. The adults always insisted on “packing” the
frozen ice cream for an hour or two (to make the final product firmer), but the
mixing paddles had to be removed from the freezer before packing, so a
preliminary treat was afforded the one(s) who got to “lick the paddle.”
Homemade peach
ice cream was my mother’s favorite dessert.
I liked ice cream whether with peaches or “plain.” My dad often added cereal to ice cream, so I
tried it and liked it, and still do.
(My grandkids have laughed at me for pouring cereal over ice cream, but I’ve
told them not to knock it until they’ve tried it, for the result is synergistic
– the total is greater than the sum of its parts.)
◊◊◊
Peanuts grew well in Acton’s sandy soil, were a good cash crop, and the
hay provided year-round forage for livestock.
Except for hoeing peanuts (removing noxious grasses in and around the
plants), my memories about peanut growing are generally good:
·
Threshing time was fun (for kids).
Farmers joined cooperatively, moving as a group from farm to farm,
helping each other get the job done; Mr. Jackie Gee owned the only thresher in
the Acton community, so it moved with the crew. Watching threshing and hay-baling procedures was fascinating, and
one could have all the peanuts he wanted to eat.
·
The noon meals for the thresher crew, cooked by Mother and
Mama Grammer (sometimes assisted by neighbor women), were superb; I’m sure the
meals were equally good at other farms.
·
Peanuts were sacked in large burlap bags, then kept in a
protected area until sold. I don’t
think I ever knew who the purchasers were (Papa Grammer handled the sales), but
I recall one year when the sacks of peanuts were loaded on the first
tractor/trailer rig I had ever seen; I thought it was huge, but it was small
compared to today’s 18-wheelers.
·
Baled peanut hay was covered and left outside until the
risk of spontaneous combustion passed, then was hauled to the barn and stored
in the loft. The hayloft was a great
place to play; while climbing on and around the bales, one could pluck and eat
peanuts missed by the thresher.
The risk
of spontaneous combustion in baled hay was real. One
year Mr. Luke Rash, a farmer who lived about two miles southeast of us (and
father of the Rash twins I mentioned earlier), put his hay in the barn too
quickly, where it ignited spontaneously one evening as night fell, and fire
destroyed the barn; we could see its glow from the Grammer place.