OT nostagia. Jane's fault (always have somebody else to blame), she asked. Most need to skip all this and tend to bidness.
I could write a book about boyhood days. Everybody was the same except for very few "well off.
Parents spent very little money buying food. Always a big garden for plenty of fresh vegetables plus a lot of "canning" in glass pint and quart jars for winter. Pinto beans were easy to raise in large quantities and when harvested and dried would "keep" indefinitely. Peach and plum trees. Always chickens for meat and eggs. Wild game, mostly rabbits, most winters a buck. Usually a hog butchered in the fall (first "cold spell") and smoked. Beef once in a while; it didn't "keep" as well and there was no refrigeration, except that ice could be bought by the 25 or 50 pound block to cool the little "ice box" in the kitchen. Several families would cooperate to kill a beef and share the cuts that would keep well enough during cold months. A milk cow, sometimes two, milk and butter. I never remember being hungry, and looking back, a healthy diet except too much saturated fat from the hog renderings, making gravy, cornbread, whatever.
Few clothes, mother sewed most of the children's (five of us) underwear from the cotton sacks containing the flour and some cattle and chicken feed we had to buy.
My first memory of a car/truck we had was a Model T, the ford which Henry built several million of. I have a picture on my wall of me and my older sister ca 1929 climbing on Dad's T pickup.
My memories of depression days are enormously favorable. Folks got along, cooperated, "made do" with what we had. Visiting was a principle form of entertainment. Houses' heat was typically a wood stove, usually two, one cook stove in the kitchen and another in the living room (when there was one) for the rest of the house. Plenty of quilts in un-heated bedrooms. Mother and my sisters sewed quilts endlessly. I still have half a dozen in regular use in a house built 1967 that I bought almost new 43 years ago.
The thing is, I also know a lot about my parents generation. Father had 14 siblings and Mother had 8. After Marge died in 1997 after a wonderful 47 year marriage, I was alone, having liquidated my small business to care for her. I spent most of the next four years gathering information and writing a book about the lives and times of my paternal grandparents as well as their 15 children who produced 36 children in the next generation (mine). Stories, you bet. I have notes from 101 people and made 21 trip all over the country. Bound volume 8 1/2 by 11, single spaced, 299 pages, 142 photographs. I and 18 paternl cousins still survive. Not started on our maternal side. Son will have to do it; beyond me now.
When I sit here at my computer and interact with a number of valuable acquaintances, several of whom I regard as dear friends without ever having seen their faces, I marvel at what has happened during the twentieth century and a decade more. Dad and Mom were born in 1898 and 1904. Dad lived into his 82nd year and Mother 80.
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