GREEN

DOWN MEMORY LANE

GREEN

BY R. AUBREY LA FOY

       Green is the “hip” word today, meaning we should do all what we can to save the environment. I take offence to the implication that older generations contributed to the contamination of our world today. The suggestions, by some, are that we did little to help save the environment are far from the truth. While, in fact, we were not a wasteful generation but did many things that saved material, time and energy.

The other day an e-mail came through lamenting the use of “throw-away-plastic water bottles. It has always amazed me to see young people tilting a bottle of water when they are standing next to a water facet. Why in heavens name would you pay money to get water in a bottle from who knows where to drink? When I was a youth we got our milk, pop and beer in glass bottles that we returned to the store. Milk bottles were washed, sterilized and refilled at the creamery. I recall Mother doing the same with the glass milk bottles, giving me a dime and trotting over to the neighbor who kept his cow back of his house in a barn to pick up a quart of milk. Money was hard to come by in those days and many times we walked the road ditches and picked up discarded pop and beer bottles, taking them to the store and receiving a penny or so for each. When I was a kid an old fellow from Arnolds Park walked the road to Milford and back each day carrying a gunny sack to put discarded glass bottles. I asked my Dad about him and Dad told me that was about the only income the old fellow had. Good thing we lived in a tourist area

In 1940 several of us pooled our money a purchased a Model T Ford. We spent a great deal of time getting it to run and after several attempts made it go. Only one of us had a driver’s license so he was our driver. The Model T had a top and side curtains but most of the time we drove it with the top down. None of us had much money so one afternoon we all piled into the Model T and drove to Estherville. A real adventure as it is over 20 miles. We started in Milford, took Highway 71 to Spirit Lake and then Highway 9 to Estherville. Jim drove the car and the rest of us ran alongside and searched the ditches for pop and beer bottles. If we got tired, we rode a bit, rested and jumped out to look in the ditches. It was surprising how many bottles we found and upon reaching Estherville turned them in at a grocery store. Forget how much we got but know it was more than enough to resupply our car with gas. We even had enough after that to reward ourselves with a hamburger and malt. It was fun and the ride back was delightful just reclining and letting Jim do all the work. Today the kids can find pop cans the same way but the returns are not nearly as much. We recycled our bottles and we didn’t have the green thing in those days.

Several years ago our local YMCA in Spirit Lake built a wonderful facility. We built one here in Leisure World also for people to exercise and keep in shape. In my folk’s days they didn’t have an escalator in many stores and office building let alone an elevator. They walked to the meat market, school, bank, dry cleaners, and post office. During the Depression years our one car was jacked up on blocks during the winter in the garage and we walked to everything. School was five blocks away.  Downtown Milford was three blocks and church was four blocks from our house. We shoveled snow with our scoop shovels and mowed the lawn with a hand pushed mower and got all the exercise we needed.

We had one radio in our house and to really save one windup clock in the kitchen. The radio was a big Atwater-Kent that picked up about six radio stations not 150 like our TVs do today. About 4:00 p.m. my sister and my favorite programs started on the radio. We listened to Sky Harbor, Jack Armstrong, I Love a Mystery, Little Orphan Annie, Renfrew of the Mounties and a few others. In the evening we had all the great radio shows like Jack Benny, Gildersleeve, Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos and Andy and the Lux Theatre. We really saved on electricity and gas and for refreshments Dad would make a dishpan full of popcorn. When we wanted water it came out of the tap and put it in a glass not a plastic bottle like today. We were green in those days already.

Mother did have an electric clothes washer but put the damp clothes on a clothesline in the backyard. Diapers were washed, hung out to dry and not bought at the store and disposed of in the land fill. In those days we used solar power long before the new meaning came around that we use today. In those days most of the boys had only one or two pairs of pants-one for everyday and one for church and when if they tore or ripped Mother would put on a new patch. Today I cringe when I observe young people wearing jeans that are ripped and torn and pay through the nose to look scuffy. Think how much we saved in those days but the pants were always clean. Many nights after I had gone to bed Mother would wash my pants and hang them over the register to dry so I could wear them to school.

Several years ago I was cleaning out my parents home and opening a drawer found a Parker’s Lifetime fountain pen. In those days we refilled the pens and didn’t throw them away when they went dry, like today. It is almost impossible to find refills anymore for pens-want a waster. I recall that when I first started to teach in 1950 somebody had given me a fountain pen for graduation which I used at school. There was no law or rule that I know of but men teachers were supposed to wear white shirts, necktie and a suit. The fountain pens were not always perfect and many times they would leak and stain the white shirt. What a mess but we had our wives bleach the shirts and refilled the fountain pen. When I first started to teach I really saved on clothing as I had only two suits that I wore on alternate days. I’ll bet the kids got tired of those two suits but we had many neckties to seek some variation. When school was out practically all the students walked home, rode their bikes or rode a school bus and didn’t turn their moms into a 24-hour taxi service.

I recall getting invited to spend the weekend at a schoolmate’s home on a farm. We had electricity in our home in town but as I recall most rooms had one electric light bulb hanging from the ceiling and very few outlets like today with multiple outlets. We didn’t use or waste much electricity. My visit to my friend’s farm was a real awakening as they had no electricity. When it became dark out came the lanterns. We stumbled around in the dark to milk the cows, ate supper and even did some school work with only a feeble lantern for light. It wasn’t until REA came around in the 1940s that my farm friends had electricity but they sure didn’t use much energy as we do today in our homes and on the farms.

Unfortunately I have read many articles that lament how wasteful older generations were because we didn’t have the “green” things we have today. Horsefeathers! I think we had lots of savings and the present generations could learn from us old geezers. I do know that many of the unemployed today have had to cut back. Maybe they could or should read about us and how we lived in the 1930s.

SPRING

MEMORY LANE

SPRING

BY R. AUBREY LA FOY

“Spring is sprung, the grass is green, it’s time to get the blankets clean.” So went the popular ditty when I was a youth.  Lots of things happened in the spring like a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts that the girls have been thinking of all winter.  Teaching young people was always a thrill especially in the spring of the year.  Love would blossom right before your eyes and it gave one acknowledgement that the human race had not really changed.  Trying to teach about the American Revolution was a lost cause when the love bug bit.  Students could care less about George Washington or the Battle of Bunker Hill but if you could find a historical incident of George Washington dancing with Martha maybe, just maybe you could get their attention about history.

Does anyone still do spring-cleaning? Many of you can remember mother really going all out with cleaning up the house after a long cold winter. Spring-cleaning was a tradition and religiously followed by grandmother and mother.  Most of the homes were heated by wood or coal stoves and with the house being shut up all winter that old coal dust and smoke would penetrate and get into everything.  In many houses all of the curtains came down, washed by had and stretched to dry on a wooden frame known as a curtain dryer. Drapes were dry-cleaned in white gasoline and hung up to dry.  This operation was done outside as a safety precaution. We always had a can of that gas on the back porch that mother used to dry-clean other apparel.

The other day we were at an antique shop and one of the items for sale was a rug beater. People of our generation know what one looks like but kids today wouldn’t have the slightest hint of what that goofy looking apparatus was intended for.  Many of you can recall pulling up the living room rug, taking it outside to hang on the clothesline and beating the dirt and dust out of it.  The beating of rugs was great practice for baseball batting but it was hard work.  No matter how hard or how long you beat the rug it never was enough for mother.

Mother always wore an apron and had her hair tied up with a dishtowel that hung down her back. When she got that garb on we knew that springhouse cleaning was for real. It was an all day or two affair and meals were pretty skimpy.  I recall that one spring we had several painters come into the house and after my parents had washed down the wall they painted the dining and living rooms. It took them several days to do the job and I recall the smell of fresh paint and turpentine really smelled up the house.  That paint job was great because it hadn’t been redone in all the years we lived there which were something like 40 years. The paint in those days was nothing like our water base paint of today in drying time, odor and ease of cleaning brushes.

 Robins arriving signaled the advent of spring and even if they have to dodge snow we knew it would not be long before the temperatures would be warmer.  With their arrival and seeing one we would recall and do the traditional good luck ritual. Wipe your right thumb across the palm of your left hand and doubling up your right hand strike the left palm. Do this routine three times and it was suppose to bring you good luck. In the early spring mayflowers came out on the pastures west of our community and we would go and pick a bouquet for mother.  She was always so thrilled to get them and put them in a vase to set on the kitchen table. One of the best things about spring was that you could shed your overshoes, winter coat, mittens, cap with earflaps and feel 20 pounds lighter.

We really knew that spring had arrived when recess time came and we could play marbles.  Sometimes it was a bit of a chore to find a dry spot but the south side of our school building afforded a great location. We would draw a three foot round circle in the dirt and then go back a number of yards and scratch a “lag line.” Lag up to the circle and then get our your favorite shooter. Some fellows had a great way of pushing the shooter with their thumb and other used a knuckle flip.  I could never master that knuckle flip but managed to knock a number of marbles out of the pot so kept pretty even. But marbles and spring went together. Another place we played marbles was in the center of the street.  The streets were graveled and the center seemed to dry out early. Nobody bothered us or told us to get off the street nor did we worry much about traffic, there wasn’t any.  If a vehicle did come it gave us the courtesy of driving as far to one side as afforded so as not to stop our great marble game.  Many of you can remember the embarrassment of accidentally spilling all of your marbles in the schoolroom.  That little commotion really interrupted the class schedule as well as getting the teacher mad at you.

Another sure sign of spring was the return of flies. Our farm friends had cows, pigs and chickens that helped the fly population but we city folk were not exempt.  Many of our neighbors raised chickens and ducks and within one block of our home. There were also several cows quartered nearby.  Flies are equal-opportunity pests and early on we heard “Don’t open the screen door!” Flies could form a solid mat on the screen door, as they wanted to get into the house, so one had to be constantly on guard to keep out the unwelcome guests. One of our defense weapons was ribbon of sticky paper that uncoiled from little green tubes, which were hung from the ceiling. A thumbtack was even provided. The long sticky strips hung from the ceilings of butcher shops, ice cream parlors, drugstores and grocery stores as well as in our houses. Flies that were seeking you out would bump into the strips and get caught. Another seeker of flies was a large sheet of sticky paper placed where flies would land. The fly would land on the paper and stay. It also caught cats and little children.  If you anchored your fingers on those sheets it was a mess to extract them and usually the paper could find your other hand and chin before you escaped. I recall a gag that Red Skeleton did trying to get untangled from those sheets of sticky flypaper.  It was hilarious. Other weapons in an attempt to rid the farms, animals and homes from flies were fly spray and fly “guns.”

Animals really suffered in the warm months with those flies.  Horses seemed to attract flies and the owners put on fly covers on their backs and even a sort of round screen attachment on the horse’s mouth and nose to keep the flies off.  Cows were forever swishing their tails and I have from good authority (Connie) that while milking a cow the tail is not a soft touch when twirled in your direction across the face. She told me it stings getting smacked with a cow’s tail plus the tail is not the cleanest part of the cow.

 Spring is a rebirth of life and a time for planting. Gardens are planted and seeds sprout and grow in spring.  A sure sign of spring was seeing the farmers in their fields preparing the ground and planting the seeds.  Watching mother and father robin build a nest is awe-inspiring.  Each flight by one of the robins with bits of straw and paper will eventually form into a nest.  Many times we have observed one of them sitting on the eggs and knowing full well that spring has arrived. The buds come out on the trees, weeds grow and the grass needs mowing are all signs of spring.  It is a great time to be alive and it renews our spirits to the wonders of nature.