Re: LOUISIANA BAYOU HUNT - DATE SET - APRIL '08 !
Country Life in Richland Parish in the late 1930's and 1940's
I was born before many things that youth today think have always been
around. Those things include but or not limited to, portable radios,
televison, tape players, CD players, telephones in many homes , cellular
phones , xerox, copiers, instant cameras, camcorders, computers and the
internet, credit cards, space exploration , radar , ball point pens,mosquito
repellent, microwaves, dishwashers, garbage disposals, automatic washing
machines ,clothes dryers ,fans , air conditioners. and instant foods.
There were many other items that were unknown to me and my family in my
early years such as,toliet tissue, commodes, lavatories, indoor plumbing
and refrigerators.
Electricity was unknown to me until I was about eleven years old. Prior
to that time we used kerosene lamps for light. Our method for keeping cool
was using a piece of cardboard or paper to make a fan to fan ourselves .
At night, we kept warm not by electric blankets but by quilts stacked high
on our bed and often with smoothing irons which were heated on our wood
heater and wrapped in cloth placed at our cold feet. Rooms were not well
ceiled or insulated and the stars could be seen through cracks in the roof
and I have had the snow drift through those small spaces and onto my bed.
Rooms were not heated or cooled at night. I have had the water in a goldfish
bowl freeze in my room at night. The next day when the ice melted the fish
was fine. We slept under things called mosquito bars, which was a net type
material hung over and around our beds to prevent the mosquitoes which came
in around the shutters which closed our opening for windows at night.
As for the laundry, clothes were boiled in a wash pot in the back yard and
then rinsed in a round metal tub. These same round tubs served as our bath
tubs in the evening. Clothes worn on special occasions were starched and
ironed, with the flat heavy metal iron that was heated on a wooden cook
stove , and often everyday clothes were worn just as they came off the
clothes line where they had been sundried.
I was born before indoor plumbing was a part of every home. We had to go out
side to a small outhouse to relief ourselves. Our cleaning material was
usually Sears Roebuck catalog pages. Except around Christmas time we
were fortunate to have some tissue paper wrappers from apples,which
our parents bought in a large wooden box,to do the cleaning job, At night
most of us had a chamber pot, often called a “slop jar" in our bedrooms
so we did not have to go outside. Our baths were taken in a round metal
tub called a number two tub. This was a tight space for adults to try to
clean themselves.
Our garbage disposal was taken care of by having a “Slop bucket” in the
kitchen in which we poured our used dishwater, the small amounts of uneaten
food or scraps left over from our meals and trimmings from meal preparation.
This was then taken and mixed with “wheat shorts” which was a bought hog feed
(very special) and feed to our hogs. Of course some of our few leftovers
(scraps) were given to our dog and the chickens which often provided meat
for my family. We raised chickens for eggs and meat,or my family did, I
never wanted to eat any of these foods.
We raised hogs for meat for the family. These were butchered by family
members, cleaned and processed for eating. Most of the meat was hung in
a “smoke house” to cure so that it could be kept for a length of time .
This house was built with some openings on the sides of the small building
near the top to allow the smoke to escape after it treated the meat. A fire
was built to create smoke not to flame but to fill the room with smoke
which cured the meat. Children often liked to sneak into the smoke house and
cut off a piece of the meat when they wanted it.
Our water had to be pumped out of the ground by using a hand pump which was
usually located in our back yard. We pumped water for cooking, bathing,washing
and for our animals. This was quite a lot of work. For drinking purposes water
was brought into the home in a bucket and was dipped out to be used as needed.
Many families who had a water bucket on their back porch or in their kitchen
and it contained a dipper from which each person who wanted water drank it.
That was not done in our home, as no one drank directly from the dipper but
poured the water into a glass before consuming it.
I mentioned being born before ball point pens. This makes me recall my first
school. Our school desks had ink wells that held the bottle of ink that we
dipped our pen in to use. Country schools were two or three room buildings
with classes for two grades being held in each room. These schools had no
indoor plumbing. We had to use the outhouse as we had to do at home. There
was no such thing as meals served at school and the students took their
lunch,often in a syrup bucket or wrapped in used paper. The food would
often be cold biscuits with eggs or such and maybe some bacon which came
from the hog their family raised and butchered. When I was about nine years
old,near the end of World War II the government started a lunch program
for small schools which did not have a lunch room. In our school this noon
meal was soup that was heated on the wood stove which was used to warm
our classroom. After the meal we would go out to the pump and pump water
over our dish to “wash” it. The outdoor toilets at our school consisted
of two holes and a trough. This trough was made of two boards built in a
“v” shape and held together with black pitch (tar). This portion of the
toilet would accommodate about three of the
boys at one time.
Electric refrigerators were unheard of in my younger days as there was no
electricity as I mentioned before. In my younger days we did not even have
an “ice box”. When we did get a block of ice it was placed in a cotton sack
and then wrapped in a grass sack and placed this up under the front porch
which was a little high off the ground. Milk and butter which came from the
farm would be placed next to the sack and a round No.3 wash tub would be
placed over all of this and thus, we had our “icebox”.
I mentioned milk and butter. The cows had to be milked daily to provide milk,
butter, buttermilk and cottage cheese for our family. To make the butter we
let the whole milk sit in a bowl or pitcher overnight and the cream would rise
to the top and we would skim this of and place it in a stone jug type container
and use a wooden stick to move up and down in the container for a long period
of time until we had butter made. The butter would rise to the top of the
container and the milk left after this process was called buttermilk and it
was used to drink or in cooking. Leaving milk out at room temperature would
case it to “clabber”, this would mean that lump like objects would form in
the milk. The clabber could be put in a cloth sack and tied up on something so
the liquid could drip from the bag and the product left in the bag was cottage
cheese.
I remember when I first saw margarine. Our cows were not producing much milk
and my family bought some margarine. It came in a square block and looked much
like lard. A package of yellow coloring came with the block and you would put
the coloring in and stir the margarine until the color spread through out . We
got our first bought bread about that time. This was called light bread. I was
so amazed at these new foods and remember eating so much margarine, light bread
and molasses (syrup) that I made myself sick.
I was born before instant foods, frozen foods and fast food restaurants. Almost
everything we ate came from the farm. Mama usually had to gather the food, clean
and prepare it for the family. A meal took a great deal of her time and a lot of
work, yet she made sure we had three meals a day. There was no gas or electric
stove. A fire had to built in the wood stove to begin the meal. Later as I was a
little older we had a “coal oil” stove, most people know this liquid as kerosene.
There were no mixes such as cake mix, biscuit mix, pancake mix or such, all of
these foods had to be made from “scratch”. We always had biscuits at our house
and even though the potatoes had to be peeled and sliced before frying we had
them every day at our house.
Our heat came from an iron stove located in one room of the house in which we
burned chunks of wood. We had to cut and stack the wood and bring it in and
usually stack it in the corner behind the stove so that it would be available
to start the fire in the mornings and keep it going through the day. The fire
burned down before we went to bed at night and nights could be very cold as I
mentioned before. It took a while in the morning for the heater to warm the
house and we would stand near the heater to warm ourselves. This warming was
done one side at the time as we would get very hot on one side and then have
to turn around to heat the other side of the body.
Transportation in my early days was interesting. I have memories of riding on
a slide to the country store some mile or two from my home. A slide was made
by using two boards(usually 2x6’s) and nailing a group of boards side by side
on the tops of these. The 2x6’s on the bottom on which the slide moved across
the ground. On top of the boards were where we placed items that we wanted to
move from one location to another, or where we sat to ride. It was quit a bumpy
ride over the dirt and gravel roads to reach the store. We often walked
wherever we went, such as to visit family members or to attend church or school.
The next popular mode of transportation was a wagon pulled by two mules. This
was the way people carried there cotton to the gin. It was a treat to ride on
top of the cotton to get to the gin and the store next to it. However the trip
home in the empty wagon was a rough ride. Wagons were used to transport families
to visit other members of their families or go to town. Sometimes these trips
were very adventurous. I recall a story one of my cousins related to me in recent
years. He said they loaded the wagon for a trip up to visit his mother’s family .
This trip was about 10 miles. This boy was riding on a seat in the front of the
wagon on which the driver sat. He said they were over half way to their
destination when the mule suddenly had to “go”. With the movement of the wagon,
his position and the power of the mule, he was completely covered by the results.
They had to turn around and go back home and clean him up and change his clothes
and start all over on their trip.
We got our first car when I was about 6 years old. It was a 30 Model A Ford Sedan.
This transportation gave my dad an opportunity to begin public work and he drove
to various places in north Louisiana and would work during the week and come home
on the weekend. This transportation opened up a new world for me. We moved to
Winfield , LA about 80 miles away when I was 8 years old. The family traveled in
the car and a family friend moved our belongings in a one and one half ton 1937
Chevrolet truck. We loaded all of our belongings on that open top truck with
side planks and saved room in the back left corner for our milk cow to ride along.
We were there about nine months and because my Mama was unhappy there we moved
back to the home place in the area where her parents lived. We returned in the
same way with our belongings and cow on a truck.
Cars that I knew about in my early days were mostly Fords and Chevys. I was very
interested in cars as a boy and bought my first car when I was 15 years old. It
was a Model A Ford four door sedan for which I paid $50. My car had a windshield
and one window in it and the glass was out of all of the other windows and the
back. I drove this car for about a year and then sold it for $100 and bought
a 1940 model Willys for $100. I drove my car to school instead of making the
10 mile ride on the school bus. A student driving to high school in his own car
in those days was not common at all. For years I remembered people in our
neighborhood by make and model of car or truck they drove. Even in my adult years
I would recall that so and so drove such and such and then what they bought next.
I remember the English Ford,Henry J,Kaiser,Frazier,Packard,Pontiac,Hudson,
Studebaker and Nash as cars of my early adult years. It has only been in my
senior years that I have heard of such foreign made cars such as Mitsubishi,
Suzuki and such.
In my days of growing up there were no nursing homes,no day care centers,no
preschool,no kindergarten. Children and older persons were cared for by their
families in their own home. There was no such thing as handicapped facilities.
When I was a youngster we never heard of open-heart surgery, body transplants,
or knee or hip replacements, defibrillators, portable oxygen, or by-pass surgeries.
We never heard of triglycerides, cholesterol, cat scans, MRI’s, Pet scans, radiation
treatments or chemo therapy. Most people did not live as long as they do today
because there was a lack of medications, and antibiotics to heal them and knowledge
of medicine was very limited compared to the present time. Often if a person was
very ill the doctor would come to his home, even in the rural area to treat him.
Most babies were born at home and usually with the assistance of a mid-wife rather
than a Doctor. A mid-wife was usually a neighbor hood lady who was experienced in
this and was trusted by the people in the neighbor hood. Pneumonia was a disease
that often killed many people in the early to mid 1900’s as there were no strong
antibiotics such as penicillin to cure the infection.
Many words have different meaning today that than did in my developing years.
Gay meant happy and nothing else. Grass was something we had to cut and then we
bailed it and fed to our cows in the winter. There were no lawn mowers, if we
needed to cut grass or weeds we used a hoe or a sling blade , both of which
took a lot of your energy. Most yards were swept clean with a broom and grass
was not allowed to grow. Coke was a soft drink that we did not see very often
but when we did we could purchase it for a nickel. Pot was a large container
in which my mother cooked or a large black container in which we heated water
for washing or used to cook out the lard when we butchered a hog.
Prices were very different in my boyhood and teen years. Two nickels would
get me a coke and candy bar at the country store, we could mail letters for
3 cents and a postcard for one penny, a pint of ice cream cost 25 cents an
gas was 19 cents a gallon. I got my hair cut for fifty cents.
Stores were few and far between out in the country and we had rolling stores
beginning in the early 1940’s. These were called grocery buses and rolled down
our country roads and would stop when they saw someone out by the roadside who
was waiting for them. Often people would meet the grocery bus and sell live
chickens or eggs to the driver. Usually the price you got for those things
was used to purchase items from the driver. These buses carried more than
groceries but no refrigerated items. You could buy staple groceries, smoking
and chewing tobacco,cigarette papers ,snuff, animal feeds, and many other
items including thread and fabric. They carried the chickens they bought along
the way in cages up under the side of the vehicle. This was like a trip to town
and children were excited to see what was on the grocery truck or bus. So few
people had transportation to go into town to purchase their needed items that
this was a real service for them.
In my early years, radios were battery radios and not many people had radios in
their homes. On Saturday nights those who didn’t have them would gather at the
homes of family or friends who had them to listen to the Grand Old Opry.
I began to hear of television from people who visited from a large city about
1950. I could not imagine what they were talking about. Sometime later
James A. Knoe put in a broadcasting station in Monroe and somewhere I saw a
television and found out what it was. In those days everything was in black
and white and this local station was the only one to which we had access. A
couple of years later I bought a 17 inch TV for my family as I had a job by
that time. This was really a novelty at that time and as with the radio people
would gather at a home that had a tv to be entertained.
As a growing boy, I spent many hours rabbit hunting.This was just a time
passing activity for us boys and often we would get a rabbit to bring home
to be cooked for our meal. We rabbit hunted in our regular clothes as there
was no such thing as camouflage in those days. When I was about 9 I built
a raft out of poles and boards and used it to carry myself up and down
the bayou next to our house. There were plenty of things to keep young boys
busy in those days without all the toys and games that growing boys have to
occupy their time today.
Many changes that have come through my lifetime are good and make life
easier, increase our length of life and so on, but some have caused the
youth to lose their creative thinking and ingenuity as they have to be
constantly entertained rather than to think for themselves. I’m glad that
I grew up in the time I did and as a country boy. I appreciate my experiences
and lessons that I learned. I am thankful for the memories I have of
the “old days”.
As remembered and written by B.P.Golliher
I stand corrected...
studying for their tests. 
...now you tell me what post # and date this was originally posted....
to 
- 
- will i pass if i can sign with my real X and not put a circle around it? if not i will just go to the corner and sulk
