Mom, A Life: Part Two

Mom, A Life: Part One

The Great Depression (continued)

Mom is unclear on when the May Day celebrations, including dancing around the Maypole, stopped. It was a school thing, most likely elementary school. She mentions a teacher running the thing and the embarrassment of the boys who ad to participate. The girls, if she is to be believed, loved it.

Much more acceptable to boys and girls alike were the Saturday matinees at the two movie theaters in town where 10c bought a double feature (maybe Hoot Gibson or Charlie Chaplin) and a free comic book on the way out. The Mohican Market, the local grocery, had penny sales: buy one pound of ground beef for 29c and get the second for a penny, one apple pie for 15c, the second for a penny. And if your timing was good the butcher would give away soup bones and spare ribs (often with meat on them) that were otherwise going to be trashed.

Every week the family, Mom, her sister, brother and parents, would drive out to Mom's maternal grandparent's farm for Sunday dinner which was invariably one of grandpa's chickens. He'd kill it and drain it just before they arrived and the girls would help dip the bird in hot water to loosen the feathers for plucking. They'd pick vegetables from the garden and, voila!, Sunday dinner. They also helped pick dandelions and elderberries for grandpa's homemade wine.

Grandpa had a cellar workshop where he created an entire working Christmas village with lighted houses, skiing skiers, skating skaters, sledding sledders and sawing sawyers all operated by a complicated serious of gears and pulleys and a motor hidden beneath the Christmas tree. The Christmas tree turned, too. Unfortunately, Grandpa hanged himself down in that workshop one day in 1933. Mom made no reference to whether some aspect of The Depression economy had brought him down or if it was something psychological but unrelated.

The family would make homemade root beer which the girls would sell at a sidewalk stand and Mom's mom would bake German cinnamon rolls which the girls would put in their wagon and sell around the neighborhood for 25c per dozen. They made their first acquaintance with margarine around 1937 and Mom's mom used it in her baking although she would never admit to it.

In high school, Mom was on the girls' gymnastic team and lettered on the varsity basketball team where she played guard. Eventually she was certified by the state to referee. She learned to drive stick on the family's 1933 Hudson.