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Due to the fact that my father was a "workaholic" spending from fifteen to eighteen hours a day in his store, my mother assumed most of the responsibility of the home. This is not to say that she did not have my dad's support because all she needed to do was to tell him that I was obstinate about something or had misbehaved and he would confront me with, "Your mother says that and you'd better straighten up, young man."
He kept a hair brush in his store for more reasons than just to brush his hair. However, his being away from the home did not mean that we actually lacked his presence, as in the case of some "workaholics" today, because I was with him at the store a part of each day and he was also home for his meals twice a day.
I always had some chores to go around the home. For example, we cooked on a kitchen range fueled by wood or coal. Basically we used compressed soft coal that came in pieces the size of a biscuit. As a matter of fact, we had a visitor once who looked in the coal bucket and some remark about my mother's misfortune of having burnt a batch of biscuits.
I had to keep kindling or corn cobs in the house to use in starting fires and also keep the coal buckets full. There was an old barn on our lot where we stored the auto, kept some chickens and also some rabbits. All of the wooden boxes, cheeseboxes, banana and tomato baskets that were used to ship things to the store were saved and tossed up to the loft of this barn. I sat on a box in this loft for many hours chopping up boxes and baskets into kindling.
My grandfather McDaniel had given me a backsaw shortly before his death and hhe also handmade a saw horse for use in cutting tree limbs into stove length pieces with the saw. He taught me how to use them, and any broken tree limbs or pieces of wood that could be sawed up for stove use were salvaged for that purpose.
We also had a big stove in the living room and above it there was a register in the ceiling that allowed some of the heat to ascend into the bedrooms upstairs. This stove would burn either wood or coal and I kept a supply of both on the back porch. We had a 'parlor" next to the living room which was seldom used during the winter. Each fall we would erect a small sheet metal stove in the parlor, including the stove pipe, damper, stove collar, and other parts. If we had guests or the occasion demanded it, we could make a fire in this small stove and heat up the room in just a few minutes. (After I was married we used the same kind of stove to heat our small apartment for a couple of years, so my previous experience prepared me to deal with this situation.)
We did not have electricity until around 1928, although there was electricity in my dad's store as far back as I can remember. Prior to getting electricity in our home, we used kerosene lamps for lighting at night. One was a kayo lamp which used a large round wick and gave off more light than the small kerosene lamps. Another kind was called an Aladdin lamp and used a very flimsy mantle for lighting. When the mantle became fully lit it gave off a very bright light, much brighter than the regular kerosene lamps using a wick.
There was always a lantern for use at night when necessary to go to thebarn or to the outdoor toilet. Wicks had to be trimmed and globes washed and dried and I did my share of both. My homework was done at a table in the living room using the Aladdin lamp.
There was a path down the middle of the backyard from the house to the barn and on each side of the path we had a garden. Dad worked in the garden sometimes when he went to the house for meals. Mother would work in it also, and I was expected to help spade it up, plant it, pull weeds, and clean it off in the fall. Mother always had flower beds, and she particularly liked to grow cannas, coxcomb, and dahlias. The canna and dahlia bulbs had to be dug up in the fall and stored until planting time again in the spring.
Many homes in those days had a second kitchen, often a back porch so that the big kitchen range need not be used in the hot summer. The range helped to provide heat in the winter as well as space for cooking and baking. But in the summer it was too hot to use the range. We had a small building attached to the back of the house which we referred to as our summer kitchen. We used a kerosene cooking stove there and it gave off very little heat except that which was directed to the cooking utensil. So we moved pots, pans, and eating utensils to the summer kitchen in the spring and back to the house again in the fall. Later, we had the back porch closed in with weatherboard at the bottom and windows that would be opened around the top. A portion of this closed-in back porch was used thereafter for the summer kitchen.
Our water came from a drilled well to which was attached a pitcher pump. It was also located on the back porch, and freezing weather one had to remember to draw some extra water for priming the pump the next time and to raise the handle which tripped the holding valve inside the pump and allowed the water to return to ground level to keep the pump from freezing. Sometimes in the coldest weather this had to be done during the day as well as at night.
If water was allowed to remain in the pump, it would freeze and likely burst the pump, thus requiring a new one. he sucker and the valve were made of leather and once they became worn it difficult to pump water or to hold it in the pump, thus requiring a priming each time the pump was used. Therefore, it was necessary each couple of years to take the pump apart and replace the leather parts, which were available at any country store.
Life was very simple then -- no plumbing, no electrical problems, no TVs, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, electric fans or air conditioners, or other such appliances that could cause trouble. Or perhaps it wasn't as simple as it seems now because there were such problems as cutting and fitting stove pipe, replacing grates in the heating and cooking stoves, polishing the stoves and pipes each year, rebuilding the insides of the water pump, harnessing the horse when necessary to go somewhere, or cranking by hand the old Model T, huddling around a stove to keep warm, undressing near the stove and then rushing to crawl in under ice cold sheets and several blankets, visiting the outdoor toilet, or a score of other things made unnecessary today with our modern conveniences.
Back then you lived and worked during daylight hours, did after dark using poor lights, or visited neighbors, or went to bed early. daylight saving time had not been thought of then. you just got uup early made use of the daylight hours. What do we do today if the electricity goes or the water is cut off? I guess the problems of living, although they vary in nature, remain with us in any age.
Some of my mother's relatives lived in or near Denton. Her brother, George McDaniel, and his wife and four children lived in Denton, and her sister, Lettie Seese, and her husband and five children, lived close to Denton. My mother's Aunt Ella Brumbaugh, husband Levi, and children, lived at Greensboro, a town about eight miles from Denton. One of the Brumbaugh cousins,Arthur, operated a department store in Greensboro; another cousin, Mrs. Mary Rairigh, was a teacher at Denton. She was my seventh grade home room and major teacher. Her husband, Norman Rairigh, was in business with her brother, Arthur, at Greensboro. I mention these because it meant that Mother and I frequently visited these relatives, but Dad seldom did because of his store.
We often went to Aunt Lettie's or Uncle George's home, or to the Rairigh's home in Denton, and occasionally to Greensboro. Mother drove the car until I was old enough to get a driver's license, and it seemed that we were often going to relatives' or to some church function together. It also meant that I got to play with William McDaniel and the four Seese boys, all of whom were my first cousins, not much older or younger than I.
My Uncle George McDaniel had electricity in his home long before any of the rest of us, and I remember hearing a radio in his home for the first time in my life. My dad later got one for his store, and after our home was wired for electricity, we got a new Atwater-Kent radio there It had three dials that had to be coordinated in order to get a particular station. Uncle George also had a large cabinet model Victrola with the round cylinder type recordings. I remember hearing Amos and Andy on these recordings long before they were on radio. My Uncle George McDaniel had so many things that we didn't have that I thought of him as a wealthy man. He was a regional representative for the Gulf Oil Company, did a lot of traveling through several states, and perhaps received a salary that was very good for the times.
At sometime during my boyhood days my mother decided that she either wanted some money of her own or else felt that she needed to supplement Dad's income. She had been a professional seamstress before marriage. She lived in Washington, D. C., and was a seamstress for a family there when she met my dad. So with her sewing skills it was easy for her to get a job in a shirt factory very close to our home in West Denton, where she was employed for several years.
She also decided to start raising rabbits for home consumption. Helping to take care of these was another one of my chores. We had several pens of female breeders and one or two bucks. Rabbits are quite prolific and we raised quite a few. Neither she nor I liked to kill them or skin them but two of her neighbors, Earl Cooper and S. B. Kitchen, would do the job whenever she had sale for a dressed rabbit. Home raised rabbits are delicious, better than chicken I think, but because of the "pet" or Easter bunny stigma attached to rabbits, many people do not like the thought of eating them...
Wild rabbits used to be one of the main sources of food for country people, and may still be in some places, but generally interest in them waned when tularemia (rabbit fever) became so prevalent among wild ones. It can be transmitted to humans by handling the infected animal.
After I left home, my mother finally gave up raising rabbits. But for years that old barn had many uses: nests and shelter for chickens, a loft for storing boxes for kindling, storage for feed, a coal bin, bins for corn cobs, rabbit hutches, storage for garden tools and miscellaneous items, and finally a home for the Model T and later the Whippet Once or twice each day I had chores around and iin that barn.
Since my sister was ten years older than I and my brother was eight and a half years older, they were both off to college shortly after I started to school. I do not remember much about our family life before they went to college except for family trips in the Model T and my sister's hours at the piano in the parlor. While in college they were usually home during the summers, but even then they were off to visit or to go somewhere with their friends. For most of the time during my school days, Mother, Dad, and I made up the family at home. Then, due to Dad's preoccupation at the store, we were together as a family only after 9 p.m. or weekdays and on Sunday afternoon.
You can imagine what meals were like. Sunday noon was really the only time we ate together, often snacking on Sunday evening. At other times, Mother would get me up early enough in the morning to get my breakfast, and I would be off to the store so that Dad could core to the house for his breakfast, and he would be back to the store so that I could leave the store in time for school.
Sometimes he caused me to be tardy and re couldn't say very much when the tardy marks showed up on my report card. The same thing was repeated at supper time. I know that I formed a bad habit of eating fast since Mother was usually hurrying me to finish and go for Dad so that his food would be warm when he came to eat. I have had difficulty all through life trying to break that habit.
Dad usually snacked at the store for lunch, Mother was on her own, and I would either take a lunch to school, go downtown to the bakery for a sticky bun (2 for 5 cents), or rush home to the store to snack with Dad I remember when he bought a special hot dog cooker and served hot dogs to quite a few in the neighborhood. The top of it was flat and shallow with the four sides extending up about one inch In this part he would put about a quarter of am inch of cooking oil and lay the hot dogs in it, turning them often so that they became crispy brown all over. The bottom was an oven-like arrangement for keeping the buns warm. When assembled with a special pickle dressing that he had, they were delicious. I came home often for one or two hot dogs at noon.
Also, since my dad never left the store before 9 p.m. and went back the next morning at 6 a.m., I was usually off to bed soon after he came home and still in bed when he left the next morning. I have often told people that I seldom remember my dad as one who ever slept, since I was in bed before he was and still there when he got up.
There were occasions when he didn't feel well and he would call me to go and open the store for him. He required very little formal sleep, often sitting on the front porch after closing the store until midnight. After I started driving the car, he liked to have me drive him toward Hillsboro or Ridgely for about an hour in the evenings after he closed the store, especially in the summer in order to relax and cool off. Sometimes Mother went along.
This is probably enough to indicate that my home life was a bit sporadic and divided between the store (Dad) and the home (Mother). However, while we spent much time going our own way I did not feel any division of family unity. Mother and Dad supported each other as far as I was concerned, and I gave my allegiance to them as a family and not necessarily as individuals.
There was no such thing as taking sides with one against the other. While they may have had differences of opinion, it did not result in my being allowed to be partial. For example, my father was a staunch Democrat and my mother just as staunch a Republican, but I wasn't expected to support one or the other...
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