As I mentioned, our religious beliefs restricted us for dancing, drinking or playing cards. Dad did treat us to an evening in Denver once a year at the Ice Capades.
We put on our Sunday best, even though it was Saturday evening. Dad was a farmer and mostly dressed in navy or grey work shirts and pants during the week. He had a nice suit with a vest that included a watch pocket, crispy starched white shirt and big wide ties for Sundays. My brother Alan still carries that watch that dad had for his watch pocket. Dad always wore one of those fedora hats. This was one of those days for dressing up for all of us. Alan probably looked a little like a clone of his dad with a suit jacket, pants, shirt and tie and shiny shoes. Nancy and I wore dresses with our hair all combed neatly plastered down with wave set. Nancy probably wore nylons, but I still had little white socks with patent leather shoes. Mom had put on her Sunday dress, jewelry and carried a hand bag with a fresh lacy handkerchief.
We would all pile in the car to go to Denver. There were no super highways at the time so we wound through all the little towns like LaSalle, Platteville, Fort Lupten and Brighton on a two way paved road. You could tell that Mom would always get nervous if dad decided to pass a car. You had to accelerate to beat any on-coming traffic. Sometimes the crest of the hill didn’t provide you with enough visibility to see very far.
We might stop at a restaurant to have a special dinner before the show. I’m sure it was not a fancy restaurant, but to us it was grand to go to a place with thick cushy carpets, table clothes, and heavy silverware. I don’t remember what I ate, but dad usually ordered fantail shrimp.
When we got to the coliseum, the place was a busy with people. We walked through the concrete corridors with the flow of the crowds looking for our portal for our seats. We settled in for an evening of entertainment. Dad would have bought a program that we all read while we waited for the show to start. I looked through the program at the photos that depicted what we would see. The star of the show was on the cover. At the time, in the early 1950’s, I think Sonja Henny was a big ice skating star. It seems she also won a gold metal in the Olympics. She or some other beautiful star was on the cover of the program. I was enamored with the pose this skater had in the photo. I was little and it just seemed that with her arms and head throw back that she just didn’t have any boobs. I tried as I might to figure out where her normal body parts were. I was used to women with a little meat on their bones, not just skin and bones in tight costumes. It is amazing what a person remembers.
The skating started and we watched in amazement at the coordinated efforts as they skated around the arena. I particularly liked the finale where they would start with a foursome spinning in a circle in the middle of the rink. Then gradually they added on a person at a time until all the skaters were skating around like spokes of a car. There was always a straggler who couldn’t quite catch up with her place in the line. We would all root for her to clasp hands with her team mates. Such is the simple life of entertainment.
On the way home dad might stop for gas in Brighten. This was when the gas station attendants came running out to pump the gas, check the oil, wash the windows. There were no rest stops invented yet so if you really had to use the rest room it was at the gas station and usually not the tidiest.
We ice skated from time to time when Darling’s lake would freeze over. One of the neighbors would blade off the snow and then we all gathered in our warm woolen coats, hats and gloves for a afternoon of skating. The big kids skated in circles around the lake while the little kids skated on wobbly ankles trying to learn to skate. Boys used brooms or sticks for a makeshift game of hockey. The ice was bumpy from the wind blowing across the water while it was freezing solid. We didn’t care as we just skated over the bumps and crust.
When we moved to Swanson’s house from the Tipton farm, my dad let the washing machine water flood the side of the yard for a little skating rink for me when I was a teenager. There was a tetherball pole right in the middle of the rink. I would skate around and imagine what the real skaters would do with jumps and all those pretty graceful gliding poses. I could almost turn around and skate backwards, but that was about it.
When I went to CSU they had a requirement for 3 quarters of sports. I chose ice skating and found there were actually techniques to skating figure eights and other such feats. I could skate to pass the course, but still never excelled to greatness in that sport. All I remember is that the rink was right outside the student union. I would need to wear my outdoor skating clothes to all my other classes on skating days. My fellow students probably wondered why I wore the same outfit every day to class.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Visits with Cousins
Entertainment in the 1940’s and 1950’s included going to church and visits to relatives. Our religion restricted us from going to movies, a dance hall or spending time at a bar for even one drink of alcohol. I think the first movie I saw was Albert Switzer with my school mates at about age 10. I was so nervous that I would be exposed to some strange happenings, that it was kind of a let down to see the inside of the theater and wiggle in the wooden seats for a couple of hours to listen to the biography of Albert’s life.
Up to about age 6 or 7 we visited my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Swede (my dad’s brother) and their five kids. My brother, Alan, was about the same age and Lynnette who was nicknamed Tiny. Alan probably hung around outside their home in the backyard lot that was set up as a Kiwanis basketball court with his cousins Gene who was a little older and Brad who was a little younger. Uncle Swede was instrumental in arranging for the basketball court to be built on that empty lot. It made it handy for his three boys and other neighbor kids to play good clean sports. Brad the tallest of the bunch really got good at basketball. I remember watching him play basketball at University of Northern Colorado with my parents several times. Dad always liked basketball too. When he was a young man going to College High he was on the basketball team. I’ve seen a photo of him in uniform with the basketball in his hand. I wonder where that photo is today?
Alan played basket ball, but wasn’t tall enough to really go after the sport. In addition, at home usually meant more chores like milking the cows, feeding the calves and cows, fixing the machinery and so forth, if there was any free time. We did have a basketball hoop on our barn. I’m sure it wasn’t really regulation height, but still provided some fun from time to time. I think the Howard boys, Gary, Wayne and Joe who lived about a half a mile north of the Tipton farm might have come occasionally to play basket ball. The ground in front of the hoop was dirt so you can imagine how fun it was to bounce the ball in dirt. You really had to work to get the job done.
When we visited Aunt Ruth and Uncle Swede, Nancy my sister ten years older than me probably visited with Tiny or hung around my Aunt Ruth and Mom to help prepare something for us all to eat. I remember stopping by one Saturday. Aunt Ruth had a cotton print scarf tied around her pin curled hair from the back to the knot at her forehead; Aunt Jemima style. She had just made some kraut burgers, which are home made bread dough rolled out into squares, then filled with cooked cabbage and hamburger. They were yummy. I still make those today for my family. We were Swedish so this German dish was a change. Aunt Ruth was also known for her homemade rye bread that she often baked in a coffee can tin and her little square cakes that were frosted on all sides and then rolled in nuts.
At the time I thought their home was huge as it had all these bedrooms upstairs, hallways and closets. When I look back I see that it was a two-story cracker box filled with kids.
Corky and Pam were born a year after me in 1945 and about a year apart from each other. So we hung out together. Corky probably went out to play basketball or to chase the out of bounds balls. Pam and I looked at Tiny’s stuff for a while, but lost interest easily as Tiny was into finger nail polish, hair curlers and trying on clothes. Pam and I would walk around the block to the small corner grocery and buy a few pieces of candy. Pam was really more of a Tomboy than I was and always was turning cartwheels along the sidewalk and doing flips. As she grew up she was really good at baseball and joined a women’s professional league for a while before she settled down with a husband and raised three really pretty girls who looked a lot like their mom.
Something happened along the way with the parents as about the time I was eight or so in 1954 we stopped going to each other’s homes. Before that we spent every birthday together for both sets of parents and all the kids. These tight family get-togethers mostly included the Grandparents, Carl and Anna Swanson too. Well, life goes on and I guess I was too little for me to be privy to this issue between the parents.
My dad had a sister, Belva, too who lived with her family in New York, Alabama and then Denver. We infrequently visited them. Their kids, Brenda (nicknamed Bunny), Mark and Mike were about 10 or 20 years younger than me. Belva’s situation is another story unto itself.
My Mom had several sisters and brothers. Her sister Shirley was younger than Mom and had four boys. I remember spending quite a bit of time over at their home after the falling out of Dad’s family. By this time Nancy and Alan had mostly gone off on their own at about the age 14 and 18 so I don’t think they went along to visit much unless it was a family picnic in the summer. Aunt Shirley and Uncle Don lived on 10th street, right were the Greeley 4th of July parade passed. Sometimes we would all visit that morning and maybe have a potluck picnic after the parade to celebrate the day.
Other times Mom would visit with Shirley about all the sewing projects she was working on and Dad would chat with Don. I would go upstairs where the boys had their bedrooms and learn what was new. Don had the biggest bedroom by himself. Now that I think about that family I think that Don would probably be in the gifted and talented program today if he was born in a different generation. He always had something going on. As a young kid about 10, he would be growing plants. He had little pots all over every desk, bookcase and window sill. Next time he would be growing orchids that he had ordered from a catalog. He knew their names and had researched all the details about their differences. I was still spending time currying my horse and riding her around in my spare time. One time he had many fish tanks where he was breeding guppies. He had books of stamps, which I also had an interest. He knew all the countries and had the maps memorized.
I didn’t get to know Don’s brothers, John and Tom too well. His little brother Doug mostly stayed by his mommies side when we visited. Don was born the same year as I and was in the same junior high and high school. After a while his nickname at school was Icky as he was so different. Aren’t kids just horrible?
We all went off to college. I went to Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins and Don and John went to Colorado University (CU) in Boulder. After we had gone our merry way as teenagers from several years we had one of those family gatherings at Aunt Shirley and Uncle Don’s on the 4th of July. I hadn’t seen Don for several years and was interested in how he was getting along in school now that we were more grown up. CU was about a year or so ahead of CSU in the 1960’s drug use by the students. Evidently Don had tried out some along with some fringe religious sects. To each his own I suppose.
Our family seems to have the thread of mental illness maybe running through my Mom’s side of the family starting with Aunt Hattie. I don’t know much of anything about her, just that people would call her crazy Aunt Hattie.
At that 4th of July picnic while watching the parade with Don and trying to carry on a conversation about college experiences, I noticed that Don was also carrying on a conversation with invisible people. At least invisible to me. I would stop him and ask who he was talking with to no avail. He just kept on talking away. Later I found out had had gotten married for a while and then surprisingly divorced.
Years of embarrassment and quiet family discussions later revealed that both Don and John had schizophrenia. It must have been a struggle for Aunt Shirley and Uncle Don as health care didn’t always pay those costs for treatment and the general public really didn’t’ understand the issues. It was the quiet, not talked about illness. My cousin John had also married and had a little girl Holly. Then his life fell apart with mental illness. I thin he was one of the attendees at Woodstock so no telling what the trigger to find that mental illness thread. He was hospitalized for year as a mental institution in Pueblo.
Don had also been diagnosed with schizophrenia. After his divorce and figuring out he really couldn’t mainstream into society he took up a Section 8 apartment. As an adult he was obsessed with piano playing. He had never played the piano a lick as a kid, but became a virtuoso as an adult. He would play the piano for hours on end to the point where his dad bought him a piano that connected to ear phones so he would hear the music, but neighbors would not. He wrote music too and played my one of his symphonies that I video recorded one year. I’ll need to convert that to digital some day.
I visited my cousin Don occasionally with my Mom over the years. I would bring him some used clothes from my son John. Don was happy to have them, but always concerned if there was a worn spot in a coat pocket.
I think both Don and John live in separate apartments in Greeley some how surviving through the treacheries of mental illness.
I don’t see my cousins anymore as we have all gone our own ways. It was interesting to think about how these people have touched my live over the years.
Up to about age 6 or 7 we visited my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Swede (my dad’s brother) and their five kids. My brother, Alan, was about the same age and Lynnette who was nicknamed Tiny. Alan probably hung around outside their home in the backyard lot that was set up as a Kiwanis basketball court with his cousins Gene who was a little older and Brad who was a little younger. Uncle Swede was instrumental in arranging for the basketball court to be built on that empty lot. It made it handy for his three boys and other neighbor kids to play good clean sports. Brad the tallest of the bunch really got good at basketball. I remember watching him play basketball at University of Northern Colorado with my parents several times. Dad always liked basketball too. When he was a young man going to College High he was on the basketball team. I’ve seen a photo of him in uniform with the basketball in his hand. I wonder where that photo is today?
Alan played basket ball, but wasn’t tall enough to really go after the sport. In addition, at home usually meant more chores like milking the cows, feeding the calves and cows, fixing the machinery and so forth, if there was any free time. We did have a basketball hoop on our barn. I’m sure it wasn’t really regulation height, but still provided some fun from time to time. I think the Howard boys, Gary, Wayne and Joe who lived about a half a mile north of the Tipton farm might have come occasionally to play basket ball. The ground in front of the hoop was dirt so you can imagine how fun it was to bounce the ball in dirt. You really had to work to get the job done.
When we visited Aunt Ruth and Uncle Swede, Nancy my sister ten years older than me probably visited with Tiny or hung around my Aunt Ruth and Mom to help prepare something for us all to eat. I remember stopping by one Saturday. Aunt Ruth had a cotton print scarf tied around her pin curled hair from the back to the knot at her forehead; Aunt Jemima style. She had just made some kraut burgers, which are home made bread dough rolled out into squares, then filled with cooked cabbage and hamburger. They were yummy. I still make those today for my family. We were Swedish so this German dish was a change. Aunt Ruth was also known for her homemade rye bread that she often baked in a coffee can tin and her little square cakes that were frosted on all sides and then rolled in nuts.
At the time I thought their home was huge as it had all these bedrooms upstairs, hallways and closets. When I look back I see that it was a two-story cracker box filled with kids.
Corky and Pam were born a year after me in 1945 and about a year apart from each other. So we hung out together. Corky probably went out to play basketball or to chase the out of bounds balls. Pam and I looked at Tiny’s stuff for a while, but lost interest easily as Tiny was into finger nail polish, hair curlers and trying on clothes. Pam and I would walk around the block to the small corner grocery and buy a few pieces of candy. Pam was really more of a Tomboy than I was and always was turning cartwheels along the sidewalk and doing flips. As she grew up she was really good at baseball and joined a women’s professional league for a while before she settled down with a husband and raised three really pretty girls who looked a lot like their mom.
Something happened along the way with the parents as about the time I was eight or so in 1954 we stopped going to each other’s homes. Before that we spent every birthday together for both sets of parents and all the kids. These tight family get-togethers mostly included the Grandparents, Carl and Anna Swanson too. Well, life goes on and I guess I was too little for me to be privy to this issue between the parents.
My dad had a sister, Belva, too who lived with her family in New York, Alabama and then Denver. We infrequently visited them. Their kids, Brenda (nicknamed Bunny), Mark and Mike were about 10 or 20 years younger than me. Belva’s situation is another story unto itself.
My Mom had several sisters and brothers. Her sister Shirley was younger than Mom and had four boys. I remember spending quite a bit of time over at their home after the falling out of Dad’s family. By this time Nancy and Alan had mostly gone off on their own at about the age 14 and 18 so I don’t think they went along to visit much unless it was a family picnic in the summer. Aunt Shirley and Uncle Don lived on 10th street, right were the Greeley 4th of July parade passed. Sometimes we would all visit that morning and maybe have a potluck picnic after the parade to celebrate the day.
Other times Mom would visit with Shirley about all the sewing projects she was working on and Dad would chat with Don. I would go upstairs where the boys had their bedrooms and learn what was new. Don had the biggest bedroom by himself. Now that I think about that family I think that Don would probably be in the gifted and talented program today if he was born in a different generation. He always had something going on. As a young kid about 10, he would be growing plants. He had little pots all over every desk, bookcase and window sill. Next time he would be growing orchids that he had ordered from a catalog. He knew their names and had researched all the details about their differences. I was still spending time currying my horse and riding her around in my spare time. One time he had many fish tanks where he was breeding guppies. He had books of stamps, which I also had an interest. He knew all the countries and had the maps memorized.
I didn’t get to know Don’s brothers, John and Tom too well. His little brother Doug mostly stayed by his mommies side when we visited. Don was born the same year as I and was in the same junior high and high school. After a while his nickname at school was Icky as he was so different. Aren’t kids just horrible?
We all went off to college. I went to Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins and Don and John went to Colorado University (CU) in Boulder. After we had gone our merry way as teenagers from several years we had one of those family gatherings at Aunt Shirley and Uncle Don’s on the 4th of July. I hadn’t seen Don for several years and was interested in how he was getting along in school now that we were more grown up. CU was about a year or so ahead of CSU in the 1960’s drug use by the students. Evidently Don had tried out some along with some fringe religious sects. To each his own I suppose.
Our family seems to have the thread of mental illness maybe running through my Mom’s side of the family starting with Aunt Hattie. I don’t know much of anything about her, just that people would call her crazy Aunt Hattie.
At that 4th of July picnic while watching the parade with Don and trying to carry on a conversation about college experiences, I noticed that Don was also carrying on a conversation with invisible people. At least invisible to me. I would stop him and ask who he was talking with to no avail. He just kept on talking away. Later I found out had had gotten married for a while and then surprisingly divorced.
Years of embarrassment and quiet family discussions later revealed that both Don and John had schizophrenia. It must have been a struggle for Aunt Shirley and Uncle Don as health care didn’t always pay those costs for treatment and the general public really didn’t’ understand the issues. It was the quiet, not talked about illness. My cousin John had also married and had a little girl Holly. Then his life fell apart with mental illness. I thin he was one of the attendees at Woodstock so no telling what the trigger to find that mental illness thread. He was hospitalized for year as a mental institution in Pueblo.
Don had also been diagnosed with schizophrenia. After his divorce and figuring out he really couldn’t mainstream into society he took up a Section 8 apartment. As an adult he was obsessed with piano playing. He had never played the piano a lick as a kid, but became a virtuoso as an adult. He would play the piano for hours on end to the point where his dad bought him a piano that connected to ear phones so he would hear the music, but neighbors would not. He wrote music too and played my one of his symphonies that I video recorded one year. I’ll need to convert that to digital some day.
I visited my cousin Don occasionally with my Mom over the years. I would bring him some used clothes from my son John. Don was happy to have them, but always concerned if there was a worn spot in a coat pocket.
I think both Don and John live in separate apartments in Greeley some how surviving through the treacheries of mental illness.
I don’t see my cousins anymore as we have all gone our own ways. It was interesting to think about how these people have touched my live over the years.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Sugar and Butter Sandwiches
At the Tipton farm through the big corral yard to the north of the house was the hired man’s house. This is different from the Mexican migrant workers house in the east part of the yard just pasted the potato dug out. The hired man had a permanent job and worked side by side with my Dad and brother to keep up with the farm work.
I think when I was about six the family that lived there was named Bray. They were regular people raising a family and trying to make a living. You could walk north down the dirt road a quarter of a mile to their house or go through the big corral yard. The corral yard sat mostly empty as I remember that the milk cows were kept in a different corral by the big barn. The corral yard had a big fenced in area for heifers (young cows) or maybe cattle raised only to sell or be butchered for food?
My Grandpa Carl Swanson was a big cattle man more than a dairyman. Carl had a corral on his farm and the one across the street on the property he also owned filled with cattle. He fattened them up on rich grain and hay, and then took them to market in Denver to sell them. Is seems we all thought he was pretty good at that job and highly thought of in the community for his management of cattle.
In the big corral yard at Tipton’s farm was also a concrete set up that was used to wash sheep. We never raised sheep so we just played on that set up. Along the board fence was a few lesser used pieces of machinery and an old buggy that had belonged to Frank Swanson. It was quite the thing with the open bench seat that you could imagine ladies sitting on all dressed to go to town. It had the oak posts that tied onto one horse that used to pull it. My dad showed this buggy with pride to all who ventured into the big corral yard. One summer Frieda Johnson (Carl Swanson’s sister) came with her grown son and liked the wagon so much they took it for her son and hauled it to Pasadena California to display it in their front yard. My dad, mom and I did visit with second cousins and saw the buggy there. It didn’t look near as appealing in a suburban setting. I remember going to their house, but can’t remember the guys name. He was an inventor of some type and was working on the body of a small go-cart type car that he had built himself. He was working with fiberglass which was a new material for the time in the early 1950’s. This was probably the same trip I talked about before when we went to Disneyland.
Another big hay wagon rested against the fence in the big corral yard. It had oak wagon wheels and was made in the about 1909. It had some boards across the bed of the wagon, but they weren’t the boards that came with it. Dad moved this across the street when we moved to the Swanson Farms in the late 1950’s. The wagon sat for in the back yard surrounded by other discards until the 1990’s when my husband Stan and son John dismantled it and hauled it to Lakewood in our Ford van. They reassembled it and the two units of wheels are in my front lawn now. We couldn’t move the long oak bed that connected the wheels together where the bed of the wagon was due to size. Those long pieces stayed behind the milk house for years until we had to burn them while cleaning up the property to sell.
Because my parent taught us the love for old things, especially if connected to departed family I have lots of treasures that probably should be moved along. I like keeping them so I do.
At the north of the big corral yard was a gate that you could peek in and see the hired man’s house. They had a little boy named Richie Bray that was about my age. He was keep mostly to his mommy so I really didn’t play much with him. When I did visit his mom would always offer me a snack which was white bread spread with butter and sprinkled with sugar. That is still a favorite today although I might toast the bread and include some cinnamon with the sugar. Sometimes she had a left over pancake that she did the same thing. I always same one pancake when I make them to cool off, spread with butter and sprinkle with some sugar. Yum Yum.
I think back now about the Bray’s and realize they were pretty poor. They didn’t have any jelly or jam to spread on the bread so sugar was the best treat the mom could offer me.
On the first of day of May, May Day, the tradition was that you would take a bunch of little cups, decorate them with crepe paper, add a pipe cleaner handle and put nuts or small candies in the cup. You would take these to school and pass them out to your classmates. I took one of these little may baskets over to Richie Bray’s through the big corral yard to his back gate. I think maybe my brother or sister went along to tease me. There was some silliness about giving the basket to a boy and then kissing him. I think I gave Richie the basket when he opened the gate and ran like the dickens so I wouldn’t be kissed.
I think when I was about six the family that lived there was named Bray. They were regular people raising a family and trying to make a living. You could walk north down the dirt road a quarter of a mile to their house or go through the big corral yard. The corral yard sat mostly empty as I remember that the milk cows were kept in a different corral by the big barn. The corral yard had a big fenced in area for heifers (young cows) or maybe cattle raised only to sell or be butchered for food?
My Grandpa Carl Swanson was a big cattle man more than a dairyman. Carl had a corral on his farm and the one across the street on the property he also owned filled with cattle. He fattened them up on rich grain and hay, and then took them to market in Denver to sell them. Is seems we all thought he was pretty good at that job and highly thought of in the community for his management of cattle.
In the big corral yard at Tipton’s farm was also a concrete set up that was used to wash sheep. We never raised sheep so we just played on that set up. Along the board fence was a few lesser used pieces of machinery and an old buggy that had belonged to Frank Swanson. It was quite the thing with the open bench seat that you could imagine ladies sitting on all dressed to go to town. It had the oak posts that tied onto one horse that used to pull it. My dad showed this buggy with pride to all who ventured into the big corral yard. One summer Frieda Johnson (Carl Swanson’s sister) came with her grown son and liked the wagon so much they took it for her son and hauled it to Pasadena California to display it in their front yard. My dad, mom and I did visit with second cousins and saw the buggy there. It didn’t look near as appealing in a suburban setting. I remember going to their house, but can’t remember the guys name. He was an inventor of some type and was working on the body of a small go-cart type car that he had built himself. He was working with fiberglass which was a new material for the time in the early 1950’s. This was probably the same trip I talked about before when we went to Disneyland.
Another big hay wagon rested against the fence in the big corral yard. It had oak wagon wheels and was made in the about 1909. It had some boards across the bed of the wagon, but they weren’t the boards that came with it. Dad moved this across the street when we moved to the Swanson Farms in the late 1950’s. The wagon sat for in the back yard surrounded by other discards until the 1990’s when my husband Stan and son John dismantled it and hauled it to Lakewood in our Ford van. They reassembled it and the two units of wheels are in my front lawn now. We couldn’t move the long oak bed that connected the wheels together where the bed of the wagon was due to size. Those long pieces stayed behind the milk house for years until we had to burn them while cleaning up the property to sell.
Because my parent taught us the love for old things, especially if connected to departed family I have lots of treasures that probably should be moved along. I like keeping them so I do.
At the north of the big corral yard was a gate that you could peek in and see the hired man’s house. They had a little boy named Richie Bray that was about my age. He was keep mostly to his mommy so I really didn’t play much with him. When I did visit his mom would always offer me a snack which was white bread spread with butter and sprinkled with sugar. That is still a favorite today although I might toast the bread and include some cinnamon with the sugar. Sometimes she had a left over pancake that she did the same thing. I always same one pancake when I make them to cool off, spread with butter and sprinkle with some sugar. Yum Yum.
I think back now about the Bray’s and realize they were pretty poor. They didn’t have any jelly or jam to spread on the bread so sugar was the best treat the mom could offer me.
On the first of day of May, May Day, the tradition was that you would take a bunch of little cups, decorate them with crepe paper, add a pipe cleaner handle and put nuts or small candies in the cup. You would take these to school and pass them out to your classmates. I took one of these little may baskets over to Richie Bray’s through the big corral yard to his back gate. I think maybe my brother or sister went along to tease me. There was some silliness about giving the basket to a boy and then kissing him. I think I gave Richie the basket when he opened the gate and ran like the dickens so I wouldn’t be kissed.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
The Greeley Tribune
The Greeley Tribune was delivered every afternoon around four. This was dad’s paper and we couldn’t touch it until he broke it open at the dinner table.
Mom would prepare the meal. Either Nancy or I would set the table with all the silverware in its proper place. I don’t remember having napkins for every day meals. Maybe we did have paper napkins. Paper products such as paper towels and Kleenex were not used to the extent we use them today. There was no dish washer except the women of the house. Dishes were washed by one person in soapy water, rinsed and placed in a drainer for the other person to dry. I was sometimes the drier and maybe my sister or mom the washer. If you were too short to reach the drainer, then a chair was pulled over so you could stand on the chair to reach the dishes. It was so cute to see little Nancy when she was a young child stand and that chair to do the dishes. Then it was my turn as I was 10 years younger than Nancy. Seems a little less cute today now that I think about it and more like child labor. I don’t think either my sister or I have stopped the dish activity in some odd fifty to sixty-five years. I still prefer dish towels to paper towels. However, mine are not the variety that my mom used that came in the laundry soap or held chicken feed. They didn’t have discount store such as a Walmart at the time and it was probably unheard of to buy dish towels when you get them free from soap boxes or feed sacks.
We blew our noses on handkerchiefs. Mom had a drawer with a small box padded with light blue satin that she kept her special handkerchiefs. They were ironed carefully, then folded and put in the box. Some had hand embroidery of delicate flowers while other had her initials. Some had lace edges. More ordinary ones were printed with flowers on the borders. My dad had red bandana type handkerchiefs. He tied them around his neck and brought them up over his nose when he worked in the fields with dusty hay or thrashing the wheat. I remember seeing him all covered with dust and dirt at the end of the day. He always changed his clothes before he came to the dinner table.
Mom had pulled out the comics for him and folded them in fourths so he could read them at his place. We always sat in the same seats at the dinner table with dad at the head. No one touched their food or fiddled with their silverware until we said grace together. It was a Swedish prayer that I know by heart, but can’t read or write any Swedish. Sometimes when we had company we would say a prayer before the meal in English. It was not the same words as the Swedish one. My brother-in-law Bob is the best person for grace. He always has something pertinent to the situation at hand.
We could read the funnies after dad was finished with them. Dagwood Bumested and Beatle Bailey were a couple of favorites. Dick Tracy was in the comics too, but I was too young to follow the story line.
Mom would look through the obituaries to see if anyone she knew had died. This was long before computers with email, facebook and twitter that provide instant messaging. Even phones were party lines that you shared with the neighbors. Some times you had metered phone service that only allowed so many calls per month. I guess that is similar to restrictions on minutes per month on cell phone usage. We used the phone infrequently. So the paper was the communication tool for the community. I suppose I read through the obituaries in the Denver Post occasionally just to see how long people live. I’ve been doing that once I head toward the finish line just to gage your possible live expectancy.
Mom would also cut out quilt patterns that were in the papers. She also subscribed to a few magazines such as Capper’s Weekly, Life and Look. Mom kept some racy True Story romance novels and magazines hidden from the rest of us that she read occasionally probably to break up the day to day monotony of being a farm wife that was filled with a day of chores and responsibilities.
The Sunday paper was the most fun. I think there were colored pages for the comic pages that day. Now we have colored photos throughout the paper.
Mom would prepare the meal. Either Nancy or I would set the table with all the silverware in its proper place. I don’t remember having napkins for every day meals. Maybe we did have paper napkins. Paper products such as paper towels and Kleenex were not used to the extent we use them today. There was no dish washer except the women of the house. Dishes were washed by one person in soapy water, rinsed and placed in a drainer for the other person to dry. I was sometimes the drier and maybe my sister or mom the washer. If you were too short to reach the drainer, then a chair was pulled over so you could stand on the chair to reach the dishes. It was so cute to see little Nancy when she was a young child stand and that chair to do the dishes. Then it was my turn as I was 10 years younger than Nancy. Seems a little less cute today now that I think about it and more like child labor. I don’t think either my sister or I have stopped the dish activity in some odd fifty to sixty-five years. I still prefer dish towels to paper towels. However, mine are not the variety that my mom used that came in the laundry soap or held chicken feed. They didn’t have discount store such as a Walmart at the time and it was probably unheard of to buy dish towels when you get them free from soap boxes or feed sacks.
We blew our noses on handkerchiefs. Mom had a drawer with a small box padded with light blue satin that she kept her special handkerchiefs. They were ironed carefully, then folded and put in the box. Some had hand embroidery of delicate flowers while other had her initials. Some had lace edges. More ordinary ones were printed with flowers on the borders. My dad had red bandana type handkerchiefs. He tied them around his neck and brought them up over his nose when he worked in the fields with dusty hay or thrashing the wheat. I remember seeing him all covered with dust and dirt at the end of the day. He always changed his clothes before he came to the dinner table.
Mom had pulled out the comics for him and folded them in fourths so he could read them at his place. We always sat in the same seats at the dinner table with dad at the head. No one touched their food or fiddled with their silverware until we said grace together. It was a Swedish prayer that I know by heart, but can’t read or write any Swedish. Sometimes when we had company we would say a prayer before the meal in English. It was not the same words as the Swedish one. My brother-in-law Bob is the best person for grace. He always has something pertinent to the situation at hand.
We could read the funnies after dad was finished with them. Dagwood Bumested and Beatle Bailey were a couple of favorites. Dick Tracy was in the comics too, but I was too young to follow the story line.
Mom would look through the obituaries to see if anyone she knew had died. This was long before computers with email, facebook and twitter that provide instant messaging. Even phones were party lines that you shared with the neighbors. Some times you had metered phone service that only allowed so many calls per month. I guess that is similar to restrictions on minutes per month on cell phone usage. We used the phone infrequently. So the paper was the communication tool for the community. I suppose I read through the obituaries in the Denver Post occasionally just to see how long people live. I’ve been doing that once I head toward the finish line just to gage your possible live expectancy.
Mom would also cut out quilt patterns that were in the papers. She also subscribed to a few magazines such as Capper’s Weekly, Life and Look. Mom kept some racy True Story romance novels and magazines hidden from the rest of us that she read occasionally probably to break up the day to day monotony of being a farm wife that was filled with a day of chores and responsibilities.
The Sunday paper was the most fun. I think there were colored pages for the comic pages that day. Now we have colored photos throughout the paper.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Mexican Farm Laborers
Farming is hard work. My grandparents started working the fields with teams of horses. In the 1930s when they bought their 80 acre farm, they kept the horses in the big barn. The barn was two-stories. It had a place to store the hay in the upper level. All the harnesses and horse collars were hung on nails on the walls so they would be ready to harness up the animals for a days work. The horses could be let out in a fenced in carrel through the side doors of the barn.
My brother said that Frank O. Swanson, my great grandfather was a really tall big man. The horses were draft work horses and when Frank would sit on the horse his legs extended well down the side of the animal. There is an interesting enlargement of a photo of my dad, Harold as a young child about two in his grandfather Frank’s arms went Frank was sitting on one of these giant horses. I think I have the black and white negative of this photo. Jim, my sister Nancy’s oldest son has the actual photo.
Big horses lots of work. My dad, Harold and his brother, Clarence (called Swede) grew up working the fields with the horses until tractors came along. When they could afford tractors, they switched over from horses to plows, harrows and other machinery pulled by tractors.
Early on we may have farmed the fields at Tipton’s with horses, but mostly I remember Case tractors. My dad was loyal to the Case brand of farm equipment with its bright red-orange paint. Other farmers preferred the green of John Deere or grey of the International Harvester. It was Case for the Swansons. We did have one small grey Ford tractor that was use for smaller farm projects.
We lived in the three bedroom two-story house at Tipton’s. The steep stairs spilled out into kind of a big hall that was my brother’s bedroom. You had to go through that room to my parents bedroom. My twin bed was in my parent's also. Walk around the corner and there was my sister Nancy’s room. She actually had her own staircase, but it seems this was not used very much. Not much privacy with the family walking between bedrooms to get to their room. Different from the way houses are set up today with hallways and doors to each bedroom. We had another bedroom on the main floor by the stair case that was our guest bedroom fully decked out with a double bed, white Martha Washington nubby bedspread and dresser. I don’t remember anyone ever being our guests, at least not often.
We had one bathroom off the guest room that had a big old tub with the claw feet, toilet, sink and some cupboards along one wall. It seems there was also a closet there too. I think the closet was in the bathroom. I was too little to know when the bathroom and running water were installed in the house. It must have been in the 1940’s as there was still a usable outdoor john next to the ash pit outside about 20 feet from the back door. The ash pit was where we burned the trash. It was made of large colored brick and was about ten foot square. It had a two foot square hole in the top where you dump the trash. I think there was an other fifty-five gallon barrel that we throw the cans. Recycling before its time.
There was a large tin shed with big sliding doors used to store machinery at the east end of the yard between the potato cellar and the back yard of the house. There was another brick shed used to store machinry in that same area that probably was used for animals at some time before we moved there as there was no door just the brick walls and overhead roof. It was pretty big, maybe about three double garages wide.
Other machinery was lined up at the edges of the buildings until they were needed for farm operations. It took a lot of different types of machinry to grow all the different types of crops. My dad grew everything; sugar beets, potatoes, alfalfa, onions, sometimes barley or wheat, corn of course and pinto beans. He wasn’t much for vegetable crops like carrots or cucumbers. The soil might have been too rocky or this type of crop didn’t really appeal to him. Now farmers specialize to one to two crops to maximize their return and keep their equipment purchases to a minium.
To work the farm in the summer, Dad would hired migrant workers from Texas or Mexico. They mostly spoke Spanish only and Dad learned enough Spanish to communicate with the Mexicans as we called them. They stayed in a migrant house that was next to the tin shed. It was two rooms with an outside pit toilet. I think he piped in some running water some how. This was low tech and an upgrade from what the migrants had before they came to Colorado to work. The laws and requirements for housing are much different today along with status of migrants being legal aliens or illegal. In the 1940’s – 1950’s this wasn’t an issue. These were just people who needed a job and my Dad had one for them.
Many people lived in this Mexican house, as we called it. It took a lot of people to walk up and down the rows of crops thinning the sugar beets or weeding the fields. Today much of this work in accomplished by machinery or chemicals that treat the soil and seed to better manage the weeds. It was what it was at that time.
We were told to not talk or play with the Mexicans. They were always a raft of children that came with the adult families living in this house. They were told to stay in their yard by the tin shed and we were told to stay in our yard between the chicken coop and barn to the house.
Being the inquisitive kid that I was, I ventured back to the brick shed to play or chat with several of the Mexican kids. I was about five or six at the time. I sat down on the edge of a harrow or some type of equipment that had long metal fingers and was about butt high for a kid to sit. It was stored by the brick building. This was close to the barn so it was almost in our yard, not the Mexicans. The machinery was propped up with a pretty thick wooden stick so it would be ready to load onto the tractor.
As I set there swinging my little legs back and forth waving and chatting with the Mexican kids, the stick wiggled with me. Boom! The stick gave way and the machinery fell on the calf of my left leg. The little Mexican kids ran to the milk barn to get my Dad and brother who were milking the cows at the time. Quickly they lifted that machinery like it was light as a feather and pulled my out from under the machinery. Dad carried me over to the car to check out my leg. I’m sure there was a panic from my mom as she scurried out of the kitchen to see what had happened. I vaguely remember either being scolded for talking with the Mexican kids or expecting the scolding. I don’t remember if it was that night that we went to the doctor or the next day. I’m sure the milking chores still needed to be finished. I remember the doctor saying that the fatty cells were smashed and there would be an indention in my calf. There still is a slight one. As I wasn’t trying out for any beauty contests, it didn’t matter.
My brother said that Frank O. Swanson, my great grandfather was a really tall big man. The horses were draft work horses and when Frank would sit on the horse his legs extended well down the side of the animal. There is an interesting enlargement of a photo of my dad, Harold as a young child about two in his grandfather Frank’s arms went Frank was sitting on one of these giant horses. I think I have the black and white negative of this photo. Jim, my sister Nancy’s oldest son has the actual photo.
Big horses lots of work. My dad, Harold and his brother, Clarence (called Swede) grew up working the fields with the horses until tractors came along. When they could afford tractors, they switched over from horses to plows, harrows and other machinery pulled by tractors.
Early on we may have farmed the fields at Tipton’s with horses, but mostly I remember Case tractors. My dad was loyal to the Case brand of farm equipment with its bright red-orange paint. Other farmers preferred the green of John Deere or grey of the International Harvester. It was Case for the Swansons. We did have one small grey Ford tractor that was use for smaller farm projects.
We lived in the three bedroom two-story house at Tipton’s. The steep stairs spilled out into kind of a big hall that was my brother’s bedroom. You had to go through that room to my parents bedroom. My twin bed was in my parent's also. Walk around the corner and there was my sister Nancy’s room. She actually had her own staircase, but it seems this was not used very much. Not much privacy with the family walking between bedrooms to get to their room. Different from the way houses are set up today with hallways and doors to each bedroom. We had another bedroom on the main floor by the stair case that was our guest bedroom fully decked out with a double bed, white Martha Washington nubby bedspread and dresser. I don’t remember anyone ever being our guests, at least not often.
We had one bathroom off the guest room that had a big old tub with the claw feet, toilet, sink and some cupboards along one wall. It seems there was also a closet there too. I think the closet was in the bathroom. I was too little to know when the bathroom and running water were installed in the house. It must have been in the 1940’s as there was still a usable outdoor john next to the ash pit outside about 20 feet from the back door. The ash pit was where we burned the trash. It was made of large colored brick and was about ten foot square. It had a two foot square hole in the top where you dump the trash. I think there was an other fifty-five gallon barrel that we throw the cans. Recycling before its time.
There was a large tin shed with big sliding doors used to store machinery at the east end of the yard between the potato cellar and the back yard of the house. There was another brick shed used to store machinry in that same area that probably was used for animals at some time before we moved there as there was no door just the brick walls and overhead roof. It was pretty big, maybe about three double garages wide.
Other machinery was lined up at the edges of the buildings until they were needed for farm operations. It took a lot of different types of machinry to grow all the different types of crops. My dad grew everything; sugar beets, potatoes, alfalfa, onions, sometimes barley or wheat, corn of course and pinto beans. He wasn’t much for vegetable crops like carrots or cucumbers. The soil might have been too rocky or this type of crop didn’t really appeal to him. Now farmers specialize to one to two crops to maximize their return and keep their equipment purchases to a minium.
To work the farm in the summer, Dad would hired migrant workers from Texas or Mexico. They mostly spoke Spanish only and Dad learned enough Spanish to communicate with the Mexicans as we called them. They stayed in a migrant house that was next to the tin shed. It was two rooms with an outside pit toilet. I think he piped in some running water some how. This was low tech and an upgrade from what the migrants had before they came to Colorado to work. The laws and requirements for housing are much different today along with status of migrants being legal aliens or illegal. In the 1940’s – 1950’s this wasn’t an issue. These were just people who needed a job and my Dad had one for them.
Many people lived in this Mexican house, as we called it. It took a lot of people to walk up and down the rows of crops thinning the sugar beets or weeding the fields. Today much of this work in accomplished by machinery or chemicals that treat the soil and seed to better manage the weeds. It was what it was at that time.
We were told to not talk or play with the Mexicans. They were always a raft of children that came with the adult families living in this house. They were told to stay in their yard by the tin shed and we were told to stay in our yard between the chicken coop and barn to the house.
Being the inquisitive kid that I was, I ventured back to the brick shed to play or chat with several of the Mexican kids. I was about five or six at the time. I sat down on the edge of a harrow or some type of equipment that had long metal fingers and was about butt high for a kid to sit. It was stored by the brick building. This was close to the barn so it was almost in our yard, not the Mexicans. The machinery was propped up with a pretty thick wooden stick so it would be ready to load onto the tractor.
As I set there swinging my little legs back and forth waving and chatting with the Mexican kids, the stick wiggled with me. Boom! The stick gave way and the machinery fell on the calf of my left leg. The little Mexican kids ran to the milk barn to get my Dad and brother who were milking the cows at the time. Quickly they lifted that machinery like it was light as a feather and pulled my out from under the machinery. Dad carried me over to the car to check out my leg. I’m sure there was a panic from my mom as she scurried out of the kitchen to see what had happened. I vaguely remember either being scolded for talking with the Mexican kids or expecting the scolding. I don’t remember if it was that night that we went to the doctor or the next day. I’m sure the milking chores still needed to be finished. I remember the doctor saying that the fatty cells were smashed and there would be an indention in my calf. There still is a slight one. As I wasn’t trying out for any beauty contests, it didn’t matter.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
