Discover Vintage America — January 2012
Winter memories from an editor’s archives
This month, let’s take a
trip back in time. I’m talking about the days when Discover Vintage America was known as Discover North and served only a couple of counties north of the
Missouri River.
It was the 1970s. Newspapers
had only recently broken away from ancient “hot metal” Linotype machines and it
was years before computers were used in the newsroom. Using the journalism
talents of generous volunteers, I would sell ads by day, compose and paste-up
pages by night, then get the paper printed at a neighborhood newspaper shop. Then
I put on another hat and delivered the paper to the shops.
The early writers shared
my fondness for old-time stories. Some of the best were accounts of pioneer
families, especially during rugged Midwestern winters. They remind us, now that
winter has settled in, how lucky we are to be living in this day and age.
Winter food
In 1979, Francis
Williams, who had a long career as a newspaper editor in Platte County, wrote
several descriptions of early settlers’ winter foods in the early days of the Platte
Territory, including:
“Garden produce — such as Irish potatoes, sweet
potatoes wrapped individually in paper, parsnips, cabbage and turnips — was
taken from a pit or trench where it had been buried to prevent freezing. From
three or five-gallon stone jars came hominy and sauerkraut.”
“There was usually sweet corn that had been dried
or put down in brine in a stone jar. Since the Mason fruit jar did not make its
appearance until 1848 and tin cans (with lids set in place with sealing wax,
when available) were not suitable for preserving certain kinds of fruits and
vegetables, fruit pies were made of apples, peaches or apricots that had been
sliced raw and spread on a shed roof to dry in the sunshine. Pies were also
made with pumpkin that had been cut into strips and dried on a wall near the
fireplace.”
Childhood memories
Mildred S. Burns wrote
several “nostalgia pieces” in the early days of the paper. Wintertime was difficult in the early days,
as she illustrates with this article, “Keeping warm took real effort back in
1914.” Here are excerpts:
“I spent my childhood in a large, old frame house.
It was during the years from 1914 until 1935. In the winter we had a stove in
the living room and the kitchen stove was left up the year around. The rest of
the house was unheated. The fire in the living room burned day and night, but
that couldn’t be managed in the cook stove. The kitchen often got so cold during
the night that water froze. When the weather was that severe, Mama moved her
house plants into the living room.”
“Keeping warm at night in our unheated bedrooms
required some effort. We piled on layers of heavy woolen blankets. We slept on
thick featherbeds. Mama heated her flat irons on the cook stove after supper. They
were wrapped in old newspapers and put in our beds to warm our feet.”
“I remember that at bedtime I took off my clothes
and put on a long flannel nightgown behind the hot stove in the living room. The
rest of the family very politely looked the other way. Papa carried me to bed
so I wouldn’t have to walk across the cold floor. He dropped me on the
featherbed and I put my feet on the hot iron as he tucked the covers around me.
How delicious it felt to be so snug in the frigid room.”
“It was necessary to wear lots of warm clothing
during the winter months. We had underwear with long sleeves and legs reaching
to the ankles. It had to be folded to get our long stockings over it. I hated
the lumpy look it gave my legs. Sometimes when I got to school I went to the restroom and rolled the
underwear up above my knees. That was after I got to high school. I went to
grade school in the country and our restrooms were outside, and of course,
unheated. It was no place to go to rearrange one’s clothing.”
A ‘two-blanket’ night
In the 1988 book, Recipes & Stories of Early-day Settlers, I included an account by William Paxton, the Platte County chronicler,
describing his late-November 1839 overnight visit to Joseph Robidoux, founder
of present-day St. Joseph. At the time, Paxton was a young attorney, and
Robidoux was his client.
“His house was perched on the hillside,” Paxton
wrote. “It was of logs on a stone basement. I was shown to my bed on a plank
frame in the basement, and was given two blankets. I spread one blanket on the
boards, and covered with the other. It was a cold, blustery night, and I nearly
froze.”
“In the morning, before day, I heard Robidoux
stirring in the room overhead, and I went up the rude ladder. He asked me in
his broken English, French and Indian how I had spent the night. I told him I
had suffered from the cold. “What!” said he, “cold with two blankets?” I
explained how I used the blankets. He
replied with contempt: “You haven’t got even Indian sense, or you would have
wrapped up in them.”
Needless to say, we’ve come a long way since pioneer days. But when the winter “blahs” set in, we still find plenty of things to complain about.
Ken Weyand can be contacted at kweyand1@kc.rr.com
