When Henry Ford started his workshop in Highland Park, my dad worked for him there.  Then when they moved to the River Rouge plant, dad went along to work in the foundry.
The Model A was our first car

Cheaper By The Dozen

When we lived out to the farm, my dad worked in the city and drove out on Friday evening.  Ma would send us to the store to get Dum Dum pops, and we'd sit n the front porch and count cars.  She'd ask, "how many cars do you think will pass by before dad gets home?"

I seems like it took a long time, but those pops were a lot bigger back then!  I still like Dum Dum pops.

Looking back at Christmas of Old

When I was a child, we never had a Christmas tree, but we had a large nativity scene that we set up on a large table in the living room. It must have been six feet long with stable a foot tall! I realize that when we reminisce about our childhood thins seem a lot bigger than they actually were, but this really was a large scene with mountains and a creche. Sticks held up the canvas to make the mountains--I don't think my mother ever saw a mountain, but she made a good representation of them.

Setting it all up was a big deal, with stones and bushes on the mountain. Of course, the Holy Baby Jesus wasn't put in the crib until we came home from midnight Mass.

I did get to enjoy a Christmas tree elsewhere in the family, though. My cousin June was six days older than I (actually, her mother was my cousin) and since June was so close to me in age, we hung out together. She was two grades behind me, so we had other friends too. Her family always had a Christmas tree, and I used to go to her house at Christmas-time just to look at all the different ornaments. I was fascinated by it all. I remember my cousin Walter lighting the candles on the tree, but only for a short while. Candles on trees could be a dangerous thing, and we had to watch them carefully.I'm not sure how old I was when they went to electric lights, but they became popular around 1936.

We got our first family tree in 1944, during the war, and it was almost impossible to get lights and ornaments, but my niece Pat worked at an independent Five and Dime store and one day they got a shipment of lights--she called me and I went down and bought them. In those days we strung colored popcorn and paper chains. It really was a simpler time.

I am still in love with Christmas tree decorations. When I traveled, I always looked for unusual ornaments, and I have many. I still like to sit and remember where I got them. I know I can't expect others to feel as I do, but I was disappointed in the last several years that no one asked to see my tree, and sometimes it seems more of a chore than a joy to decorate, but I always do and can enjoy it all for a few weeks.

Recycling: An Idea Older than I Am

Recycling isn’t a 21st-Century phenomenon: my mother recycled stuff more than 80 years ago.

The garage served as a garage for dad’s car, and two bins of coal: one for soft coal for the kitchen stove and one for hard coal for the base burner that heated the rest of the house. Upstairs in the barn was the overflow from the attic, and my brother had his clubhouse up there too. That's where we kept our "recycling."

I’m not sure how often—maybe every week or every couple of weeks (I can’t be sure)—an old man with a horse and wagon came through the alley behind the barn. He had a tin horn he blew to let everyone know he was coming, and mom would say "Oh, the Sheeny!” and we would run out to the barn to see what she had ferreted away there. When he would see my mom, he would sing out, “Any rags, any bones, any bottles today?”

Being a family of ten, we always bought potatoes and apples and sometimes corn or whatever produce was in season by the bushel at the farmers’ market, and they would put the produce in a burlap bag. Mom would save the bags and get two cents apiece for them from the Sheeny. Also any rags (clothes that had been patched or mended too many times that couldn’t be patched again and so went into the rag bag), and any large cow bones were worth a penny or two and bottles were too. The Sheeny would pick them over and take what he wanted.

Speaking of the Cold...

I remember the house I was born in, 2167 St. Joseph Street in Detroit. We had three bedrooms, one bath. The bedrooms were very small compared to the bedrooms in the houses now. One was big enough for two beds but that was all. I often wonder how we managed with so little closet and drawer space. We hung our cloths on pegs or nails on the walls. When we went to the Amish country and toured their homes I said to my sister “Remember, that’s how we did it too.” We lived in that house until I graduated from high school.
Compared to what we have now it seems so primitive. We had no central heating. We had a cooking stove in the kitchen and a ‘base burner’ in the dining room which we never used for dining. We ate in the kitchen. In the kitchen we burned soft coal which burned more easily and hotter than hard coal, which we burned in the stove in the dining room. The kitchen stove heated the kitchen, one bedroom that was off the kitchen, and the bathroom, which by the way had only a bathtub and a toilet. There were no cabinets under the sink in the kitchen, mother hung a cloth skirt around it and that was where we kept one pan for washing the dishes and another for washing us. We always washed in the kitchen sink, except on Saturday when we took a bath in the tub in the bathroom. We had a kerosene heater that we heated the bathroom with in the winter.
The ‘base burner’ in the ‘dining room’ heated the dining room and the two bedrooms and the living room, which we only used when we had company. The living room door was closed in the winter to conserve heat.
The dining room stove barely kept the rooms above freezing, so mother would get up early and start a fire in the kitchen stove and when we got up we ran to the kitchen where it was warm and washed, and dressed behind the stove in the kitchen.
We had only cold running water, so there always was a kettle of hot water on the kitchen stove, which also had gas burners for cooking in the summer.
Along one wall in the kitchen there were cabinets. Above the kitchen there was a room. The kitchen had an eight foot ceiling so there was room for a room, but the dining room and living room had a ten foot ceiling so that was just attack space above them where we stored stuff. There was a grate in the floor above the kitchen stove to heat the room above. You had to go out of the kitchen to an enclosed porch to get to the steps to the upstairs room. In the space under the stairs we stored the baseburner in the summer
Under the kitchen we had a cellar. There mom had a two burner stove that she heated the water for washing cloths. We also kept things like potatoes and apples etc. Where it was cold but not freezing. We never had a refrigerator until we moved on Pennsylvania after I graduated from high school We had an icebox where we kept food for a couple days at a time. The iceman came and brought us ice and put it in the icebox and the melted water was caught in a pan under the icebox, which had to be empted every so often or it over flowed.
There were three doors to the outside. A front door, a side door and a back door. Coming in the front door, you entered a small room which we called the front hall. On wall behind the door was room to hang the coats of visitors, and where we hung our winter coats, since there was only one closet in the whole house. As I said we hung our cloths in pegs or nails along the wall, I guess we didn’t have as many cloths then as we have now. There were dressers and we were lucky to get a drawer or two for our under things.
To go to the cellar you had to go outside and down some covered stairs. The walls of the cellar were lined with shelves where mom kept the food she would can for the winter, and also some can goods since there wasn’t much room in the kitchen cabinets. Since we lived in town and there was always someone around, we could go to the store almost daily for meat etc. There was a bakery a half a block away where we got bread and cakes.


On the left, this is what Google says is that address now: an urban "prairie." Below is an old house from down the block, still standing.

A Hard Lesson

One fall we were at our cottage on the lake. We often had a neighbor, friend or relative visiting.

On this day there were a couple of neighbor children with us. My brother and the older neighbor boy went off somewhere by themselves, and the younger boy and I went to pick some wild blackberries along the road. Among the berry bushes was some poisonous sumac. Not knowing the difference, we waded through the bushes.

Well, by evening, we were covered with itchy red bumps. Mother went to the drug store to ask the pharmacist what would help to get rid of the stuff (back then, we didn’t run to a doctor, especially if you knew what the problem was). That night and for many more, my mother put socks on my hands so I couldn’t scratch myself. I had learned a hard lesson, but definitely a lasting one!

Goody Two Shoes

I could tell my mother was getting tired of shopping. She hadn't been doing too well since a minor stroke, and we had been at it for some time. I had all of my Easter outfit except for the shoes, and there were still a couple of weeks until Easter, so we quit then. It is usually a busy time, and for one reason or another, we never did get back to shopping for those shoes...and before we knew it Easter was the next day!
I was getting worried by late Saturday morning and then mom said that I would have to go to the shoe store alone. I had mixed feelings: I was proud that mom would trust me to shop alone, and yet I was apprehensive. It was the first time I was allowed to choose solely on my own. Mom suggested I go to a shoe store near our home. But as I left home with my money safely in my little purse, I thought about the pretty pearl greys we saw at the department store downtown, and how well they would go with the little gray hat we had purchased two weeks before, with the pretty pink rose on it. So I went to the street car stop and boarded it for downtown.
As I sat there on the streetcar, I thought about what mom said about going to the nearby Trybus shoe store. Of course, I didn't really disobey because she didn't really tell me to go there, she just said that it might be a good idea. Well I was on my way: I wouldn't waste time, I would go right to the store and get my shoes, and then be on my way home.
When I got home, I gave mom the change and got one shoe out of the box to show her. I didn’t want to put them on, because I wanted her to see the whole outfit all together. I thought about how well the shoes matched my hat and purse, and how nice I would look in church the next day.

I was awake early on Easter and decided to dress long before it was time to go to church. I put on the new shoes, but something wasn’t right. They just didn’t feel right, and one looked bigger than the other. I took them off and checked the sizes, and sure enough they were two different sizes. I was devastated! What should I do? If I told mom, she would make me return them, and I would have to wear my old black shoes. And if I wore them, someone would ask about the different size and I would be embarrassed.
After a short deliberation, I decided to wear them anyway. If someone looked at my shoes, I could be cute and stand up on my toe with the heel up. I just had to remember never to keep my feet together to show off my new shoes. Somehow I managed to pull it off, and I wore them several times, and no one ever asked why one shoe was bigger than the other. Even my mom didn’t notice until it was too late to exchange them.

And that’s how I got the name “goody two shoes.” It was kind of a joke between mom and me.