I once had a nice rag doll my mother made for me, but I wanted a 'ma ma' doll so badly. She told me I could have one when I was seven. By that time I would be old enough to take care of it, she told me. Well, anyway I would be seven in just a few months so I wondered if I might receive one for Christmas. I sure hoped so. One day right before Christmas, either Pauline or Helen, I don't remember which, asked me to go upstairs and get something for her. When I went into their room, I noticed a big box under the dresser, which I hadn't seen before. Naturally, I opened it and before my eyes was a beautiful doll, just like I wanted. Only her nose was broken off. I picked her up, hugged her, and said, "I don't care if your nose is broken off, I will love you just the same". I then carefully put her back in the box and went back downstairs.

Christmas morning arrived. I hurried downstairs to receive my doll. There she sat on my little red chair. She was beautiful just as I knew she was -- only she had a new nose. Not a broken one. I stopped dead in my tracks and said, "I thought her nose was broken off". Well, the jig was up. The whole family thought I'd been snooping around the house for my doll. I hadn't. It was many years until I heard the last of that.

I learned later that my mother had ordered the doll from a mail-order catalog. It had come the very morning I found it. Shortly after dinner my dad had mailed it back, and it was replaced with a new doll.

In those days most people didn't have cars, and if they did they surely didn't drive them in the wintertime or in bad weather. For one thing none of the cars had heaters. To go to the school or church programs we drove a team of horses hitched to a buggy or sled. In the wintertime dad drove a team hitched to a bobsled. In the afternoon before we left he would put fresh straw in the sled and mother would put some rocks in the oven to warm. Then, shortly before we left dad would put the rocks under the straw. We would then wrap ourselves up in heavy horse blankets. Very warm. As we rode along you could see the stars shining brightly overhead. The crunch of the runners on the frozen snow and the jingle of the sleigh bells made for a cozy winter night. I can still see dad in his horse-hide coat, standing at the front of the bobsled, driving the horses. After arriving at our destination, we would take off the blankets and put them on the horses. Horses get cold too, you know. They were put back on us for the ride home.

When I was in the 4th grade still in country school, Miss McCabe told me they had some baby puppies at her house. She asked me if I would like to have one. Would I ? My parents gave their permission so Everett and I hitched Spot to the buggy and away we went. He was so little and so cute. I held him all the way home, He was so tiny that when I went upstairs, he tried to follow me, but couldn't get up the first step. About that time I was reading a story in my reading book about a boy named Billy Bob. I had liked this story so much that Miss McCabe suggested I name the puppy, Billy Bob. This I did. Eventually he became just Bob. I had, and loved him, for many years. He grew up to be a large dog and very protective of me. There were a few men Bob didn't like. One of the persons Bob didn't like was the man who picked up our cream and took it to the dairy. We tried to put Bob in the house whenever the cream man came, but sometimes we were busy doing other things. The man would park his truck as close to the cooling tank as he could and then make a bee-line as fast as he could. Sometimes he made it to the tank and sometimes he didn't. It was actually kind of funny, although I don't think it was ever funny for the cream man.

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Both my brothers, Everett and Russell, would help my dad in the fields. They would plow, plant, and cultivate in the spring, and harvest crops in the summer and fall. It was my job to carry cold drinks to them. My mother would fill a two-quart fruit jar with cold water from the well and wrap it in a newspaper. I would then run to the field where the men were waiting for a cool drink. I usually went barefoot. That ground was hot in the summer. I also remember walking in the oat stubble. Very hot and sharp.

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Sometimes a sow would be particularly protective of her piglets. We had one sow like this. Mother and I had gone to the corncrib to get some cobs and when we were coming back to the house, we heard a big noise. Turning around we saw this old sow coming at us on a dead run.

Luckily there was a wagon nearby, and we managed to reach it before the sow. The sow snorted but eventually became bored and left. We hurried down from the wagon and went into the house. Later, we went back and picked up the cobs that were scattered all over the ground.

Sometimes we had friends or relatives to our house for Sunday dinner. On these days I would run to the barn for our special rooster catcher. This was a long piece of wire with a U-shaped end. This wire was made especially for catching roosters for the frying pan. After going to the chicken house and looking over the flock, my dad would pick out a nice fat rooster. He would then throw some corn on the ground and while the rooster was busy gobbling up the corn, my dad and I would creep around and hook the rooster catcher around one of the rooster's legs.

The next job was to kill and dress the rooster. It was grizzly business. We kept an old broomstick in the barn for just this purpose. My dad would hold the rooster by the legs and put the broomstick over his neck. Then, standing on each end of the broomstick, dad would give a quick and mighty tug and off came the head. After the rooster stopped flopping around, mother would plunge it up and down in scolding water, which allowed the feathers to be plucked easily. I often helped with the chicken plucking. I was a real good chicken plucker. After plucking, mother would then take the carcass to the house where she would cut it up into pieces. Often, Pauline and Helen would help in this work. Later, so would I. My mother always cut up pieces of drumstick, thigh, breast, wishbone, and the back, which was her favorite piece. She always put the pieces in cold water and soaked them for an hour or so. She then rolled the pieces in flour and fried then in hot lard. I had never tasted anything so good.

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Maybe, I should tell you about the wishbone. You rarely find them in grocery stores today. This is the curved bone located at the top of the breast. After the meat is eaten, two people, usually children, each take an end of this bone and make a wish. The children then pull until it breaks. The one that has the larger piece of bone gets his wish granted. We never had chicken without two of us carrying out this ritual. Every one enjoyed a good chicken dinner. Except the rooster, I guess.

Every day during the summer when the men were working in the fields we had pie for dinner. Of course, we also had potatoes, gravy, a vegetable, salad, bread, but pie was the common daily fare. The vegetables were picked from our garden. Mother also grew many kinds of flowers and even the men remarked how pretty they were. We also had a huge strawberry bed, a plum thicket, a long grape arbor, and an apple orchard. I can still see the hundreds of jars of canned preserves of all kinds setting on the shelves in the cellar. During strawberry picking time, I would always find a dish of strawberries on the table for breakfast. I used to beg my mother to let me help in the picking. I never got to. She was worried about how many strawberries I would step on.

We also had a long row of raspberries bushes. One day mother and I were picking some for a pie and I was eating as many as I put in my pan. After we were through picking and were walking to the house, I turned around and saw a huge bull snake sunning himself right where we had been picking.

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The evening meal was always called supper. It usually consisted of leftovers from dinner, which was the noon meal. Eggs were served a great deal at this time. This was before we ever heard of cholesterol. If there wasn't enough food for the hungry brood, we finished with bread and milk. Many a winter supper was cornmeal mush in milk. Fried mush was a favorite too.

Bread was home baked and a dry yeast, called 'yeast foam,' was used. Mother would begin by mixing a yeast and water mixture to a little flour. She would set this starter on a warm part of the stove and let it stand overnight. In the morning more flour was added and kneaded until she had a good elastic dough. She would then let it rise, then she'd knead it down, and finally let it rise again. She generally made about four large loaves of bread a week. She always used water in which she boiled potatoes for the liquid when she baked bread. She claimed the bread was more moist this way.

In addition to making bread, mother would also make cinnamon rolls. Cinnamon rolls were often in the oven about the time I came home from school. I can still smell that great aroma as I came up that long lane.

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I remember one morning after I got up, I came downstairs to give mother a birthday spanking. It was her 40th birthday. She was kneading bread. I crept up behind her and gave her a couple of good whacks. I thought I would never get to the end of that spanking. Forty, that's a lot, I thought. I was four years old. She was sure old, I thought.

Speaking of age, I remember one year at our family reunion, I overheard an aunt say she could remember back when she thought forty was old. "But," she said, "I'm forty now and I don't think I'm old." At the time I thought, yes, you are old. Thank goodness I kept my mouth shut.

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I mentioned my first bed was a cot in my parent's room. Since Pauline and Helen were twelve and fourteen years older than myself, they were married when I was quite young. At that time their room became my room. You would think having my very own bedroom would make me happy, but I was lonesome. On those  nights when my dad stayed up late reading, I would go climb in bed with my mother. When dad came to bed he would pick me up and carry me to my own bedroom. He always told me not to do this but of course I didn't listen. Finally, one night when he was carrying me to my bed he gave me a little pop on my backside to let me know he meant it. This was my one and only spanking. A one-spank spanking.

Children in those days always helped with the chores. There was no arguing. You just did them. One of my chores was to feed the young calves. I liked this job. I would take a half pail of fresh milk and give it to each calf. Sometimes they would bunt the pail with their heads and cause me to spill the milk. When they saw you coming, they would come running fast. The calves were kept in a large, grassy lot.

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Feeding the chickens was another chore that I liked. I liked watching the tiny fluffy chicks. Mother also raised ducks. She would often set duck eggs under an old hen chicken. It was especially fun to watch the mother hen with her brood of ducklings. After a rain, the little ducks would swim in the water puddles that covered the ground. The old mother hem would run along beside the pond clucking, trying to get her babies to come out. She just could not understand how her babies could enjoy the water so much.

Every evening the eggs had to be gathered. Sometimes a hen would be sitting on a nest and you had to reach under her to remove the eggs. Some hens didn't like this and would peck. I didn't like this either. Chickens were allowed the run of the farm. Well, almost the run of the farm. We had a large fence around our yard to keep the chickens from scratching up my mother's flower garden. If a chicken happened to get in the yard, it was my job to chase it out. Other than that the chickens could go about anywhere they pleased. Of course, they wouldn't get their daily ration of corn if they wondered off to far, so I guess they had some incentive to stay close to home. Some of the hens would find a secret place to lay their eggs. Maybe it would be in the hayloft of the barn or even in the grove. If we couldn't find her nest, she would lay an egg a day until the nest was full. Three weeks later we would see her proudly leading a dozen baby chicks.

Like I said, I always liked doing chores around the house. Well, I liked doing almost all the chores around the house. There was one chore I didn't like at all. We kept cobs for the range in a small shed near the barn and carried them to the house as needed. Sometimes, however, we ran out of cobs in the shed and we had to get our cobs from the pig lot. Dirty. Awful. I won't describe those smelly things, but it was a nasty job indeed. I was always glad when we shelled corn so we had some nice clean cobs.

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Dad sometimes let me 'have' a couple of hens that were in the process of hatching eggs. He let me keep the money I got when the chicks were sold. I would put the hens and their newly hatched chicks in a small chicken coop in a grassy field next to the road. It was fun to watch the tiny chicks grow.

I used some of the money from the sale of my chicks to buy Christmas gifts. One time my mother and I were shopping in Emmetsburg when she saw a picture she liked. Later, that day when she wasn't around, I bought it for her. The clerk wrapped it nicely so I didn't bother to rewrap when I got home. When we exchanged gifts on Christmas day, mother opened the package and lo and behold, there across the front of the picture in big black numbers was the price. I was so embarrassed.

Speaking of cobs again, let me tell you a little story. My dad smoked a pipe, and it was his habit to knock the ashes in the cob basket next to the range. Of course, he never did this when the ashes were hot. Mother always told him he was going to burn the house down someday. "Stop worrying", we all heard dad say a million times. Well, as you might have guessed, one day when my mother went to the washhouse to do her washing, my dad knocked some ashes into the cob basket. He then went outside to do his morning chores. Of course the cobs caught on fire. Luckily, my mother returned to the house in the nick of time and put them out. She may have had to clean up the mess, but that's the last time she ever heard dad say, "Stop worrying".

One of my favorite activities was playing with paper dolls. Paper-doll books were  expensive, so I generally cut out pictures of little girls from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. I would cut out pretty dresses for the paper dolls. Sometimes they fit and sometimes they didn't I spent hours doing this.

I also made dolls out of hollyhocks. Mother had a long row of these flowers along the side of the garden. The flower was shaped like the skirt of a large ballroom dress so you simply took the flower and stuck a hollyhock bud on top of it to give the ballerina a head. If you've never made one, believe it or not, they're kind of pretty. My best friends, Gladys or Bonnie, would sometimes come over and we would make these hollyhock dolls by the dozens. We would have entire families of these doll. They were very colorful. I never did know what mother thought of us picking her hollyhocks.

I always wanted to play the piano. I could never remember a time when we didn't own a piano. Mom and dad bought a piano so Pauline and Helen could play it - neither of whom wanted to. So, the piano just sat there collecting dust. I begged mom and dad for lessons, and they finally agreed during the summer after my 5th grade. Although I only took lessons for four summers, I did learn to play. My only regret was that I didn't take more lessons and become a good musician.

The piano sat in the downstairs bedroom and during the winter the keys were as cold as ice. (That was one of the reasons I didn't take lessons.) Mother also said I should spend my time doing my school work. Still, I would often go into the cold room and play. Those keys were pretty cold.

One of the dumbest things I ever did had to do with a small bucket of cobs and a can of kerosene. I guess you know what I did. I poured some kerosene on some cobs and threw on a lighted match. That isn't a good idea. I was six years old. I'll tell you one thing though, the flame that shot out of those cobs was taller than a six-year old girl. I remember thinking that mother shouldn't know since she would probably be upset. I walked slowly around the house where she was doing some yard work. I tried to act as though nothing had happened. She took one look at me and raced around the house and put out the fire. I guess my singed eyebrows and lashes gave me away. That was the last time I ever played with matches.

Every Saturday night during the summer months Curlew had free movies. In a vacant lot between the bank and the hardware store, planks were laid across some posts. Those were the seats. The side of the bank was painted white to act as the movie screen. Everyone for miles around came to watch some of the great stars of the mid-1920s. First, a comedy was shown -- then the feature movie. Such a wonderful time! I would walk around with my friends, Bonnie and Gladys, waiting for the movie to start. The film reel had to be changed several times during the movie and often the film broke. But it great entertainment.

They were silent movies of course. This was before 'talkies' came into being in the late 1920s. The younger children sat on the grass in front of the plank seats. Sometimes we threw grass at each other instead of watching the pictures. I usually had to sit with my mother. Maybe she didn't like me throwing grass. As we grew older, we sat in the back with our favorite beau. We didn't throw any more grass, but we still didn't watch the movies.

On these Saturday nights I always had five cents to spend. Gladys, Bonnie and I would go to Easton's Drug Store where we debated over what to buy. There were penny candies. There were huge ice cream cones. There were candy bars. The candy bars were so big you couldn't eat them all at once. Many times two of us would divide one. In that way we could buy some penny candy too. Of course, if you bought an ice cream cone you could lick it slowly and savor each lick - or maybe eat it fast and feel that cold going down your throat. You could buy a lot for a nickel back then.

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Oh yes, my mind is slipping again. There is one thing I completely forgot to mention. It was my favorite activity. It was swinging. My dad would take the rope that came on the new rolls of binder twine and make a swing in the big old box elder tree that stood next to the house. It was not a tire swing or a sack swing like some of the other kids had, but a swing with two ropes and a board between them. I spent hours in this swing. I still remember the poem :

One time Everett and Russell hung a sack swing from a very high branch of another tree. This swing was great fun too.

When I was about ten years old, dad always let our cows graze along the road in front of our house. It was my job to herd those cows and see that they didn't stray onto the neighbor's yard. I usually rode Spot when I did this. When I let the cows out of the barnyard, they would race right for the road and the green grass. I would give them a good start and then when the last cow was almost out of site, I would jump on Spot and race as fast as I could to head them off just before they got to the neighbor's yard. Did I tell you that Spot liked to run ?

Believe it or not, the corn we harvested in our fields was used not only to feed the pigs, but to feed us as well. Dad would pick several of the nicest ears and take them to Laurens to be ground into meal. I remember those bags full of cornmeal sitting in the corner of the cold bedroom. Many times our supper was cornmeal mush, fried mush or sometimes even scrapple.

What is scrapple, you ask ? Since you'll probably never eat any, I'll tell you. After a hog is butchered, the head is cleaned and sawed apart. These pieces are then placed in a large pan of water and boiled until the outside meat can be picked from the bone. To this 'water' you add the meat and some cornmeal, which is all boiled, creating a mush. This mush is then cooled, sliced and fried in lard. Believe it or not, it is very good. At least I thought so. Yes, we cooked the brains too, but I won't tell you how we did it.

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