When I was growing up, we lived on old U.S. Route 34 3 miles outside Altona, IL. The State of Illinois handed the road over to the counties in about 1958; unfortunately, part of the road ran right along the county line between Knox and Henry Counties while the remainder was in Henry County. Neither county was very interested in maintaining the road. Although this neglect worked in our favor much of the time, leaving us with wonderful wild strawberries and wild roses with an intoxicating scent, winter was a different matter.
It’s February 1960. We’ve had so much snow that our road has yet to be plowed; meanwhile, the county road to the south of us is open and the school bus is running down that road. My two brothers and I dress ourselves in layers of winter clothes until we resemble little copies of the Michelin Man, for we must walk across the fields to the neighbors and we have no idea how deep the snow will be or how sharp the prairie wind will be. We only know that the temperature is below 20 degrees F. and the wind is out of the northwest at 15 miles an hour. We must survive walking across harvested corn fields with sharp stalks sticking up at unexpected intervals punctuated by downed fences topped with rusting barbed wire to reach our neighbors’ home where we can wait for the bus. Of course, I am wearing a skirt tucked inside my corduroys. Girls simply don’t wear jeans or slacks to school or church. I am wearing my first parka, one I have gotten for Christmas, and a hat and mittens that Mom has knitted for me. (Mom is an accomplished knitter and always has a project going.)
Money has been tight this last year. My mom has been commuting to classes at a local college to complete her BA so that she can teach school and stabilize our income. Farm prices haven’t changed in nearly ten years, and things are tough for family farmers. While we all have boots, those boots have begun to leak a little and we can’t afford to replace them right now. If we are unfortunate enough to accidentally find some barbed wire or sharp corn stalks lying on the ground under the snow, our boots will leak even more. To rectify this problem, we are using the plastic bags in which we buy our bread. These bags are sturdy and fit nicely over our shoes; they are even long enough to reach the tops of our boots.
My brothers are in third grade and first grade and therefore aren’t carrying any books.As a sixth grader, I have a few books and my French horn. We have band today and I must bring my instrument or be completely embarrassed. So we slog through the snow, trying to choose a path where there are fewer drifts and where the cornstalks under the snow don’t appear as sharp. I am probably carrying my books in a brown grocery store bag; backpacks for books are still a thing of the future.
We make it to the neighbors and even get to watch one of the space launches on television before the bus comes. We wave good-bye to our friends and hurry to join the bus. By nightfall, our road will be plowed enough for Dad to collect us with a pickup truck. But we will wear those bread bags inside our boots for the rest of the winter.
At school, we find that many of our friends also are using bread bags inside their boots. This is an era when thrift is considered a necessary virtue. Boys wear patched jeans without shame, and hand-me-downs are a way of life. Those of us fortunate enough to have cousins a few years older rejoice in new-to-us clothing, at least until we have growth spurts and suddenly are larger than our cousins. (Of course, sometimes you can lose the hand-me-down lottery. My husband has a horror story about being given a suit made with pink checked material. Despite his protests, he was forced to wear the suit, and developed a profound hatred of the color pink, a dislike he has maintained to this day. In the 1950’s NO self-respecting boy would be caught in any pastel colors and “pinko” was a pejorative term for a Communist sympathizer.)
We rent our text books and make covers for them from brown grocery bags. Heavy plastic bags for frozen vegetables are just becoming available, and we also recycle those. Ziploc bags have yet to make an appearance, although Tupperware is beginning to be heard of. Friends in town are still collecting glass pop bottles and turning them in for small rewards.
At home, those of us who live in old drafty houses are likely to have a double layer of straw bales around the foundation of our houses to keep out the cold air. Those unfortunate enough to live in rental properties with negligent landlords may also pack rags around doors and windows. If we are fortunate, we have storm windows that we hang up every fall and remove in the spring once we are certain we won’t have any more blizzards. But storm windows can also leak. Sometimes we help ourselves by purchasing calking guns in the local lumbar yard and re-calking our window panes. When storm winds are really heavy, we hang blankets over our windows.
In some of these old houses, it’s common for people to carry hot water bottles with them and put them under the covers at the foot of the bed. We also wear heavy flannel night clothes and dress our beds with flannel sheets, quilts, and heavy woolen blankets. Bed socks are quite common and knitters have many patterns for creating them. Even if a family has a coal-burning furnace, hot air can only rise so much against huge amounts of cold air coming down from drafty upper stories. Proper insulation is unknown and many homes still have horse hair stuffing cracks inside their walls. We lived in one old house that was so drafty that my mother and I had to wear our snow boots inside the kitchen with an electric heater blowing on our feet to survive fixing supper.
Live in an old house during a bitter winter and you rapidly learn to put your underwear inside your bed under the covers and change into your underwear under the covers. The alternative might be to carry your clothes downstairs and stand close to a heating stove or a register pouring out hot air. Heavy bathrobes are not a mere accessory but an absolute necessity. In that same home, our bathroom was on the north side of the house, the windward side. We had to run an electric heater for at least twenty minutes before anyone could bathe, and we all bathed as quickly as possible. But at least there we had a bathroom.
When I was a small child, we lived in a large old house with lots of cracks and no central heating. We had a wood burning Warm Morning heating stove in the dining room and another stove in the kitchen that could burn either LP gas or wood. I spent many mornings dressing close to the stove in the dining room. We had no bathroom; instead, we had a toilet 50 yards from the house and used commodes that we then emptied every morning. Once I got old enough and big enough, emptying the commode became one of my daily jobs. We bathed in a galvanized tin tub in the kitchen, heating the kitchen by turning on the oven, opening the door, and then closing the doors to keep in the heat. We had a hand pump in our sink connected to a cistern that provided soft water. We had a well immediately outside the back door and got our drinking water and most of our water for washing clothes from that well. I used to be an expert at priming the pump by pouring water down the casing, and I also suffered a chip in one incisor when the pump handle flew up into my mouth.
These days, we live in northeastern Ghana. Old habits are hard to break, and we have large collections of plastic bags and glass containers, many of which wind up being very helpful. We don’t have snow, but if my Wellington boots leak, I might begin lining them with plastic bags.
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