Dear Jan and Bruce,
I told you about all the good things to eat that we laid by for the winter. They lasted through the winter and beyond, and if we ran short the farms from which they came were close by. Most folks were frugal and I don't think anyone went hungry, even without welfare and charitable organizations and all the machinery we have today. There were a few families in the village that needed a helping hand now and again, but this was handled by the merchants and the service clubs without anyone knowing. Poor folks had their pride, too.
Our house was located just two houses and a small commercial building away from the south end of Main Street, our business district, so The Brewster & Church Co., where Dad worked, was less than a quarter-mile away. The school buildings were about the same distance east on Washington Street and north behind the row of houses on the north side. Most of the people who worked in town went home for meals, and so did the schoolkids except for those who came in from their farms on our school bus. The latter carried their lunches although sometime later there was a small cafeteria built just north of the high school. Accordingly, on normal days we all sat down to all three meals around the dining table: Dad and Mother, Grandma McFarland, my brother and I.
Breakfast was a hearty meal, a holdover from farm days but not exactly like it was on the farm. I became acquainted with farm breakfasts at first hand when Grandad Foster got back into dairying and I spent part of the summer helping out. Grandad was first and foremost a dairyman, even said that he had natural milkers hands. One time when he was temporarily out of the dairy business, in the late 1920s I think, Mr. Ed Roush, who was half owner of the Chevrolet agency across the street, persuaded Grandad to accompany him on an automobile trip out west to see the sights. They packed camping gear and Mr. Roush insisted the Grandad include some fishing tackle. When they arrived back home, that fishing tackle was still unpacked. Grandad said that whenever Mr. Roush went fishing, he went off to look at cows.
Also, I learned what it was to be a dairyman, and right there decided to find some other way, almost any other way, to make a living. Milk cows are amiable creatures but they do insist on being milked twice a day twelve hours apart. Grandad chose 4:30 AM and PM, that being the case, we got up at 4:00 AM and trudged down to the barn by lantern light to feed the cows. Back to the house we sat down to a breakfast of meat and potatoes, vegetables, bread and butter, pie or cake, and several glasses of milk, and we ate it all. Then back down to the barn to milk, by hand, no milking machines. The milk we carried up to the house in pails and, in the milk room on the rear of the house, poured it into large shallow pans to cool. Then Aunt Zill took over while Grandad and I went to clean out the barn. Cleaning manure out of the stanchions was a twice-a-day chore, too. Aunt Zill was Grandad's second wife. Grandma Loraine Foster died in 1922 and I never really knew her. In 1925, Grandad married Mrs. Druzzilla Maria (mar EYE ah) Burnett Wait, a widow and Grandad McFarland's sister. We had always called her Aunt Zill and Aunt Zill she remained. As the milk cooked, she would skim off the heavy or whipping cream with a large spoon. Some of the milk was put through a hand-cranked separator to get the light or coffee cream and skim milk. Along with the whole milk, it was all ladled into glass milk bottles and capped with paper caps bearing the name E.O. Foster Dairy and listing the contents. About once a week, Aunt Zill made butter in a round wooden hand-operated churn. No homogenizing, no additives, no preservatives - just pure fresh milk.
Coming up from the barn we fed the chickens and gathered the eggs, washed up, changed cloths, loaded the truck, and set off on the milk route. Grandad's truck had begun as a Chevrolet coupe but somebody had removed the truck lid and fitted in a small pickup box, so it looked like a bobtailed pickup truck, and I've never seen another like it. There were several dairies in town, but, of course, at home we always took from Grandad whenever he was peddling. When he wasn't, we took from a Mr. Wellington Law who had a dairy farm on the east side of town just where Walters Road angles off from Bell Street, and whose older son, Francis, was a close friend of my brother. Each milkman had his regular customers. He would stop in front of each house, and with his wire carrying basket filled with assorted goods, go up the porch or stoop to see what the household had ordered. You ordered by putting out, in a pre-arranged place, colored tickets previously purchased from the milkman, each color designating and stamped with one product; thus, a red ticket might be good for a quart of whole milk, a blue one for a pint of cream, etc. Butter or eggs you ordered by leaving a note, and, of course, you put out your empty bottles. The milkman pocketed the tickets, set out your order, took the empty bottles, and went on. In the winter it behooved you to take the milk inside without delay before it froze. When it froze, it expanded, upward, and you would find a column of frozen milk standing up from the bottle with the little paper cap perched on top. Efficiency took a large step backward when the milkmen traded in their horse-drawn wagons for trucks. The horse knew the route and pulled the wagon along without human guidance stopping faithfully at each customer's house, while the milkman went from door to door, but you couldn't train a truck to do that.
Back at Grandad's place, we unloaded the truck, took care of the accounts, and then it was a time for dinner. Dinner was a repast of breakfast with some variation in dishes. After dinner there was time to tend the chickens and the garden, see to the feed supplies, mend and fix, etc. Before four o'clock rolled around and it was again time to feed up and milk and clean out the barn. Supper around 6:00 was a three-peat of breakfast and dinner, and 8:00 was bedtime. No, I never wanted to be a dairyman. Sometime I'll tell you about taking part in the last cattle drive in Chagrin Falls, but that's another story.
Breakfast at our house depended on the time of year. From late spring through summer and early autumn it was usually eggs and bacon; four or five eggs, fried, poached, scrambled, or boiled (I liked boiled best) with a half-dozen or so strips of bacon or maybe ham or sausage. There would usually be fruit of some kind, and plenty of toast with butter and jam. Grandma had tea, Mother and Dad had coffee, and my brother and I had milk. Once a week, Mother would insist on substituting cereal for the eggs and bacon or cornflakes or shredded wheat or such. From late fall through the winter and early spring we ate pancakes, buckwheat pancakes. I could hardly wait until Grandma decided that the weather was cool enough and dispatched me over to the feed mill on Bell Street to buy a five-pound sack of buckwheat flour from Uncle John Foster, and stop at the grocery on the way for a cake of activated yeast. In a two-gallon earthenware crock, she would mix buckwheat flour, white flour, activated yeast dissolved in warm water, and I'm not sure what else, and set it over the hot air register to work. In a day or two it was ready. We would bring the black castiron griddle up from the cellarway where it had been hanging on a nail, wipe it off, and put it on the oil stove to heat. As it warmed, it would be greased with bacon grease swabbed on with a flat wooden stick whose end was wrapped with a strip of cloth and tied with string. Well, it worked. When the grease began to smoke and drops of water shaken onto the griddle exploded in little puffs of steam, we were ready to cook. Each spoonful of batter spread into a circle four or give inches across. When the the top of the pancakes was all bubbly, they were flipped and cooked an equal length of time on the other side. Four or five was merely an appetizer; a dozen-and-a-half or two dozen with a dozen strips of bacon made a breakfast that would stick to your ribs. Sometimes we put butter on our pancakes, sometimes maple syrup, sometimes both, but the way we liked them best was soaked in hot bacon grease poured right out of the pan where the bacon was frying. (Try that on your cardiologist). Again, once a week Mother insisted we forego the pancakes for cereal: oatmeal, cream of wheat, and such. I don't recall much fruit during the winter, but we did get dosed with cod liver oil.
Dinner was our main meal and it was at noon. We would have meat and potatoes, vegetables, bread and butter, and pie or cake for dessert. Sometimes there would be a salad because Mother said it was good for you (Grandma and Dad weren't too sure), maybe sliced cucumbers with vinegar and salt. Sunday dinner was almost always chicken, stuffed and roasted. On Thanksgiving we had turkey, on Christmas a duck or turkey. The day before, my brother or I would be dispatched to the barn with specific instructions as to which bird to bring back. We would catch it, decapitate it on the chopping block with an old hatchet reserved for that purpose, and let it run around until it expired. Up at the house it would plunged into a pot of boiling water in preparation for lucking. You could pick a fowl dry but it was not advisable, especially a duck - that down would float all over the house. The soft feathers and down was saved, dried and stored for use in pillows and comforters. After plucking, the bird was singed with an open flame to burn off the pin feathers, then eviscerated and readied for stuffing and roasting (but you know all about that).
Supper was at six o'clock, and was a lighter, less formal, meal. The main dish might be fried potatoes or corned beef hash or French toast or even fried eggs. Baked beans made a regular appearance. There would be apple sauce or cottage cheese or the like on the side, pickles, too. Now I have traveled and eaten all across the country and a good part of the world, and I've had some mighty fine meals, but I have yet to find anything better than fresh baking powder biscuits, hot from the oven topped with spoonfuls of new honey gouged right out of the comb, and I've made super from that. Grandma regularly announced that bread and milk was good enough for anybody, and putting action to her words would make her super from a bowl of milk with bread crumbled into it. Some cold Sunday nights in the winter would bring a special treat. Across town at the north end of Main Street a Mr. Short had a little shop which might have been a drug store, but I'm not sure. Inside, it was dark and narrow and along the right side was an ice cream counter where you could get a dish of ice cream or a Sundae or an ice cream soda and eat it sitting in a wire-back chair at a little round table. In the winter, the ice cream freezer also held fresh oysters. How this came to be I never knew, but I didn't mind at all bundling up and trudging clear across town to buy a quart of them. Mother would cook them up with milk and cream and butter, and a bowl of hot oyster stew with a double handful of those little round oyster crackers made a delicious dinner on a cold winter's night.
We had fish sometimes, but only when they were fresh, which usually meant when we caught them ourselves. We might have them for dinner or super, and I've even had fried sunfish for breakfast. Along about April when the spring peepers began turning up, Dad would get the urge to go bullheadin'.(Bullheads are catfish with rounded, rather than forked, tails, and like all that family have sharp barbels and are as ugly as sin.) A puncture wound by one to those barbels would turn red and swell up and ache for a week. Getting ready to go was quick and easy. A can of worms for bait was no problem. Half a dozen cane poles with lines and hooks were handy in the woodshed, as was a kerosene lantern. A couple of kerosene torches were made up by stuffing empty tin cans with old rags and saturating them with fuel. We would walk the six or eight blocks, with a shortcut through the school yard, to the Paper Mill Pond and follow the foot path along the south bank to the upper end which was known as Little Falls. I guess there was a falls there once before the paper mill dam raised the water level and flooded it, long before my time. The fish poles would be thrust into ground at the water's edge with the lines hanging in the water and the bait just off the bottom. We would build a little fire mostly for companionship, sit back and relax. When the tip of a pole would wiggle, we would ease up cautiously, slip the pole out of the ground, and wait for the fish to take a good bite, then bring him in. As darkness fell, we would light the kerosene torches and place one at each end of the line poles. A couple of hours would net us a nice mess of bullheads. Back home we had to skin and clean them. Our method was to behead them, make a circular cut through the skin just ahead of the tail, a long cut down the belly, then nail their tails to the woodshed door and skin them with a pair of pliers. One of Dad's inflexible rules regarding fishing and hunting was: If you're big enough to catch 'em, you're big enough to clean 'em. I tried that on my two grandsons once and was met with looks of total incredulity as they nervously backed away.
We fished in both the Paper Mill Pond and Whitesburg Pond about a half-mile upstream, in the south branch of the Chagrin River, and in Paw-Paw Lake and Lake Lucerne. The latter were private developments but we always knew a property owner or two who didn't mind us using his name. Lake Erie was about a forty-minute drive away and was justly famed as the greatest fish producing body of fresh water in the country. It was, in those days, loaded with blue and yellow pike perch, and lake trout, and even the occasional sturgeon. Dick Humphries, a hunting and fishing buddy, and I would sometimes drive to Fairport Harbor for an evenings fishing. I remember one evening when we quit in less than an hour; our arms were tired and we had about fifty nice blue pike to clean when we got home.
Hunting never contributed significantly to our dinner table. Actually, there wasn't much small game to hunt, and there were no deer at all. Pheasants were legal game but they were scarce; quail and grouse were scarce, too, and were not legal game. We hunted fox squirrels and gray squirrels in the deep woods, and shot red squirrels on sight because they were pests who ate birds eggs and chased the larger squirrels clear out of their territory but were themselves too small to eat. Well, we didn't eat them but Mr. Fred Harvey who was a maintenance worker at Evergreen Cemetery essayed a meal of them at one time. The cemetery had an overabundance of red squirrels, and a total absence of birds and other squirrels. Mr. Harvey, both doing a good turn and thinking that a squirrel was a squirrel, shot a mess of them, took them home, cleaned them, fried them - and took them out behind the barn and buried them. Those red squirrels had been living on pine cones and had such a strong smell and tasted of pine resin that they were inedible. A rare occurrence put an end to our hunting squirrel for food, however, when a fox squirrel moved into town and took up residence in our walnut tree. This was virtually unheard-of; the folks snapped pictures to show the unbelievers, people came by to see it, Dad laid a rail up to the kitchen window sill so Mother could feed it peanuts and even made and put up a house for the critter. (Now they are so common that I trap the bloody nuisances.) We continued to hunt rabbits, though, and usually brought home enough for a half dozen meals during hunting season which was only six weeks long.
We ate pretty well or so we thought at the time and so I think still. It was plain food but it was pure food, selected for taste and flavor and without regard to color or uniformity or storability or shipability or any of that. It had no additives or enhancements or preservatives. My best example (and you have heard this before ) is chicken. Growing up I liked chicken; now I can't eat it. But a few years ago while traveling through the Balkans I happened onto some chicken and eggs that tasted like they used to. I think the difference was that every chicken I saw over there was out in the barnyard picking up bugs and seed and grit, rather than living in a wire cage and eating chemicals. Anyway, we were all comparatively healthy, fit and able to do and did do a day's work. There was a noticeable absence of overweight people like you see today, and most of us lived past our allotted three score years and ten. Not a bad record.
By now you are probably thinking all we did in those days was eat. Not so, nor did we work all the time. I have lots more that I want to tell you because as I write more memories come back to me, and it's all your fault for stirring them up.
Love
Your Parent
COPYRIGHT