Being married to
Grandpa was not easy. He was
very frugal when it came to spending money on things that his wife would like
to have, like curtains for the house.
Who needs them, he must have figured.
He tended to drink a lot and sometimes when he came home from town with
“his shoes full” as the old saying went, he became right down nasty and abused
Grandma. Family legend has it that my Dad and his Brother Herman sometimes
slept in the same room as Grandma to prevent Grandpa from beating up on her
when he came home drunk. The legend also tells that when Grandma was pregnant,
Grandpa helped himself to sexual favors from the hired girl. He was far from being an angel, more like a
certified S.O.B. if you ask me. My Dad
once mentioned to my Brother Lyle, that the reason he would never strike his
wife or one of us kids, is that he saw how brutality hurt the whole family
Grandpa was the boss and owner
of the farm, and way back when, he was known to have one of the best horse
farms in the area, with beautiful trotters for the buggies and work horses for
the plow. Unfortunately, good friends
(?) found that if they would come and talk to Grandpa up behind the barn and be
nice to him, he would sign personal notes for them, and in doing so, when they
could not pay the notes, Grandpa couldn’t either, and so he signed the farm
away into bankruptsy.
Grandpa died in 1938 with the
farm financially underwater. Bankruptsy
meant that Grandma couldn’t hold it together, so my Dad, Louie, took it over,
and Dads siblings signed off on their shares. In 1941, with the help of a lawyer, he worked
out a written agreement, with his mother, (my Grandma of course), which
contained some interesting clauses. It
provided, for example, that Grandma would live in the same house as our family
and eat at the same table. If she
decided that she would rather live alone in a separate part of the house,
(which she did), Dad would need to provide her with split wood to heat her
rooms, plus 200 pounds of meat each year, Milk and cream as
needed, 5 pounds
of butter per month, 400 pounds of potatoes and 200 pounds of flour each year, and 2 dozen eggs each
week. She was also guaranteed the use of
the well for water and use of the cellar to store her food. That did cover it rather well, I do believe.
My early memory kicks in about
1938 when Grandpa died. I sort of remember
his body lying in state in the living room for a day or so for viewing, but
that’s about all I remember about him.
Grandma was a saint and loved us kids dearly and showed it to us all
the time, and so, following are some stories about Grandma and what I remember
of her and her love for us young ones.
SOUP IN A BISS----Now
that is a concoction you don’t see much anymore mainly because you don’t
see many tin cans used regularly in the kitchen for cooking and eating. A “biss” was a plain old tin can about 6 inches high and 4 ½ inches across that originally
came filled with something to eat from the store. It was cleaned out and became part of an old
farm wife’s cookware in the kitchen. The
soup was made from bread, broken up into smaller pieces and put into the
biss. But----pay attention now----it
had to be homemade bread, not the store bought, Wonder Bread kind. On top of that bread, put enough sugar to
sweeten to this kids taste and pour milk over it to make a brew, and that was a
“soup in the biss”. It was always the
favorite of us kids, especially if you had a sweet tooth like I did, and still
have.
What made it kind of memorable in our house was that frequently,
Grandma would treat me with soup in a
biss, just before my meal times back in the other side of the house with my
family, and it ruined my appetite----which really annoyed my mother enough
times that it made a big enough “discussion” in the house that as a kid, I
remember it. You probably know how it
can be, with two women living in one house together.
BLOODY BUTCHERING TIME----Blood of any kind really gets the attention
of any kid, and I was certainly not an exception. There were plenty of butchering times around
the farm back then because it was a natural part of putting home grown food on
the table. Grandma, and all other farm
wives thought nothing of going out to the chicken coop, and taking that long
stiff piece of wire that we called the “chicken hook” and fishing around
through all the chicken legs and feet under the flock of chickens, until she would hook the leg of the hen that
she wanted to cook for supper. Then, it
was off to the chopping block, and off with the head and so on till that poor
old chicken was on the table.
Butchering pigs was a much bloodier affair, when a hog would caught,
tipped over on its side and stuck in the throat with my Dad’s special “sticking
knife” that he used. The pig needed to be held down on the ground
to bleed out, so that Grandma, with her old pioneer training, could come
forward with her dish pan to catch the blood that gushed out of the wound. That blood shortly wound up on the table as
Grandma’s blood sausage, using the intestines of that same pig as casing for
the sausage. As a kid I was able to help
with the process of cleaning out the intestines by pouring water through them,
and then cranking the handle of the food grinder to stuff the guts with the
blood sausage material that Grandma had cooked up.
COOKING HOME MADE SOAP----This was all part of Grandma’s pioneer
background and training. Living in a log
house when she was first married gave her all sorts of work that brides these
days will certainly never experience, (I
will add right here, that at this point in the story, some of your readers
might be saying-----“Hold on there a minute, we can still butcher and handle
these jobs as well as any pioneer could”------but my statements go with
thoughts about my kids and Grandkids and their experiences of growing up and
living in today’s metropolitan world with a supermarket just down the street,
and NOT on a farm.)
Anyway, when it came to making soap, it was a chance for me to “help
out” Grandma by PLAYING WITH FIRE!!!!!!!!!!!
I never knew or cared much about how Grandma took some of the parts of
that butchered pig that were not edible and turned them into soap, but I do
recall that several cans of “Red Devil Lye” was part of the concoction. The best part of it for us kids is that the
concoction had to be boiled for a long time, and Grandma handled that by using
a big, 30 inch
diameter cast iron kettle which she hung over the fire out in the yard, on a
framework made of cedar poles. Under the
pot was the fire which had to be fed with fresh wood for a long time, and that
is where we kids had our fun. Just
imagine, being allowed to feed a fire and keep poking around in it to keep it
burning good and even being appreciated for our efforts. (To us it was just fun)
It beat the heck out getting caught, like happened to me one time, when
I was playing with matches and dry corn husks in the sawdust filled ice
house. Dad was not happy when he caught
me, but at least I knew enough to NOT try that in the hay mow of the barn.
After cooking long enough, Grandma would let the pot hang to cool off,
and the finished product was a layer of soap, about two inches thick, which was
cut into blocks and used for washing clothes.
In earlier pioneer days, I’m sure it was used for all purposes,
including shampooing the hair and other personal hygiene.
GRANDMA’S HEALTH CONCERNS----Grandma was always concerned about the
health of her grandkids, and one of her major concerns about me, that drove me
wild, was that I was going to ruin my eyesight by reading too much. When our family received a pile of old
magazines that had been salvaged from a dump near Milwaukee by a relative and
brought up north to us poor relatives on the farm, I was in seventh heaven,
cause now I had something new to read. I
had my favorite reading hideouts, like up in my “fort” above the corn crib, or
in the soft hay of the hay mow. I couldn’t
read too much in the house because Grandma would keep nagging me about it. When I had to change reading locations, I
would roll the magazine around my lower leg and hold it in place inside my sock
while I casually walked across the yard.
I out-foxed Grandma like that every time.
Reading in bed, with a flashlight was a real no-no!!! With flashlight batteries costing at least
five cents apiece, back in those days, such extravagance was just out of the
question. Reading in bed with the
electric power that was installed in the house in 1936 was difficult too,
because the sole light in my bedroom was a bare single bulb hanging down from
the ceiling in the middle of the room, switched on and off with a string
stretching from the bulb socket to the
bed post. The electric building code
back then did not provide for receptacles along the walls, but then, we
couldn’t afford extra bed lamps either.
GRANDMA’S PETS----Understandingly, cats and dogs were and are a normal
part of a farmer’s life, but Grandma, accumulated a few unusual ones.
The first one, long before my time, was a pet deer. I know about it only through family legends,
but it seems that somewhere, somehow, the family found a small male fawn up
north somewhere, that was adopted into the family as a pet. It was not exactly legal to have a wild life
pet, even back in those days, and as the story goes, the game warden got wind
of it and came to check it out. Again,
as the story goes, that deer was so wise that when the game warden showed up on
the yard, the deer went and hid itself behind a pile of lumber stacked in a
corner of the barn and granary, and the warden never was able to pin down this
illegal possession incident. The deer
was raised to adulthood on the farm, but as it got older, it got a more and
more nasty disposition and had to be kept behind a fence. Eventually, it got so nasty that it tried to
tear up the fence by twisting it with its antlers and it had to go. It probably ended up on the farm kitchen
table as a venison meal, because the head and antlers were mounted and adorned
the living room wall for years. That
mounted head even followed the family when the farm was sold and Ma and Dad
moved to downtown Marion, where it hung in the garage for a number of years
after that.
The pet pig that Grandma raised was a different story. Grandma was always a soft touch for the weak
and helpless, so in this case, when a sow got a large litter of piglets, there
was one small, runty, piglet that was always last at the sow’s supper table and
physically crowded to the rear end of its mothers rows of teats, which were
most of the time out of reach for the little guy. Grandma saw this and took pity on the piglet
and took it up to the house to feed it out of a baby bottle and nipple. It stayed up at the house, and eventually
wound up penned up in a fence in Grandma’s garden. The pig was never named, but it did become a
family pet to all.
One of the surprising things we learned about pigs from this pet, was
how clean pigs are when given a chance. One
of the most smelly jobs on a farm is cleaning out a pig stall, especially if it
in an enclosed shed in the warm summer weather and it hasn’t been cleaned in a
while. Pigs in the stall were forced to live there of course, but the pet pig
had its own fenced pen, and it chose not to live like a pig. It did its daily duty in a special place in
one corner of the pen and all in all, it was a nice clean animal to be around.
Eventually however, Grandma’s pet pig went the way of most farm animals
and became a farm product, when it was butchered and eaten by the family. Very few farm animals, with the exception of
dogs and cats, ever die a natural death.
GRANDMA’S PASSING----In 1948, after I had finished High School and then
worked for the summer in Milwaukee to save up some money, Dick Kreuger, Gene
Major, and I took off in Dick’s 1934 Chevy to go down to Florida and work there
for the winter as an adventure trip to escape Wisconsin’s cold. We searched for jobs in Jacksonville FL and
couldn’t find any so we drove across the state (living on catsup sandwiches and
sodas as I recall) to Tampa where we didn’t find any work either. We finally got the idea that maybe Wisconsin
was not so bad after all, and headed back to good old Marion. We arrived home just in time for me to be a
pall bearer for Grandma at her funeral from St. John’s Lutheran Church.
Goodbye Grandma, you were a wonderful
Grandmother.
copyright 2014 by Harold Ratzburg
