Childhood Memories: Health

 (Note: This series of 10 Blogs are written primarily for my grandchildren. Others may or may not find them of interest.)

 I was born in the rural “teacherage” (think parsonage) of Zion Lutheran Church, Walburg, Texas. Mother’s bed had been moved into the dining room, as that was the only room with a stove to provide heat in the central Texas December cold.  Dr. Wiedemeyer was there as always with his black bag and he was assisted by my Aunt Mattie Kurio. I weighed in at a healthy 10 pounds. After 11 days I was taken out of the house to the church for my baptism.

My health continued to be excellent. Of course during the first 10 years of my life I (together with all my sibs) had all the usual childhood diseases. I know that I had measles, mumps, whooping cough red eye, scarletina and chicken pox.

Living “out in the country” and always going barefoot I stepped on myriads of pieces of glass, pins, nails, splinters and bristles. We would dig them all out if necessary with assistance from sisters or Mother. If we couldn’t get them out we applied a generous dab of some very black gooey salve which allegedly has “drawing power.” Whenever we had a deep scratch. An itch that wouldn’t go away, or the beginning of something like athlete’s foot we applied a generous dose of kerosene and that usually took care of it.

I had an unnamed Aunt who always supplied us with a drink that was supposed to be very good at preventing nasty colds or cure them if they had arrived. It came in a 20-ounce bottle and was called “Alpenkrauter). She used it very generously and it sustained her health until she was well into her 90”s. It was only then that I really looked at the label and discovered that its alcohol proof was also something like 90!

Bee, wasps, ants and spider bites were simply facts of life. Mercurochrome seemed to fix most of that and if things got really bad we went to Iodine. Yet we were always told to be careful lest we get infected and we end up with “lock jaw.”

There were other homemade “wonder drugs”. For chest colds there was a mustard plaster. For sore throat a big slice of fatty bacon wrapped around the neck brought instant relief. Any pain in the abdomen area requited a whiskey rub. This was much preferred to detested castor oil. If a cough simply would not stop Dad would have to spring not only for a rare fresh lemon but also use some of our carefully limited whiskey. This was mixed with just a tiny bit of sugar and warm water. I don’t remember it ever failing!

But there was one major health issue which very nearly proved fatal. Somewhere between the ages of 5 and 7 I developed a terrible stomachache which could not be helped by any of the home remedies. Finally Dr. Wiedemeyer was called in. He said “You have got to get this boy to the hospital.” So Uncle Reinhold and Dad got into the Model A Ford and took me to King’s Daughter’s Hospital in Temple, Texas more than an hour away where Dr. Harland (a nephew of Mom) would take care of me. Ether put me under. It was a ruptured appendix. Peritonitis was all over my insides. Of course, there were no antibiotics. Three tubes were inserted to drain off the puss. I was on the critical list. Obviously, I survived. And I marvel at the tid-bits of memories I carry with me some 75 years later.  I remember the embarrassment of not being able to deliver a urine sample unless I was standing. I remember a wonderful plump nurse named Miss French. She told me I was beautiful and that she would wait until I was grown so that she could marry me (and I half believed her!). I remember Uncle Frank giving me a store-bought little 12-inch sailing boat. And I do remember the anxiety on the faces of my Mom and Dad and the relief and prayers of gratitude when I was retuned home. And Mother always insisted that the one side effect of my appendectomy was that it slowed down my running. She claimed I was very swift before and just barely normal after the surgery.

Childhood Memories: Fun and Games

(Note: This series of ten blogs are intended primarily for my children and grandchildren and so may be of limited interest to others.)

I had lots of fun and played many games as a child. It always amazes me that the games we played as children seem to be the same games that other kids my age played all around the country at the same time. We had no interaction with each other, often came from different ethnic backgrounds, certainly had no access to modern social media and yet we played many of the same games.

Like so many others in the late 1920’s or early 30’s, I played Hide and Seek, I Spy, Draw a Magic Circle, Sheep Pour Down (where did that title come from?), Kick the Can and Red Rover. I played very few, if any, board games. Of course, being a Texan I played lots of straight dominoes, and early on learned to play Shoot the Moon and Texas 42. Old Maid seems to have always been around. I sat by my father (often falling on the floor next to him at wedding receptions and other celebrations) when he played the card game Scot, but I never learned it.

Softball was omnipresent as long as there were at least two of us. In school we always choose up sides, played at every recess and even competed against two near-by public schools (Walburg and Thrall), but not against the neighboring Catholic school. When the older kids in the church youth group (Walther League) played against other church groups I got to be “pig tail” which means I backed up the catchers as we had no backstop behind the catcher.

The holiday seasons, wedding receptions and birthday parties were much anticipated. At Easter we went out to the pasture and found the most beautiful wild flowers (especially Texas bluebonnets if they were already blooming) and decorated fancy Easter egg nests. On Easter morning these would be filled with Chocolate Easter eggs and a few single-color painted hard boiled eggs. We looked forward to weddings. The receptions were always in the country home of the bride. There was usually a lane that ran through a gated fence. At the entry little boys were allowed to “hold rope”. We stretched a rope across the lane and “demanded” a contribution from the arriving cars before we would lower the rope and let the car in. After all the guestsa had arrived the pennies and nickels (very, very rarely was there as much as a quarter) would be distributed. Of course the fewer boys (NEVER a girl) that participated the better the per boy yield. I was lucky. My father was always the wedding organist and was the local church school principal so I was usually permitted to be one of the rope bearers. Another good thing about those weddings was the wonderful Texas bar-b-que which was absolutely essential to the celebration. Then around midnight the chivaree players arrived. They banged on the plowshares, the kettledrums, the shovels and whatever else was around to make a din. Then they were served beer (homemade during Prohibition) with my dad singing a special humorous song for the bride, and then ending with a “midnight lunch”.

Rarely, but very special were the times when dad would finally give in to our perpetual pestering and tell us stories of “von alten” - old-times. Over and over we heard the yarns of the time he and his sister were afraid to complete their walk home from school because a pack of wolves got between them and home. Or the story of the afternoon riding of the calves and   his friend who got pitched off the calf right into the cow dung; Or the story of his grandmother who sat in her chicken coop in the dark all night with flashlight in one hand and a rifle in the other and confronted the “you bastard” who had been coming to steal her chickens!

So there was no television, no social media, no movies (for us), but I would not trade my childhood fun and games for any of the wonderful gadgets, theme parks or organized Little Leagues providing entertainment for my grandchildren today.

Childhood Memories: Zion Lutheran School

This is the third in a series on my Childhood Memories, written especially for my children and grandchildren.

My first eight years of schooling were at the two room parochial school named Zion Lutheran School of Walburg. As its name indicates, it was a parish school. As such it had three distinct aims: to teach the Christian Lutheran faith to the children who had been baptized as infants in Zion congregation, to help preserve the best of the Lutheran German heritage and thirdly to prepare its students for productive citizenship in the USA. And in my judgment it achieved all three goals in an outstanding way.

Teaching the faith was primary and the methods were traditional. Tell the Bible stories, ask the questions of the Catechism and get the correct centuries-old answers, and memorize the “proof texts, the hymns, prayer and Martin Luther’s Small Catechism. Up until my graduation in 1941 these were all learned and taught in German!

We were taught to read the old fashioned way-pure phonics. Io can still see the wall charts. I remember the primer and “I am   the gingerbread man; I am. I am." We had no library and no access to a public one. When I was in the seventh grade we (rejoice greatly) received a set of 38 condensed versions of children’s classic books. Mt only regret: I had read them all in the first two weeks after they arrived. But then we got a set of World Book Encyclopedia. As diligently as I read I never finished that!

Writing was just penmanship-no essays, books reports or creative writing Spelling was a separate class. But grammar was paramount. We diagramed sentences and I can still put it all down: subject, predicate, object, adjective, adverbs, subjunctive clauses, the whole bit.

History was as much Texas history as US history. At one point I tried to memorize the names of all 52 counties in Texas and their county seats-but, of course, that was all secondary to the Alamo and the San Jacinto Monument!

I don't remember any science course. Yet my father, Principal Kieschnick, wanted his students to have new learnings. I am sure that neither I nor any of my classmates had ever been to a zoo or an aquarium. Once he contracted with a gentleman who brought a mature elephant to our school. As the elephant walked around our playground we felt its trunk - and a few students even rode it. Another time a large preserved full-sized whale was brought to the school. We felt its skin and marveled a how whalebones could be shaped into useful objects. 

Two classrooms (grades 1-3 and 4-8.) Teachers Bleke and Kieschnick Outside of my piano//organ and one high school teacher of Spanish, I had not one single female teacher from grade one through grad school!

Discipline seemed strict and fair with spanking being an option utilized only “when very necessary.”…We drank water drawn from the school well and dispensed in little tin cups of each student. Lunch came in sacks-except for mine as I lived close enough to school to always go home for lunch. No school busses and in the early years some classmates rode to school on their horses or in buggies drawn by horses. There was a place for the horses to rest and be fed, just next to the outdoors hole-in-the –ground toilet for boys. In winter the boys got coals from an outside bin an h kept the pot-bellied stove stoked.

We had plenty of fun. Recesses time was generous. We chose up sides and played softball. At other times we “shot marbles” played “red rover" and “andy over.” Christmas was time for wonderful Christmas programs in church on Christmas Eve where we each received a brown paper bag with goodies-the one time in the year when I had a stick of gum and an orange just for myself, and some red and white Christmas candy! End of the year school picnics were time for the oompah band, softball games, ice cream scones, and a “program” with candidates for public office in the 1930’s assuring us they were against “child labor laws” which allegedly might prohibit parents from sending their own children into the fields to pick cotton!

My memories now are all positive. For its time the school was perfect for me. Today is a new day and I am glad my grandchildren have so much more than I had. And I look with dismay at the many in our country and in our world who would be so blessed to have the simple lessons and eternal values which were taught me at Zion Lutheran School in Walburg, Texas.

Childhood Memories: Work

This is the second in a series on my Childhood Memories, written especially for my children and grandchildren.

My parents taught me the value of work. Early on they taught me the Bible verse: “If any would not work, neither should he eat!” In summer we lived by Dad’s mantra “In the field by sunup!” And they practiced what they preached. Dad was principal of the school, taught grades four through eight, and was church organist and choir director. He taught a Sunday morning Bible class and was the adult counselor for the youth group named The Walther League. He also cleaned the church and saw to it that hymn numbers were posted for Sunday worship. Before and/or after school he raised nine kids. Beyond his family and the local congregation he served for many years as Chair of The Texas District Teachers Conference and organized the annual statewide conference.

Mom, of course, washed diapers continually, served three hot meals a day, did hundreds of loads of laundry (always carrying the hot water in buckets to the washing machine.) She used the hand-turned clothes wringer before hanging the laundry on the drying line, taking them down when dry. Dad always wore ironed shorts; the girls wore homemade dresses sewn by Mom (often made from the material of flour sacks et sim.) She cared for the sick, always saw to it that “the beds were made”, canned up to 800 quarts of home fruits and vegetables in one year. And still made time to hear our daily recitation of Bible verses and catechism lesson.

Within that context my work was pretty simple. Of course, I milked the cows, gathered the eggs, and watered the hogs. We shucked an awful lot of corn, sometime made less tiresome when my sibs and I would have contests to see who could get 100 ears shucked first.

My memory is that I was forever pushing a lawnmower. Mom’s idea of the expanse of our lawn (our house abutted a major pasture) kept expanding. By the fifth grade I was busy mowing for my relatives. Uncle Walter wanted to be helpful. He was a very clever blacksmith so he rigged up an electric motor on top of the lawn mower blades. Big problem: Before I had cut even a tenth of his lawn I had run over the electric cord. I hastily repaired it with “black tape” only to run over and cut the extension cord at another place. My cousin Olga had what seemed to me to be an acre of front lawn, and try as I might I never cut the mowing path as straight as she liked and so had to recut the lawn in 100 degree heat.

It was obvious early on that this boy would never make it on the farm and this just got proven again when I was sent to pick cotton. My younger brother Harold and my elder sister Leona both out-picked me, and remember that we were paid by the pound picked, thirty-five cents for a hundred pounds. On a really good day if I picked from sun-up to sundown I might hit that 100 pounds and earn my 35 cents. My sibs could double that!

My most enjoyable little job may have been digging for worms that Uncle Otto used for bait when he went to the lake for perch. He would slip us a full nickel when we had a good pint-sized can full of wriggly worms waiting for him. What I remember most vividly is not the nickel but a near disaster. We moved a small water tank to get to the moist ground underneath. It was full of wriggly worms. I hoisted the heavy grubbing axe above my head to really get into the earth. Just then brother Harold spotted a worm in the middle of my target. He ran to grab it. Angels descended from above, averted the swing of my digging axe which would have shattered his skill. We got the worms and shared the nickel.

Childhood Memories: Food

(Note: This is one of a series of Blog Postings of personal boyhood memories-written especially with my grandchildren in mind. Others may not find them interesting.)

I grew up poor. However, I never ever went hungry. There was always plenty of good food, most of it homegrown, home-canned, home-cooked. If I ever complained to my mother about the food (which was usually if there were no cookies because we couldn’t afford the sugar) Mother always replied “Venn du hungrich bist, den schmeck auch jelly-brut gut:” (If you are hungry then also jelly bread tastes good.) And jelly on top of home baked bread was always available. 

I have no memory of ever eating a meal (or even a hamburger) in a restaurant until I was in high school.  We always had plenty of vegetables, almost all of which we grew ourselves in our large garden. Almost every meal featured potatoes. Potatoes were so common that we had a joke that if there were no potatoes on the table at a meal other than breakfast one was not required to say grace because without potatoes there could not be a real meal.

Our meat came from hogs, cattle, chicken, turkeys, an occasional sheep, goat or rabbit, which we raised ourselves. Our fried chicken was always fresh as Mother would catch a fryer or two, cut its head off with a hatchet, batter it in flour and fry it in lard. Friends by the name of Schwausch would come to assist with butchering the hogs. The hog’s throats were cut, bled, immersed in scalding water and the hair scaled off. Then the cuts were made, the intestines and stomach cleaned and stuffed with sausage. The ham and sausages were smoked in our own smoke house. One of my jobs was to keep plenty of tree bark smoking so the flavor would really penetrate the meat.  Most of the meat was cut off the bones to make sausage, but even those bones were salvaged, cooked and served with mustard on top and mashed potatoes with beet juice over them as the side dishes.

Fish were a rare treat. My father and Uncle Otto would catch over a hundred small perch, which we  deep-fried. (Always outside over a corn-cob fueled fire.) Once in a while an itinerant fisherman would stop by and at very low cost sell us a couple trout or more likely a big string of catfish. If my memory is correct the first time I saw shrimp was when I was about 20 years if age.

Vegetables were in abundance. The earliest crops each spring were those we did not can -  like radishes, onions, lettuce followed by mustard greens, spinach, turnips, sweet potatoes and carrots, Eaten fresh or canned by the multitudes were string beans (the plants growing up the slender bamboo poles along side them) peas, corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, okra, kohlrabi, and beets.

Of course there was plenty of fruit (either from our own trees or from neighbors and relatives) I still see my mother sitting on our back porch, peeling away enough for literally hundreds of fruit jars to be filled with peaches, cherries, pears, blackberries, apricots, figs, and pickles.

There was always plenty of fresh milk, butter, homemade bread and gravy. Desserts were for special occasions like Sunday or birthdays. I have not a single memory of wine ever being at the table, but dad did enjoy homebrewed beer, especially during prohibition. At Christmas time Dad (much to Mother’s disapproval) would buy a quart of Four Roses bourbon and we would have Christmas eggnog with all the fresh home-made whipped cream the cup could possibly hold. I do not remember ever having even one bottle of soda or cola in my home until I was in college.

Of course, this was all long before television, cell phones (we did not even have a line phone) or computers. There were no after school baseball games, dance lessons, or baby-sitting jobs. So it is that my memories of food enjoyed while growing up are all warm and fuzzy. They are filled with images of our large family gathered around the table (I am one of 9 kids) saying the table prayer (often in German), then passing around those wonderful dishes of fresh nutritious food,  enjoying every bite and trying our best to keep our mouths shut while we energetically chewed.