The Autobiography of Aunt Millie Part Six: Hard Times

     Every day, she walked the two miles to the school[.  The] roads were [usually] kept open.  But the year before on Mar. 1 it was a rainy Sunday afternoon, and the future husband drove to Milford for her.  On the way home, the rain changed to snow, a terrific wind came up and her hat blew off just as snow was beginning to pile up in front of the cutter (that is the name of a one-horse sleigh for two people).  We could not stop to pick it up.  The wind whirled it away, and it was never found.

     That storm filled all the roads with drifts of snow, and her school was closed for three days.  In 1914 they didn't plow the roads open, the traffic (no automobiles then) simply drove through a gap in the roadside fence and made a track in the fields where the snow was only a foot deep instead of three and four and five and six [foot] drifts in the road.

     School opened again on Thursday and every youngster that had a hand sleigh brought it to school and enjoyed the coasting, as the school sat on a hill just right for that fun.  Also when the nearby ponds were full of snow, the teacher brought her skates and they all went to "Nobs" Pond about a quarter of a mile away.  Most of the youngsters slid on the ice, but the teacher certainly enjoyed that skating!

     After the marriage, the Old Timer thought bliss was in store.  She came into a home with her husband, his father and mother, a divorced older son and his seven-year-old boy.  She was still teaching school.  In spring the garden, cows and housework made endless hard work.  For the rest of her life, the Old Timer has a feeling that fate is watching her with a huge knobby club, waiting to wield it in case she ever got to be too happy.  And it was wielded many times!

     Her salary of $40 a month was most welcome, as there was no Social Security then.  You lived on what you earned!  They sold fire wood and for food they had salt pork, potatoes, some canned goods, but no greens of any kind.  Were the two parents glad their youngest son married the local school teacher?  What high falutin' ideas she had of being a good influence; what a nuisance she made of herself!  Changed the wall paper, hated the fancy iron bed, oh! she felt so superior!  She wishes now she could have her father-in-law talk of his service in the Civil War!  But the young are so self-centered!

     The first baby, Stanley, was a fine ten-[pound] boy -- and she bathed and nursed him faithfully, and knowing nothing about babies had a book by L. Emmet Holt.  As the baby was born in January the book said:  "Don't wean your baby in summer" and so he was nursed, and in 1916, they never gave [him] solid food. 

     Besides, another lie:  you don't become pregnant nursing a baby, but she did, and how could there be any nourishment in the milk?  [Stanley] quit gaining, but she was afraid to give him anything!  The book said nothing about feeding anything, but was it better to starve him?  He would gnaw on his thumb by the hour!

     Baby food was not made in those days [1915] so at long last she gave him well-cooked oatmeal and he began to grow again.

     The next baby, Thomas, was born the following May -- a placid "good" baby.  A boy came along every two years till there were six boys, all full of pep, vim and vigor.  To keep track of the 2-year-old she tied a bell on him, as who had time to watch him?

     That whole 20-year interval was one of hard hard work [and] worry about pregnancy.  Another boy, Gifford, came in 1919, another, Richard, in 1922, another, Walter, in 1925, and a girl, Hazel, in 1927.  How happy they were to have her!  She was only with them a year and a half, and died on Dec. 16, 1928.  The same year the other children all had chickenpox!  A sad memory, how the bereaved parents were in a store to get a few things, how tragic as their eyes met over a display of dolls!

     The knobby club was waiting, as a cow and heifer got sick and died, a great loss.  They had eaten withered wild cherry leaves, which contained prussic acid.

     They made butter to sell at 35 cents a pound.  Money was very scarce (1917).  They raised potatoes to sell, they raised two pigs each year, cured and ate them.  They bought a five-dollar "dominic" rooster to improve their flock.  When inbreeding occurred they traded him for a neighbor's, traded again for a lesser breed -- and at last [traded] for a poor specimen they ate up!

     In two years the soldier father died, and his widow went to housekeeping by herself.   After that the two in-laws got along more amicably and grew fond of each other.
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      The blizzard that began on March 1, 1914 virtually isolated the greater metropolitan New York area from the rest of the nation. Passenger, freight and milk trains were temporarily lost during the storm and New York's barometer dipped to a record 28.38 inches. Asbury Park, NJ received 24 inches of the heavy, wet snow. 2,000 people were stranded in the Billy Sunday Tabernacle in Scranton, PA. It was the worst storm since the blizzard of 1888, when Max was born.

    Once again, Millie's hat -- was it one that she had worn for many years or a new one purchased with her teacher's salary? -- disappeared into parts unknown, just as her life as a single schoolteacher was about to end and her life as a wife and mother glimmered in the distance like a snowflake in the sun.     

     Luther Emmet Holt was an American pediatrician who published The Care and Feeding of Children in 1894. It became a best-seller very quickly. Holt was responsible for the introduction of milk certification in New York City, after proving that a large number of infant mortalities in the tenement districts were due to high bacterial counts in milk. Though the book and the one that followed, Diseases of Infancy and Childhood, were popular, it did not seem to be written to be easily understood by the first-time mother! Why should a baby not be weaned in summer, for heaven's sake? And why didn't her mother-in-law step in and tell her to feed that kid?

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