Life in the house during the depression days, food and work were scarce, but mtoher was resourceful. She would do sewing for other people. We had a cow and used to make butter and sell it. Wherever we could get any income is where we got it. We never went hungry, but we had some skinny meals. I always thought it would be great to have a tuna fish sandwich to take with me to school but mostly I had jelly sandwiches or else a hard fried egg sandwich wrapped in newspaper. We didn’t have waxed paper. I would open my little lunch wrapped in newspaper and there was some of the print on my sandwich. So I digested the news.
My Mom would pull me aside whenever we had chicken or whatever we had, and would say, now you just take one piece and leave the rest for the little boys. They were always called the little boys. They came first. She would always tell me to be the peacemaker and not make a fuss. Take one and leave the rest for the little boys, but Mother did the best she could. She had a hard row to hoe.
We had no indoor plumbing. My Dad had a tobacco problem and he would go out and sit in the outside john and smoke, but he would never smoke in front of us kids. You could smell the fumes coming out of the "john.". We bathed in one of the old round tin tubs on Saturday night. Water was heated, and because I was a girl I got to bathe first before the dirty boys. We had to get chairs and hang blankets over them to have any privacy while bathing. We bathed once a week, and we needed to, believe me.
*Note from Editor: The photo above (not the outhouse, duh) is of Margie when she was a teenager. The inscription on the lower right-hand side says, "Love to the best mother in the world, Margie." Which of all her kids and grandkids do you think looks the most like her?
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