It's a precious thing to hear the words of an older generation. Their lives are marked by the battle scars of time, but they have gained insurmountable wisdom through it all. They're eager to give precious advice and recount stories of years gone by...if only we'll listen.
What follows is the edited version of an interview with my 88-year-old grandma, whom I recently visited on vacation. She willingly sat down and gave me a glimpse into her past, along with some thoughtful advice, and kindly agreed to be featured on my blog!
Talk a little about your background; how you grew up, your family, etc. I was born on a farm in 1928, and delivered at home by a doctor and a nurse. When I was one year old, I got a Happy Birthday card from the nurse, who remembered me. I was born in a small town in Pennsylvania, and our farm was just outside of that town. We were living in the farmhouse together with my grandparents, and my grandmother took care of us when my mother was sick. My sister was ten years older than I, and she took care of all of us when my mother was sick. Then I had trauma; my mother died when I was only four years old. A year later, after my mother died, my grandma died.
I grew up totally Mennonite, and my mother and father spoke Pennsylvania Dutch. But I never learned it. (They spoke German, which is the same as Pennsylvania Dutch. Dutch is originally Deutsch , meaning German). When they didn’t want us to know what they were talking about, they spoke it. We had neighbors who also were Mennonite and spoke Pennsylvania Dutch. But I never realized my life was Pennsylvania Dutch, so much, because we were totally Mennonite.
How many siblings did you have? There were three of us about the same age - 2, 4, and 6. I was the oldest of this group. Then I had a brother who was six years older than I, and a sister who was almost ten years older than I. These two older ones were the first of the family, and they were more impacted by my mother’s death. My father decided he needed a mother for us children, and he remarried and we left the farm. We moved to another small town, into a very lovely house, which was a big change for us. Our farm was very poor, but this house was in town. I had a new grandfather - my stepmother’s father. Later on, when he was old, he was also partially blind.
I remember there, we didn’t have a refrigerator; we had an icebox. Laughs The ice man would come with a big block of ice, and put it into the box. We lived there for several years, and then my father bought a house, with the help of my new grandfather, where I lived the rest of my young life. I left when I was 18 to go into nurses’ training at a nearby hospital.
Grandma paused and looked down at the table, a faraway look in her eyes. She roused herself from her musings:
Let’s see, where are we?
So, I went to a grade school there, and then I walked a mile to the high school with my brother and other children from the neighborhood who walked that same distance; we didn’t have school buses. When I was six, what should've been my first year in school, I spent most of that year having measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, and all of the children’s diseases; along with my brothers and sisters who were closest to me in age. So I flunked first grade, because I didn’t have enough days present. When we moved to my new grandfather’s house, the school was very close, just down the street from our house. It was also a one-room school. My older sister was out of school, but my older brother and my younger brother were in this one-room school with me. Of course the teacher was very busy, so she would listen to you read, and she would look at your math questions and things. After half a year, she passed me on to second grade. I did first and second grade in this one-room school house. I passed on, so I never missed a grade, and was always at my grade level for my age.
We were very poor. My father earned $100 a week to support a support a family of five. My stepmother had another child, my half-brother. I was 10 years older than he, just like my older sister was 10 years older than I. I didn’t have much interaction with him - most of it was with my brother and sister. At this new house where we lived in town (with neighbors!), we had a six car garage with a second story. My father, being the farmer that he was, fixed up the second story for chickens. So we had our own eggs, and we had our own chickens at Sunday dinner. The house was a large house: it had a basement, first and second floor, and an attic. So there were actually four stories. The basement was not finished; it was a cellar. We had a coal stove. They would come with a delivery of coal for us to heat the house, open a window and put a trough down so that they could put the coal in outside. It would slide down this trough into the coal cellar.
My father of course had a patch (which was like a farm for him), and we had sweet corn and tomatoes, fresh peas, lima beans, and all the vegetables. Once, we were on summer vacation from school. He would go out and pull all these ears of corn, and he had a big pile of corn that he had pulled from the garden. Part of our summer vacation was to husk this corn. Well, there was a potato chip factory on the next property. The people who worked there saw us, these young children, standing by this pile of corn. They said, “Whoever does the most gets a bag of potato chips.” We finished pretty quick. I think I was the fastest one, because I was the oldest one. So I got the potato chips, which was a big treat for us at that time. Then my stepmother would cut all this corn. She didn’t have us do it, she did it. And it wasn’t that easy to slice - if you’ve ever taken a corn cob, and cut off the corn, it’s quite a job. But she did all that, and then she canned it. In the basement where we got the coal, we also had an area for canning jars. My parents tried to get enough garden things to last us through the winter. We rarely went to the store, because we had the chickens, the eggs, and all the vegetables. Out of the garden also came potatoes. My stepmother cared a lot for us, and was very Pennsylvania Dutch. She grew up in a farm community, but was working in a factory when my father married her.
My father took me to get my driver's license when I was 16. Usually the Pennsylvania Dutch women didn’t learn to drive, so he was pretty forward in that way.
My father only had 4 or 6 years of schooling, which was unusual for Mennonites. But he had the evening bulletin delivered, the city newspaper. He kept himself pretty well informed of what was happening, and educated himself. The situation was one that even if you had a 6 year education, you could teach school in those days. There were one-room schools.
What do you remember from WWII? Let’s see…in 1946, [the year after the war ended], I graduated from high school. This was a transition time, because from ’46 to ’49 I was away from home. Since I was born in ’28, I was 11 when the war started, in 1939. We weren’t that affected by it, because we as Mennonites were conscientious objectors; and we were living in a rural community. What I remember mostly was about FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt]. Everyone - even the Mennonites - listened to FDR. He did his Fireside Chats over radio; then he even went into a second term. You had a radio? No, we didn’t have a radio. Then my older brother bought a radio. It was in his bedroom, but we weren’t allowed to listen to it. Did you listen to it secretly? No, not really. When we heard about those Fireside talks, my father let us listen to it
After you finished grade school and high school, you went on to nursing school.
It was in a nearby town, with the closest hospital. During the last year of my program, the third year, I went to Philadelphia to get my medical training, in order to pass state boards. The town hospital where I did most of my training didn’t have quite enough experience. I went down there for pediatrics, the children’s hospital. I worked with babies that were one pound, and were having surgery. This was quite an experience. I was living in a dormitory.
Was it different to move from a town to the city? It was. One time, we went to a park. I said to the friend I was with, “Why do they have sheep in the park?!” Well, the sheep turned out to be poodles. So then I graduated, and I passed state boards, and my first job after graduation was in obstetrics. In those days it was quite different, because the fathers were not permitted in the labor room. Being a new graduate, I mostly worked with the mothers. I had a friend who was in the same program, and finished at the same time, and she decided that we didn’t have enough psychiatric experience. It wasn’t part of our program. We had books about it, but we didn’t have on hand experience. There was a psychiatric hospital in a nearby town which wasn’t too far away, and she had a car, so she said, “Why don’t we go work at this hospital?” My first job in that hospital was drawing blood, so I met all of the patients before they were admitted. I remember thinking, “Oh, I know how to handle patients.” I went into one room, where we were told to be very careful, because you can’t depend on the patients' actions. Well, I was attacked by one of the patients. We wore hats in those days, you know, and my hat went blowing and my clothes and whatever...Grandma gesticulated with her arms, the incident obviously impressed vividly in her mind. But I wasn’t harmed. It was quite an experience. The nurses who worked there seemed to have a lot more knowledge, and it was good to work with them. They taught us a lot, so we learned on the job. But I only worked there for about six months. This other friend decided she wanted to go to a Mennonite college. She said, “Would you like to go to college, and we’ll get our degree so that we can get a better job?” We would get our Bachelor of Science degree. I broke up with a boyfriend, and it was a good time to leave.
Read about Grandma's Mennonite background, what she would tell her younger self, and more in the upcoming Whispers from the Past, Part II! Note: This post was inspired by a writing friend, who mentioned she was going to interview her grandma. Check out her blog here: gloriakuth.blogspot.com