Mom’s Story: Bibs, Teeth, Coats

Details continue of Mom’s reminiscences. She’d always said her parents were poor, but since I didn’t grow up this way, I never realized how poor. (And neither did she at the time . . . would even say later that it stood her in good stead.)

The photo is from a slightly later date, and more prosperous time, by then married, and with a bike! (BTW, that bike stayed in the family until Dad was in his 90’s.)

We never heard of napkins, either cloth or paper.

When one of us kids would get a messy face or hands while eating, my mother would get up from the table to get a dishtowel, which she would wet a corner of and use to wipe face and hands. And sometimes Dad would use a dishtowel (“tea towel”) as a bib.

But of course that would make more washing for my mother.

At the end of a washday her knuckles would be bleeding from all the scrubbing of clothes on the board. I was as glad as she was when she finally got a washing machine. It isn’t any wonder that women of that generation became old and worn-out, often toothless, from too hard work and much child-bearing, before they were 40.

Both my parents got false teeth before that age. People then just went to the dentist to have a tooth pulled!

I never went to the dentist until I was 18. And that was because I moved to the big city of Denver for the summer and had a job as a live in housemaid. I got room and board and three dollars a week. The woman I worked for helped me find a dentist and I took the bus downtown to see him. He found nine cavities!

I don’t know what his regular price was but when he learned how much I made he charged me only one dollar per filling.

The rest of the money I made that summer I used to put a winter coat on layaway. I think it cost $15. When I decided to go back home to live and graduate, I didn’t have enough time to work to pay off the coat. Instead I had to buy a bus ticket from Denver to Yuma, where my parents had moved.

I think I expected they would pay off the coat for me but they didn’t have the money. A new friend of my mother’s did it for me just in time for cold weather.

I doubt if anyone will believe these stories but they are all true.