Did I miss something?

[Gardening with Rabbits]

I am so sorry. I agree with what seedcorn said. My mother has been gone since 2004 and when I have big news, I for a second want to call her. Daily I want to talk to her and I think of her. My dad has been gone since 1985. I spend more adult years and life experiences with my mother.

 

[Beekissed]

Just read about this....I'm sorry, Digits, about your Dad passing. I'll miss hearing about him and I'm sure you'll miss him like a heartache.

 

[digitS']

Rather than me continuing with the hijack of @margali 's thread, I thought I'd move a response to @Ridgerunner over here. I hope that is okay with Ridge' and Gardening with Rabbits.

Dad would have been 102 this week. Came close, huh?

Yes, he was a year younger than your father. Dad said that he remembered seeing Coolidge on a train. I didn't ask him to explain that but his family was in Las Cruces by then and wasn't that one of the transcontinental railroad routes?

Anyway, that means our fathers not only experienced the Great Depression but they were 11 and 12 years old when the stock market crashed in 1929. Hoover was president by then.

Whatever optimism for their future that those boys felt during the 1920's, must have taken a serious hit when news spread about speculators jumping out of windows on Wall Street, banks collapsing, and then migrants moving out of the Dust Bowl.

Dad's family home in eastern Oklahoma was somewhat out of that ecological and agricultural disaster. So was their home in southern New Mexico. Also, they managed to arrive there before the Dust Bowl years. That was probably just a stroke of luck.

Lucky guy but ... not all that much. Pulled himself up by his bootstraps? You know, that is physically impossible and dang near, metaphorically impossible - except for a very small percent of us.

Steve
who remembers colorful flour sacks

I'll help with the hijack. I also remember Eisenhower/Stevenson running against each other. I grew up on a farm where we used plow horses instead of a tractor. Mom made many of my sister's dresses from flour sacks, they were printed with patterns so you could do that and get a pretty dress. Life has changed a lot in my lifetime.

But I think about the changes in my dad's lifetime. He was born in 1917 and grew up on a farm, as did the majority of US citizens of that time. He rode a horse to the grocery as a teenager when his Mom needed something. When his family visited others they traveled in a horse drawn farm wagon, with seven kids you needed something with capacity. Think of modes of communication, I don't think radio stations became that common until the 1920's. Think of the war planes of the WWI, that was state of the art.

Then think of when he died in 2003. It had been a lot of years since we had men on the moon. Supersonic jets had long since been banned for public transportation because of the sonic boom. With proper equipment you could communicate with any part of the globe. The internet was a common way of life.

Things are still changing rapidly, you will probably soon be seeing lists of what the kids graduating high school this year consider ancient history. But I have trouble visualizing anyone going through more of a basic change in lifestyle that Dad went through. ...

 

[ninnymary]

Steve, I remember those printed flour sacks! My mom used to make bonnets (like the kind the girls in Little House on The Prairie wore) to shade our faces when we worked in the fields. I remember my grandmother also making aprons out of them for the longest time.

Mary

 

[Gardening with Rabbits]

Dad would have been 102 this week. Came close, huh?

Yes, he was a year younger than your father. Dad said that he remembered seeing Coolidge on a train. I didn't ask him to explain that but his family was in Las Cruces by then and wasn't that one of the transcontinental railroad routes?

Anyway, that means our fathers not only experienced the Great Depression but they were 11 and 12 years old when the stock market crashed in 1929. Hoover was president by then.

Steve
who remembers colorful flour sacks

My mother would have been 105 on Feb. 7. My dad this year would have been 110. He was from eastern Oklahoma. His family seemed to suffer a lot during the Depression. My mother and her family had different stories. They had a cow, chickens, a garden and at least one person in the house with a good job. I should write a book about my parents being blind or just a story of my mother. She was born premature in 1915 and weighed 3 pounds. Her dad died of TB when whe was 3. Her mother was too young and no money to raise 2 kids, so she let her mother-in-law adopt my mother and her sister, so her grandmother because her mother and that woman died of TB when my mother was 15, the year after the stock market crash. She went blind at the age of 23. She married at the age of 39 and had 2 children by the time she was 41 that she raised blind, cooking and cleaning.

 

[digitS']

Good for her ... All of those ladies.

I think that Dad's parents were doing okay because they had the New Mexico farm, a few cash crops, and food. But, it was a big family and Dad had joined some of his brothers in California before the Depression ended.

He talked about having only potatoes and gravy to eat. It may have been why he was a "short order cook," when Mom, a waitress herself, met him . He apparently joined the military soon after.

They had this story about Dad being on leave, checking on a future job, sitting in a restaurant for lunch, and they hear on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

Steve

 

[catjac1975]

Just read about this....I'm sorry, Digits, about your Dad passing. I'll miss hearing about him and I'm sure you'll miss him like a heartache.

I also missed this. Crazy life here right now. So very sorry digits.. Still hurts more than anything.

 

[ducks4you]

@Gardening with Rabbits , this is what I love about TEG, how we care about each other.