100 Years in the Life of an American Girl: True Stories 1910 - 2010

By Suzanne Sherman

The fascinating story of a century through the eyes of American girls under age 13 in every decade from 1910 to 2010.

In over 50 beautifully crafted narratives, women and young girls born between 1907 and 2001 describe the life and times that are new in every decade and vanishing just as fast.

The author collected most of the stories by interview and retains the girls’ voices as they tell about far more than playing with paper dolls and hearing the first radios open the door to the world. They are dancing in the streets at the end of WW I, climbing trees in a skirt and pantaloons, using the first telephone. They lose Japanese American friends to internment camps and undergo nightly blackouts during WW II. One girl escapes Saigon as a 5-year-old at the end of the Vietnam War to grow up in Dad’s rural Georgia.

As the 20th century goes on, American Bandstand gives way to MTV and family life includes single moms and weekend dads, stepfamilies and open adoption. Sex education classes amuse, stress is treated with medication, and the entertainments of the digital age compete with TV. By 2010 girls have role models in leadership and contribute to culture like never before. In 1931 a girl’s big achievement was winning at jacks; in 2009 it was coordinating a National Day of Silence at school.

Each chapter includes fun pop culture highlights — did you know peppermint Life Savers were inspired by the life saving devices used in the Titanic disaster of 1912? — and a short history of the decade’s events in politics, education, medicine, technology and entertainment.

These young girls of different races and classes show American culture at its truest as they describe life-altering inventions and shifting social codes across ten decades. They reveal what’s universal and what’s unique about social challenges and racial prejudices, desires and disappointments, hopes and losses. It’s history in motion powered by the personal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9780990452713

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SZS Publishing

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Sebastopol, CA 95473

www.suzannesherman.com

Copyright © 2014 by Suzanne Sherman

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permissions requests or for bulk sales or library sales requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions or Attention: Sales, or contact the publisher through the website. Addresses above.

Cover by Damonza.com.

Interior design by Damonza.com.

Author photograph by Joyce Benna.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use and edit selected writings by contributors.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014912482

ISBN-13: 978-0-9904527-0-6

ISBN-10: 099-0452700

To Shannon, always the inspiration.

It is the image in the mind that links us to our lost treasures.

— Colette, My Mother’s House

A Note to the Reader

In ways, the seed for this book was planted years ago, when I was a ten-year-old chronicling the highlights of my days in my first diary. As the years passed, those diaries turned into journaling notebooks I filled with far more than descriptions of my days. Journaling was where I described and made sense of my world. Eventually, I switched from notebooks to the computer to save space (boxes of journals filled my attic) and because I type faster than I handwrite.

Professionally, I was a writer and editor, but my dream was to share the joy of writing and to help people see the value of their lives by writing about them. I wanted people to know that treasure isn’t always glittering, but it’s always there.

At thirty-six, I started living my dream: I took a position teaching memoir writing in an older adults program at a local college.

My first classroom held twenty-two people. The eldest were born around 1910. Everyone was eager to write about their earliest years — trailing the ice delivery man for stray ice chips, chewing chunks of tar used to pave new streets like it was chewing gum, standing on a chair to deposit a coin into a gas meter on the wall in a New York tenement apartment. One man wrote about watching parents act on stage in a noisy Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side, another wrote about rag sellers on the street with their horse-drawn carts. I heard about the feel of a mother’s long hair and the softness of her cheek and then learned that mother didn’t survive the 1918 influenza epidemic or live to celebrate her child’s fourth birthday.

I taught four memoir classes a week, year-round, then I expanded my reach, offering weekend workshops at universities and other colleges and writing programs. The years went by, and as they did, I noticed the waves of culture rolling in and going out. The oldest students passed on, and the new students were born later, in the 1920s and 1930s. Now I heard stories about kneeling in front of the new floor radio to hear anything that came out of it, about the gas man lighting street lamps, about living out of the back of a truck during the Depression. I was hearing World War II stories, and I don’t mean military stories, I mean stories about growing up with the world at war. Eventually, Boomers took their seats at the writing table, with stories to share about coming up in the 1950s and 1960s — integrating schools in the South, being raised on communes. And through it all, I was a storycatcher, helping people write their stories and realize the value of their experience.

Keepers is what I call a collection of writings students have given me over the years, stories that especially interested or touched me. After fifteen years, the file was thick, and one day in January 2011 I decided to open it. I missed some of the writers, people I had known for many years by then. The times of their lives had passed on with them, but those times were preserved, too, in these pages. I opened the folder to hear their voices again.

I had unlocked a treasure chest. There were stories written by hand, stories printed from computers. I read one after the other, traveling randomly through the twentieth century, reading the stuff history books don’t tell us about. History books give the hard facts, not the juicy real-life stuff, the breakthroughs and disappointments, the hopes and thrills. Reading for pleasure and not as a teacher and editor was showing me culture in ways I’d never seen it before.

I sat back and thought about it. People have certain experiences in every decade partly because of the tenor of the times, and the tenor of the times is different in every decade. Just the weekend before I’d seen my ten-year-old niece video-chatting on her new iPad, a recent birthday present. When I was ten the best birthday present in the world was my Suzy Homemaker Easy-Bake Oven — I could bake my own three-inch cake under the heat of a lightbulb.

And suddenly, I got it. Helping draw out and polish the jewels wasn’t enough. It was time to share them so everyone could benefit from their value.

This book is the first in the 100 Years in the Life series — a collection of true stories about life in every decade of a hundred years. The website (www.100yearsinthelife.com) features a list of books planned for the series and submission information, so be sure to visit it.

Girlhood is a time in life when awareness is keen, the heart is vulnerable, and so much makes an impact. It’s a fascinating lens to look through. You’ll read over fifty stories in the words of American girls under thirteen from around the country and throughout a century.

Many of the stories in the first four chapters (the 1910s through the 1940s) are written by my students, past and present. I’ve edited them and for some, have combined several stories by the same writer. Chapter 5 through Chapter 10 (the 1950s through the 2000s) feature stories adapted from interviews I did with women and girls of different races, religions, regions, and classes. I asked about family life and friendships, about school and after school, about what they wanted and what they loved. I followed topics as they came up — racism, divorce, being different. I transcribed the interviews and edited them into cohesive stories, always retaining the girls’ voices.

The youngest girl I interviewed in 2010, Marina Rose Sherman, was 9 years old; the eldest woman was Mary Ann Natly, then 103 (in 2014, she’s 107 and still going out to the theater!). Similarities and differences run through the stories, which come from places as far from each other geographically and culturally as Moloka’i and Michigan. The Ku Klux Klan affects Charlotte, a second-generation Russian Jewish immigrant, in the 1920s, and it’s a threat to Johnny, an African American in Little Rock, Arkansas in the 1960s. Chinese Americans Angela and Amy feel the conflict of their heritage, and so does Terri Ann, the daughter of an American GI and a Vietnamese woman; her family fled Saigon in 1975 and settled in rural Georgia. Racial pressures continue in old and new ways in the new millennium, and Dylanne knows all about it. She’s the only Jewish black girl with white grandparents she knows.

It’s history in motion, giving a taste of the times one decade after the next. Family shape changes, showing new definitions in the second half of the century. A girl might be raised by a single working mom or have a bedroom at two houses, her mom’s and her dad’s. She might live with her lesbian mom and spend weekends with her dad and stepfamily. If she’s adopted, she might have relationships with her birth parents and their spouses, and even with her half-siblings. These stories and more are here.

Girlhood is different in every decade, and nothing shows it better than a look at two generations in the same family. You’ll read about mothers and daughters born thirty and forty years apart — Barbara and Janet, Victoria and Elsa, Rachel and Dylanne, Susan and Marina. Aunts and nieces show differences within a family, too. Shannon and Brianna grew up in a different Michigan in the 1950s and the 1990s. Barbara (Chapter 4) and I are twenty years apart and grew up under very different conditions on opposite coasts. My niece, Marina, was born at the start of the new millennium and was using a computer at age four. I don’t have to tell you how different it was in the 1960s.

The threads that connect us all run through the ten chapters of this book, and I’m excited for you to see them. Discover what’s unique and what’s universal, what’s timeless and what defines a decade. Whether you’re female or male, you’ll learn from these girls; I know I have. You may even understand your own childhood better when you see the culture surrounding it.

Have fun time-traveling. The everyday really is extraordinary.

Chapter 1

The 1910s

The twentieth century is off to a running start in the Progressive Era, with extraordinary inventions that will change lives forever. Who are the young girls residing in the country’s forty-eight states in 1910? To a great extent they’re first- and second-generation immigrants and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of pioneers and slaves. Half the country’s population, some 45 million people, live rurally and in small towns. New York tops the list as the biggest city, with Chicago and Philadelphia next in line, as they will be for decades.

Horse-drawn carriages and wagons travel wide, dusty streets and bumpy dirt roads. School buses are horse-drawn. Lamps are gas- or kerosene-powered until electricity comes in to light homes, and coal is used for heat. Wood-burning stoves also heat homes, and bake bread, cook meals, warm bathwater, and heat irons. Indoor plumbing is rare outside of cities, and outhouses are the norm at homes and schools. Water is hand-pumped from wells.

The telephone is new and still fairly rare in homes in this decade. How do people stay in touch? By writing letters, which are dropped off and collected at local post offices. Long-distance mail is transported by horse-drawn wagon or train.

Schools are mostly one-room buildings, with all eight grades learning together, and for most, education ends after eighth grade. New high schools are built in smaller cities, but it won’t be until 1935 that 40 percent of the country’s population holds a high school diploma.

Health is a concern in these years before antibiotics and vaccines, and contagious diseases like smallpox, measles, rheumatic fever, whooping cough, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and pneumonia threaten or take many lives. The Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 kills a quarter of the U.S. population, many of them children.

World War I is on, and in 1917 the country enters it, with brothers and other relatives shipping overseas to fight. Some never return. History is made again when the war ends in 1919, the same year American women gain the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment after a seventy-year battle. Once the 19th Amendment is made law, girls witness great change as their mothers not only vote at election time but become more actively involved in society in general.

For now, though, homemaking is women’s primary duty, and daughters are at their mother’s sides helping with chores and childcare. Babies are born at home, not in hospitals, and families tend to be large and often include live-at-home grandparents. Children may help out the family, too, by working in factories to bring home a bit of money. There are no employment age restrictions, and child labor is attractive to businesses because it’s cheap.

At home, girls help out in the kitchen, where bread is baked along with pies and cakes, and summer fruits and vegetables are canned for the rest of the year. Laundry is typically a two-day event, using water that’s hand-pumped from the well and heated on the wood-burning stove. Clothes are stirred in big buckets with shaved bar soap or laundry soap powder, then scrubbed, squeezed, and hung on long clotheslines to dry. The second day is ironing day, using weighty irons heated on the stovetop. Mom also spends a lot of time at the sewing machine, as most clothing is made at home on pedal-powered sewing machines, and girls are right there to help.

The pace of progress picks up mid-decade when families leave their horse-drawn buggies in the dust, replacing them with the new horseless carriage — the automobile, which bumps along unpaved wagon roads at an unprecedented fifteen miles an hour. Automobiles built on Henry Ford’s first-ever assembly lines are the new horsepower, and by the end of the decade, when the price of cars drops significantly, more of them are in use and traffic lights go up in cities and towns.

In 1910, girls’ skirts and dresses hang to just below the knee. Blouses are simpler, with less fluff and ruffle than in earlier years, and fabrics are lighter and available in more colors. Buttons and tie-up laces are the only fasteners (no snaps or zippers), and they’re used for underclothes, too — petticoats and pantaloons. Leather button-up high tops and patent leather Mary Jane’s are common shoes.

Entertainment in this decade is self-made, with hopscotch, hide and seek, tag, skipping ropes (jump ropes), spinning tops, tree swings, and handmade dolls and paper dolls some favorite ways to have fun. Books are expensive, with hand-set type, and so are hand-cranked phonographs, for listening to wax cylinder records that play classical music and opera. If a family has a piano, girls often learn to play it for their own entertainment and to entertain at family gatherings.

When Dad has any pennies to spare, a girl may get to go to the candy shop for a bagful of penny candies, which are sold by the weight from bins. Chocolates aren’t available year-round in these days before refrigeration, but if she’s lucky, a girl may find a box of the new individually hand-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses or the new Tootsie Roll, which is Made Clean, Kept Clean, Wrapped Dust Proof!

What Else Is New?

Coca-Cola is sold in bottles.

A chocolate manufacturer invents a summer candy that doesn’t melt: Pep-O-Mint Life Savers. The wrapping is cardboard, the shape is inspired by the life-saving devices used in the Titanic disaster of 1912.

Girl Scouts of America is formed.

Jell-O is a packaged dessert mix that comes in a few fruit flavors.

The number of circuses traveling on rails reaches a high point, with more than thirty shows touring the country.

Small prizes — toys like temporary tattoos and decoder rings — are in every box of Cracker Jack.

Silent movies include The Little Princess, starring Mary Pickford, Tarzan of the Apes, Charlie Chaplin comedies, and a dramatic twenty-episode serial, The Perils of Pauline.

Cut-outs appear in weekly newspapers — paper dolls with cut-out paper tab clothing options and paper farm animals that can be pasted to cardboard before cutting so they’ll stand.

Marshmallows! Marshmallow Fluff, a homemade cream first sold door-to-door by its creator, is used on everything from breakfast cereals to sandwiches. Moon Pies are thick with marshmallow sandwiched between two chocolate-covered cookies.

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, and The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Raggedy Ann debuts in Raggedy Ann Stories, by Johnny Gruelle.

The Tinkertoy Construction Set.

Oreo cookies come out.

Vicks VapoRub, belladonna, and homemade mustard plasters are cold remedies.

Kewpie dolls.

Kool-Aid starts as a soft drink syrup (Kool-Ade) available through a mail-order company.

Dolly Dingle Paper Dolls (Dolly Dingle of Dingle Dell) appear in one of the first popular women’s magazines, Pictorial Review, in 1913.

10 Top Girls’ Names

Mary, Helen, Gladys, Elizabeth, Frances, Virginia, Hazel, Mildred, Anna, Ruth

Big Savage Mountain

Mary Kent — Frostburg, Maryland

Mary was born on May Day in 1914 in a coal mining town on Big Savage Mountain. Her father, an Irish Catholic, was born nearby, in Frost Mines. He was the second youngest of fifteen children, and like his brothers, he started working in the coal mines at thirteen. Her mother, a Methodist, was born in West Virginia, and she went to school through the eighth grade. Mary’s older brother, Larry, was four years old when she was born, under the care of the local doctor. His wife performed midwifery duties.

The day I was born, the scent of pear blossoms perfumed the air and the mines were closed because it was a Saturday. Dad went up the hill to summon the doctor, who arrived with his wife in his Ford automobile. While everyone else was busy, against orders, Larry crossed the street to the meadow and picked a bunch of dandelions. He presented them to our mother when he was invited into her bedroom to meet his new baby sister. To this day when I see the bright yellow flowers I feel a tinge of love for this kind and caring act.

Not long after I was born Mother was back to taking care of the home and family, and as soon as I could walk, I was right there at her side. My father worked long hours at the mines. The rent on our home was $5 a month, not a small sum. At 3:30 every afternoon Mother dragged a wooden tub out of the cellar and heated water in big kettles on the stove so Dad could take his bath when he got home from the mines. Then she went back to washing clothes, cleaning house, preparing dinner, or baking bread or pies. She baked six loaves of bread twice a week so Dad had sandwiches to take to work in his lunch bucket.

We had no electricity in my early years. Our substitute for an icebox was a pantry adjoining the kitchen, and that’s where the pies and breads were put to cool. We had freshly made fruit pies of all kinds in that unheated room, and millions of green snap beans, in summer. We would sit on the front porch swing and snap and snap and then Mother would put the beans up in quart jars to store in the cellar. She also canned the best vegetable soup around. Sometimes Mother would look out the kitchen window and see a relative coming down the hill around dinnertime. There isn’t a thing in this house to eat, she’d say. Go down to the cellar and bring up a jar of this or that. Our table was always loaded.

A gas chandelier hung in each room, with lightbulbs called mantels. These were so soft, one wrong touch and they’d turn into ashes in your hand. It was different at my aunts’ house, a two-mile train ride from of our mining village. They led me upstairs to bed at night carrying a coal-oil lamp they placed on the landing that joined the three bedrooms up there. Most houses were built on this plan.

Visits to my aunts, Mayme and Bessie, were by train. They lived at my grandmother’s house in Borden Shaft, two miles south of Frostburg along Georges Creek. Mother would put me on the train with my black satchel filled with my extra clothes and tell the conductor where to let me off. Everyone knew everyone, so I was perfectly safe.

At my aunts’ house, I’d often go with them to fetch water from the well. They would hook a bucket to a chain that was fastened to a log and unwind the chain until the bucket hit the water. They would wiggle the bucket until it was almost full and then they would reverse the action, raising the full bucket out of the well. We usually got two buckets of water at a time. Another errand was going down the road to the grocery store, the primary source of social life and gossip. The other source was church.

At home I had some regular jobs. One of them was taking turns with my brother cleaning the garden house (the outhouse), on Saturdays. That meant scrubbing the ceiling, floor, walls, and seats with warm soapy water and a broom. It was there I first became acquainted with the Sears and Roebuck catalog, especially the shiny pages. Ugh!

Medical help wasn’t out of reach for residents of this small mountain town. When Mary needed her tonsils out, she went to a hospital for the operation.

Was it ever exciting to be in a hospital and traveling on a gurney to the operating room! But the best part was when my aunt and uncle brought me ice cream. Ice cream was a rare treat. A day or two later I was home again and life was back to normal — except for one thing: my tonsils grew back.

The doctor came to our house for the second surgery. Mother administered the ether this time. Or tried to. I heard some sounds and knew the doctor was about to operate, so I yelled, I’m awake, I’m awake! Mother slapped the ether-soaked rag on my nose again, and this time, thankfully, I went under and the operation took.

My mother was smart. She knew how to do everything. While I was recuperating in bed, she brought me a wooden clothespin. Would you like a doll? she asked, holding up the clothespin. Could there be any question? She pulled a small rag out of her pocket and padded the top of the clothespin with it, then tied a clean white rag over it. Next she took a piece of printed fabric, wrapped it around the neck, and let the rest flare out like a skirt. She picked up a box of wooden matches she had at her side. Watch, she said. She lit the match, let it burn down just a bit, then blew it out. With the black soot of the match tip, she drew eyes, a mouth, and hair. She handed me my new doll with a big smile. Here you go! It’s all yours!

When Mary’s family got electricity, there was one drop light in the middle of each room’s ceiling and a wall outlet went in for her mother’s new iron and toaster. Gone were the days of heating irons on the coal stove. But some things didn’t change with the advancements electricity brought. Rollers, not curling irons, were used, and they were nothing Mary looked forward to.

That straight brown hair of mine was a torture because Mother insisted on putting it up in kid curlers before I went to bed. Try sleeping on wire wrapped with leather. When those curlers were unwrapped the next morning, my hair stood out like weeds.

Our piano was the first piece of furniture my parents bought after they were married, though neither of them played it. Larry and I took piano lessons. He could really make that piano come alive. I preferred to practice lying down on the piano bench and reaching up with one hand. Mother didn’t know the difference for a long time, not until I learned how to play with both hands.

Dad played trombone in a dance band that sometimes practiced in our living room. I went to sleep to the sounds of Yes, We Have No Bananas and Last Night On the Back Porch, to name a few. Blowing those horns probably accounted for some of those boys never getting black lung disease from inhaling coal dust.

We ate in the dining room on very special occasions, like Christmas, and once a year, in the summer, we entertained Dad’s family at dinner. Mother prepared for it days ahead. The table was pulled out to its extreme length, the best china was used, and our silver plate was polished. Linen napkins were washed and ironed. By this time we had acquired a Hoover vacuum cleaner, so there was not a crumb in sight.

A live Christmas tree was always set up in the living room. After I was old enough and knew there was no Santa, I helped trim it with candles and brightly colored balls and tinsel. We hung cardboard angels here and there. On Christmas morning, when everyone was ready, we gathered excitedly around the tree while Dad lit the candles. We ooh’d and aah’d for a few minutes, and then we blew the candles out. They were a beautiful fire hazard not allowed to happen.

Chasing Horse-Drawn Fire Engines

Mary Ann Natly — New York City

Mary Ann was born in Hungary in 1907 and was three years old when her parents left for the United States, leaving her with her grandparents. When they returned for her in 1912, Mary Ann’s fate took an interesting turn. Her family arrived too late to board their scheduled ship to New York and missed being part of the historic voyage of the Titanic.

Mary Ann (lower left)

I loved my grandparents’ house in the village. We had a big well and my grandmother lined up big red tomatoes to ripen along the top of it. I was in the fields with them all the time, and there were lots of red flowers, maybe poppies, all around. My uncles lived nearby, and they doted on me, bringing me fresh cream and cookies. I adored them. One day, my mother, who I barely remembered, came to get me. I have a surprise for you, she said, hugging me. She showed me a baby wrapped in blankets. This is your little sister! A sister! Now I had a lot to deal with, including this cute little intruder. My uncles still brought