Recollecting the Forties

By Carol L. Stone

At the end of the forties, an old road was replaced with a modern highway, and television sets partly replaced radios and books. Those events marked the end of a way of life in rural Michigan. The author looks back at the forties from a modern viewpoint and at her life in a family of schoolteachers, recalling small-town storekeepers, old-fashioned teachers, and a simpler way of life that emphasized education and the environment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 28, 2000
• ISBN: 9781462094356

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Copyright © 1999 by Carol Stone

This book may not be reproduced or distributed, in whole or in part, in print or by any other means without the written permission of the author. You can contact Carol Stone at: [e-mail].

ISBN: 1-893652-40-8

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-63322

Published by Writers Club Press, an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

The Road from Home

Role Model

Sewing and Cooking and

Cleaning, Oh, My!

The Second World War

Shopping for Shoes

Planting Trees for the Future

Victory Garden

Spam and Ration Books

Teacher ’s Kid

And Teachers’ Niece

Loving and Hating Food

Roughing It

Life with Grandpa

Of Hellfire and Heaven

Playing Jacks and Softball

Sanforizing

Mother’s Mentor

Good Guys, Bad Guys

Blossom Time

Stealing Apples

Exploring Mill Creek

A Paper-Mill Economy

The Store

Falling Leaves

Deceptive Sunsets

Holidays

Hansel and Gretel in the Sticks

The Arkies

The Craftsman at Work

Weathering Storms

First Bicycle

Camping without Campgrounds

Amateur Astronomy

A Room of One’s Own

Envying Eleanor

Movie Matinees

Riding

Camp Madron

The Man in the Iron Lung

Those Greedy Little Kids

Smoking Was So Glamorous

Reading

Wild Bill

Marching out of Michigan

Pomp and Circumstance

There’s No Place like Home

To Mother,

who has kept her sense of humor through everything

Acknowledgments

When I began writing these essays, I received invaluable comments from members of the Writers West group in Alameda. Later, a long, sunny afternoon spent reminiscing with Eleanor Brown Lahr and Chet Pelton brought back many memories; and I have shamelessly pumped my own mother for her own recollections of the forties. Manfred Miller, Donna Schwartz Dell, K. Michael Shea, Connie Garich Ostrander, and Diane Worden have provided helpful, specific information. For several years Roy Davis, one of my high school English teachers and the author of books about the Paw Paw River area, has encouraged me to keep writing these essays. I am extremely grateful to all of them.

Carol Stone

Alameda, California

The Road from Home

The old, tree-lined road led to the north and south, as far as we could see from our home—though in fact we could not see very far, because of the rolling hills and trees. Two miles north of us was Watervliet, a paper-mill town having a population of about 2,000. North of Watervliet the road narrowed to a gravel lane that had once been a Potowotomie Indian trail; and south of us, the road followed the gentle curves of the land for perhaps thirty miles to the city of Niles at the southern end.

All along the road was southern Michigan farmland, orchards and fields that were owned mostly by German farmers. The farms were small by today’s agribusiness standards, and the houses were not separated by great distances geographically, but the emotional distances were often greater. There was little mingling in everyday life; unless we made the two-mile trip into Watervliet, we could go for days without talking with neighbors. Until the late forties, we had no telephone, adding to our isolation.

A little way south of our home and around a slight curve, a brook flowed along the road, and tall pine trees next to the water sheltered a picnic table. Under a small roof was the spring, a landmark for local people and even for the occasional resorter visiting from Chicago—a landmark because the spring was an artesian well with the coldest, most delicious water you can imagine. The water gushed up into a rough stone fountain, then bubbled down over moss and stones to the brook. Watercress grew in the brook, peppery and cold in the spring water. On even the hottest, dustiest days of summer, I loved walking to that cool, green retreat.

Farther south, past a few small farms, was the Cribbs School, a brick two-room building that would be one of the last country schools in Michigan. Pop (Henry Beall) taught there for a few years during World War II; Mother (Isabelle Beall) taught there in the postwar years; and I was a Cribbs pupil.

More farms lay along the road south of Cribbs, and a few smaller roads crossed it. At the major intersection a few miles south was Pelton’s store and gas station. You could buy the world’s best ice cream sundae at Pelton’s—Sealtest butter pecan, with Hershey’s syrup, served in an off-white cereal bowl. There were always a few men (never any women) sitting around the stove in the store, leaning back and teetering precariously on the back legs of their chairs, chewing the fat about local politics and national news.

South of Pelton’s, through many miles of trees and farms, the road went on to Niles. But, there was never any reason for us to go there. For us the road might as well have ended at Pelton’s.

About 1948 the men from the state highway department came around, visiting each household and bringing the news about the modern highway that would be constructed to take the place of the old road. The highway would be wide, straight, and smooth, without the hills and valleys that slowed traffic down and made the old road unsuitable for large trucks. We would be inconvenienced for a year or so while the construction went through our area, but then we would be living on a major state highway, M

140.

Dust filled the air and the road was torn up for two years, for in snowy Michigan the construction season is necessarily short. Finally, though, we had our new highway. True, it ran straight and true from north to south—looming far above some farms and homes, in other places cutting ugly gashes in hillsides. A few homes that had lain in the path of the new highway were lost. Maples, pines, cottonwoods, and oaks along the old road were bulldozed for the widening. Even the spring disappeared, paved over. (Eventually an antiseptic version of it appeared on the other side of the highway, with concrete and chrome where there had once been moss and stones, but it was never the same after that. That’s progress, I suppose.)

Distances suddenly seemed much shorter along the new highway. It was easier to drive to Watervliet and other places now, for us and for others. Schoolbuses that had once made only short runs from the high school in town could go much farther into the country, carrying not just high school students but also many of the younger children who had previously attended the rural grade schools. New highways like ours helped sound the death knell of rural schools, as small-town school districts could be consolidated into larger, wealthier districts, offering advantages both to town children and to those bussed in from the countryside.

We didn’t walk along the road after that, unless the car had a flat tire or there was some other emergency. We were either in the car, on our way to somewhere else, or we were at home. And when at home, we weren’t outdoors as much as we had been earlier. The forties, and a way of life, were almost over.

Role Model

Most of the married women we knew stayed home. Farm wives might work hard, often helping in the barns and fields, yet were still perceived as housewives. In the towns, though