My mom talked this morning while we were looking at this family photo. The subject matter looks like something something Dorothea Lange could have taken. I have been reading about my Ruddle and Heavner family history: the frontiersmen, the military leaders, and the farmers. There are many stories worth telling. Some are simple and some are quite dramatic. There have been several notorious characters. There was a 1952 movie made, based on the life of one. The movie was called “Brave Warrior.”
It seems right to have a narrative attached to this photo. My mom, Betty is the young girl in front, next to her is Joe her brother. You can see by his smile, he has a great sense of humor. The youngest one is Gracie. Aunt Connie is above my mom and Aunt Kitty is above Joe. They are my most favored aunts. I am guessing this photo might be the early 1940’s. My mom thinks she was a tall 7 year old. My Uncle Max, the oldest and Rich, not pictured, were in the military and they both fought in WWII. My Aunt Ruth and Aunt Sue were not in the picture, perhaps they were working in town. I still have a book and a purse my grand daddy gave me. I remember how kind he was.
My mom said, “I am just telling you some of the things I remember. When we get a bath on Saturday night we would get in a metal tub and my mom would heat the water on the stove. I don’t know how my mom raised nine kids. The water would freeze in the winter. The older ones helped out. Joe and I had it easier, but we thought we had it hard. I wish we could kept that place. It was five bedrooms, a basement. My dad built that house but he never painted it. The house still stands in Deer Run, West Virginia, but you wouldn’t recognize it now. It has been renovated and it is beautiful. The house was arranged kind of arranged crazy. We had a big back porch that went across the back porch. It was a pantry. She kept the flour in 25 lb lard tin cans. She had a 3 legged cast iron pot that she fried Kruellers in it. She had a warming closet in the stove. It had a big firebox on one side. The coals would go down and that is when it is good to bake with. We didn’t always have a lot of Maple sugar. It depended on the weather. I remember my mom breaking up the Maple sugar cakes, we also had Sorghum Molasses, we grew the cane, and had a press. We would make the juice and then boil it down.”
“We had a smoke house, where we hung the meat. It was cured and wrapped. They put wires around it and hung the meat. We had a meat saw. And we had a shed where we dried fruit. We built a low fire to smoke the fruit with sulphur….peaches, apples and even beans. Then we put it in a muslin sack. And that is what we ate Becky. Up on the hill towards my granddad’s house in the upper part of the garden, we dug a hole and lined it with straw, then we covered the vegetables with straw, then put dirt on top. In the winter, you could dig through the snow and get what you want…cabbage. We never wasted anything. There was a lot of people to feed but we had a lot. We had wild huckleberries, and my were they soooo good. and in the summer we picked wild strawberries and made ice cream. My mom made fruit pies with cream on top. And she made homemade biscuits for us. It is a wonder we didn’t get fat. I had to chop corn for the chickens and I did that in a hurry so I could read.”
“Sometimes, I would come home from school to listen to the radio, Welcome to the Inner Sanctum on the radio it made all those scary sounds….the door would squeak real loud. it was scary but I would listen to it and it would scare me to pieces…also “Stella Dallas” and “Young Widder (Widow)” Brown…on the radio. Then we always had company for sunday dinner. EVERY sunday. I don’t know how mom did it. We had fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, pie and ice cream, lemonade…….Don’t know how they afforded it. I remember making the lemonade. I don’t know how they afforded lemons. Before we had a refrigerator we had an icebox. My mom always made the best pies. She made them in the iron skillet. My mom made Vinegar pie. She made it in the winter alot. In the summer, she canned in half gallon cans. We had bins of potatoes. And we would just eat them all. Often times we would get a great big wooden keg. I remember it coming. It was salt fish. They were big fish in a salt brine. My mom put them in cold water to soak them overnight to get the salt out
and then fry them the next day. Doesn’t it sound like we lived in the dark ages? But you know what Becky? We never went hungry. I was never hungry.”