Les and Nora - Stories of their Youth

Nora's china headed doll in
company with other heritage dolls

Dolls in Nora’s childhood were cloth or rag dolls.  But if they were lucky, girls received a china doll, breakable and fragile, more to look at than to play with.  Nora’s doll had a china head, brown hair, and a composition body.  Made in Germany by Otto Reinecke, it was given to to Nora, then much later she gave it Marcene.  It is shown resting on a shelf with other heritage dolls.  Behind her is a small hand quilted silk quilt made for baby Marcene (her first great-granddaughter) by Great-Grandmother Elnora Cox.

 

When Marcene received the doll, both the head and body needed repair and it was dressed in this sweater dress.  New clothing was needed, and the dress and bonnet Bob Taylor was blessed in was used, (with his permission).  Tucked and stitched to fit, it became a way to preserve the clothes as well as to dress up Nora’s doll.  

He That Will Not Work Will Not Eat 

From mother Nellie’s history:  “The members of our family did their share of chores, you bet your life.  That was standard.  Our motto was: he who will not work, will not eat.  We had a bunch of cows to be milked twice a day and the boys knew they would be expected to help.  The girls in other families helped with the milking, but that’s one thing that neither Grandpa Cox or Harrison would allow their girls to do.  We didn‘t need to, we had plenty of boys.”

 “I thinned and weeded beets”, Nora noted, “cut and picked potatoes and even topped beets.  I never had to work in the hay, do chores, or milk cows.  My brothers were never asked to wash dishes, however.”

There was plenty for Nora to do inside, helping her mother with all of the many things concerning raising a big family such as caring for babies and small children, cooking, cleaning, washing dishes, clothes, ironing sewing, mending etc.

As soon as she was old enough, Nora was working at the side of Nellie who "baked the bread for that bunch and made all the butter we ate, and it was a quite a bit", according to Nora. “She had a big old black square pan, and would bake six loaves of bread in that pan and sometimes she baked a cake in it and it would last a meal.  Through the years, she baked all the bread and the biscuits we had from scratch.”

Nora's brother Perce remembered:  “She had this coal range and she would get up in the morning and build a fire and I remember she'd have toast all over the top of it, and she would butter it.   If she ran out of bread, we'd have baking powder biscuits for breakfast the next morning.

When she made rice pudding, she usually made it in a big pan, she would put raisins on one side and none on the other side, because some of the family wouldn't eat the raisins."

Work Hard and We'll Go to the Hills for the Fourth of July

 Nora said, “When I was little my dad would say, ‘Work real hard and we'll get the beets thinned and hoed and the hay up and we'll go to the hills for the 4th of July’. The prospect of going to the nearby hills to the east of us and camping was a big incentive to us. We all pitched in so we could go.”

“My father, Harrison, raised sugar beets and the children thinned most of them on their knees or bending over. (Just like growing beets in the garden, sugar beet seeds were planted close together on purpose. When the plants were two to three inches high, they were thinned by hand to about a foot apart to allow the healthiest and largest to grow to a large size without the roots tangling together. Naturally, plenty of weeds would grow along side of the beets and were pulled out by hand or hoed with a short handled hoe.)

“The boys thinned beets as well as helped in the hay which was mowed, raked into rows, loaded on wagons with pitch forks, and then rolled onto the stacks with ropes.”

Harvesting Hay

Leslie recorded it this way: "They had horse mowers by the time I was a kid, I don't remember anything else.  We grew alfalfa hay to feed our milk cows, horses, and other livestock.  The hay harvest was done by horse drawn hay mowers and hay rakes. A special hay rack was attached to the farm wagon base and included a set of ropes on the floor of the rack.  

"After the hay was mowed, raked into windrows and dried, we pitched the hay onto the horse drawn wagon.  The horses pulled the wagon loaded with hay into the barnyard area and the ropes were used to roll the hay off the wagon and onto the haystack, quite a trick.  It worked, though.  We still rolled some hay up to Harrison's place after I married Nora and moved on our place in the early 1930's.”

Hay rakes were made to rake the hay into winrows
wide enough for a wagon to pass in between

Harvesting the hay was a co-operative effort with families and neighbors working together.  The crews would move from one place to another to bring the hay from the fields into each barnyard stack. 

Celebrating the Fourth of July

"To celebrate the Fourth of July, we would go up to the foothills east of us in the wagon with the horses.  We would stay as long as we could, two or three weeks. (I suppose a neighbor or hired man milked the cows and did the irrigating, but no one talks about that.) We didn't have tents; we'd just make beds on the ground and cook on campfires. We went with the Lewis Christensen and the Alfred Sessions families, taking plenty of good things to eat, sleeping on the ground with quilts and singing together."

The children had a great time together hiking and playing in the hills. Nora’s brother Clint told the story: "One time when we were up in the hills over the Fourth of July, a bunch of us kids walked up to the area we called `bushee'.  It was way back up into the spruce pines away from camp.  We enjoyed chewing pine gum (or pine sap).  It was good if it was aged, but that time we got some green pine gum.  It makes you sick, sticks to your teeth, and you can't get it out of your mouth.  We all got sick but I think I was the sickest.”

Working on the Fielding Farm

"As children", Leslie said, "we Fieldings worked on the farm doing chores and fieldwork.   I milked cows until Harold was big enough to do it, then he turned it over to the next boy who was Mel (Melvin). That tradition went on, even after we moved to town (Shelley), Ralph, and then Pat milked the cows.

“We had chores and worked hard, but when it was time to play, we were outside all summer long, inventing our own games, or playing in the irrigation water or mud. In 1917, the year of the flu epidemic, the schools were closed most of the winter. I was eight years old, and Harold and I skated on the ice and played in the snow.  It didn’t hurt our feelings a bit to miss school."

"I was seven or eight years old when I went to work in the spud (potato) field", Leslie continues.  "Dad told me to follow behind the single row two-horse spud digger.  The horses pulled and the farmer guided the digger with a big blade that scooped up the potatoes from the earth into a rake/grill that shook the dirt off the potatoes.  They fell off the back into a scooper equipped with a shield to throw the spuds onto the row.  Sometimes the spuds would roll into the furrow.  My job was to follow the digger and throw the good spuds back on the row so they wouldn't get run over by the equipment the next time around.

Typical picture of what Leslie would
have looked like digging his first spuds.

"One morning, in early October, there was frost on the ground, the horses were sweating and their breath was visible in the morning air.  Dad had been digging spuds.  He tied up the horses, came into the house, and told me to get on the digger and make a round or two while he ate his breakfast.  I was still quite young, and it was exciting to have Dad think I was old enough to do that."