A little about my Grandmother...Part 2

After Emil and I Were Married:

- We only had about 5 or 6 horses because we had a tractor to help with a lot of the work.

- Sometimes, when I had to go out and do chores, I would have to leave the little ones in the house. I couldn’t leave them on the floor or they would get into something, so I would put them in the crib by the front window. Usually they were fine, but if they would look outside and see me working they would always start to cry. It was hard to get any chores done with so many little ones.

- Saturday was always baking day. I would either make bread or kolaches. Sometimes on these days Emil would say, “Let’s go to town (Yankton), “ and we would pack up some egg salad sandwiches and go. When I was little 5 cents was a lot of money when you went to town. Everyone was always in a hurry to get the work done on those days so that we could go to town. Emil liked to go to the movies and I would take the children to visit my mother and father (John T. and Anna) or do some grocery shopping.

- We always went to Tabor for church on Sundays.

- Everything was made at home. We did a lot of canning: fruits, meats, etc. We ate a lot of eggs and fresh vegetables from the garden in the summertime.

- My sister, Pauline, was always amazed at how the chickens would follow the girls up to the granary after they got home from school in the afternoons. Those chickens knew it was the girls’ job to get them fed!

- I remember one time when one of the children wanted a pumpkin pie, so Emil locked the cow up in the barn away from her calf so that we could get some milk for a pie. The cow got into a barrel of feed, overate and died. Boy, that was one expensive pie that never happened!

- We heated the kitchen with a cook stove that was fed with corn cobs. The upstairs where everyone slept was never heated, so everyone would stay in the warm kitchen as long as possible in the evenings and listen to the radio. WNAX came on the air in 1928 – nine years before we married – and that was what we always listened to. In the winter, even the water in the stove reservoir was frozen in the
morning.

- Our daughter, Donna (the oldest), didn’t even know how to speak English when she began school. She learned quickly though and the other children picked up a lot from her. This was about the time that we started to speak English at home. We thought it would be more appropriate since that was what the children had to know for school.

- We got real electricity after our son Joe was born in 1949. Before that we had a wind charger that ran a light in the kitchen by batteries, but that was it. One of the first things we got when we got electricity was a television. I remember having friends over in the evenings to play cards and the children would all be gathered around the TV.

- Our son, Joey (my dad), was a good boy. I remember Sylvester Pechan, the city cop in Tabor, told me that he would stop at Binder’s Pool Hall for an ice cream or candy bar and always come straight home for chores. All the kids were really good about helping out at home. Joey always helped Emil and the girls helped me in the house. I never asked Joey to do any housework, but I remember one time at Christmas I said that there would be no presents until the dishes were done and he ran for a dish-cloth!