Welcome to Inkwell, Hearth, and Plow!

 I write a weekly column for Canada Free Press. I've meant to post all of them here, but I've been putting it off. I must do better.

All the columns are archived under the Heartland tab at this page: https://canadafreepress.com/

 December 25, 2022

So Here We Are #48

Ghosts of Christmas Past

 

My world in 1958 teetered on the boundary between a small Midwest industrial town and the fields and pastures of the farm. I was the fifth member of our family to come along. My two older brothers and I and our parents lived in a ranch house our dad had built in 1951. The folks had gone to high school in the town and had been married there, at the Baptist parsonage on South Main, in ’43. Our parents had lived there all or nearly all the thirty or so years of their lives, except when they had gone to California during the war. When my dad shipped out to Europe early in ’44, my mother returned to the town to wait for him. He came back in December ’45. They settled into a rented house with their son, who was 16 months old when my dad returned from the war to his home town.

 

The farm was the home of my paternal grandparents. In the middle of Henry County, Indiana, it was a modest farm of 81 acres with a 1920s farmhouse, a barn, a corncrib, and chicken houses. The house where we lived had been built on a lot that had been part of the farm when my grandparents purchased it in 1950. Our house was on the boundary between the industrial town and the farm.

 

My maternal grandparents, also in their 50s and early 60s, lived in the same town. Both grandfathers were in the later years of their working lives. By the time they both retired at age 65, they had worked for Chrysler for a combined total of 79 years.

 

My dad and my uncles served in World War II while my mother and my aunts worked and worried on the home front in this small town. My grandfathers worked in the Chrysler plant that was part of the war effort. My grandmothers worked and worried and prayed for the day when it would all be over and the boys could be home again.

 

That’s the setting for this column. The war was over, and our extended family lived in a small town in the 1950s. But just as the Great War had changed everything before it, World War II also changed everything. Monumental changes do not happen overnight, however. I had been plopped down into a world that would soon disappear, but I had no idea that my world was anything but eternal.

 

Our life centered around our home, school and church, and the farm. The school was down the same road about half a mile, the same school my dad attended as a boy. Our church was in town, just five minutes’ drive or a half hour walk away. We knew lots of people in town and along our road. My parents saw people they had gone to school with when they went to the grocery. All of them had vivid memories of the war. Our mom and both our grandmothers were ‘at home.’ They worked as housewives, cooking, cleaning, and waiting for us at home after school. It was not easy for anyone to get away with anything.

 

With so many baby boomer kids around (our road was thick with them), and with the wave of postwar prosperity catering to them, Christmas became a much bigger phenomenon than it had been in the lean years of the 1930s and 1940s. For us three boys, there were three Christmases, one at each of the grandparents’ houses, and one at home. Both sets of grandparents were thrilled to have grandkids, and we were mighty pleased to have them very close at hand.

 

Three breadwinners with full-time industrial paychecks kept us comfortable. My maternal grandparents ended up with twelve grandchildren, three from each of their four daughters. My paternal grandparents had just us three grandsons. It was a great situation for us. At my mom’s folks, there were ten grandsons and two granddaughters by 1960. They had long ago turned their backs on the privations they had known and tried to forget about them. Christmas time and birthdays were when they could remind themselves that they were never going back to those days. They showed everybody that they had the world on a string. They bought new cars and nice furniture. Lavish gifts, even by 1950s standards, were the rule there. Our cousins gradually moved away with our aunts and uncles, but for ten or more years after the war, it was expected that all would gather at their house for a grand Christmas gift splash. These gatherings were legend before my memories of them began. My oldest brother, oldest of all the cousins, enjoyed these bountiful events for several years, then one year wondered if something had changed. He was always one to look to the immediate concrete issue. This incident probably came when my grandmother began switching over to buying clothes for all of us. After the flurry of tearing paper and flying ribbon, obviously disappointed, and about to be more chagrined, he famously asked, “When do we open the big toys?” It was good for a laugh for years afterward, but it tells me more now about how things were then. We couldn’t have cared less about a new shirt or pair of pants.

 

At the other grandparents’ house, just fifty yards from our own, it was a quieter affair. There was never much of a toy extravaganza there. They drove used cars and had old furniture. Practical gifts were the rule because they weren’t trying to forget anything. They remembered the 1930s and 1940s very differently. At their house, the treat was outside, on the farm. There were chickens and hogs, and I remember the last big setup for rabbits. There had been Guernsey milk cows before my memory, but a little later on there were sleek Black Angus cows and a fine bull. There was aromatic hay in the hay mow, and straw in the back end of the barn, where the rope swing was. We gathered eggs. There were cats, and sometimes we could stalk rats in the corncrib. The pasture was near to our house, beyond the cob piles. If it rained and then froze, there were long patches of ice where we could run and slide.

 

At my mom’s parents’ house there were fine big meals to ease the restless hunger of aunts and uncles and a dozen cousins at a time. At my dad’s folks, it was better because there was just as much food available, it seemed to me, but fewer to eat it. We lingered there longer, so there were many memorable meals of leftovers, doted upon by grandparents with only three grandkids. A boy could hone his expertise in judging fine pies with no pressure to reach a conclusion.

 

Our parents and grandparents had come through very dark years in the depression of the 1930s and the war. The Korean War was in the past, and nobody wanted to talk about that. Already, though, the dangerous world of the 1950s had been crowding out the memories of the old days. Now it was all about sleek jet interceptors and rocket planes and spies. There were atomic drills at school and much talk of bomb shelters.

 

There were new heroes now like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger. Soon there would be astronauts. Even westerns would find it hard to compete with those who had the ‘right stuff’ to ride rockets into space. My brothers had the Flash Gordon pajamas and other accoutrements of the popular culture. One Christmas in that house I had the red straw cowboy hat, the plastic gun belt, and the cowboy boots, all of which must have fit for about six weeks. I had the cowboys and Indians set, complete with figures of Custer and Sitting Bull. Wait, that must have been cavalry troopers and Indians. My brothers got models and chemistry sets and the World Book Encyclopedia.

 

For many families like mine, the changes were already well under way. Families had moved to big cities all over. One aunt and her family had moved to Kokomo, then to Indianapolis. Another moved to Roanoke, Virginia, wherever that was. Another went to Michigan. The world had become much larger and much easier to reach. It was dizzying.

 

The example we saw playing out before us was a settled existence where parents raised their kids in the hometown while the dads worked at the plant and the moms worked at home making idyllic lives for us all. There was no need to travel at Thanksgiving or Christmas because everyone was close by. Until I was 18, all my grandparents lived in the old hometown no more than thirty miles from us. There was a familiar cycle of life. In my hometown there was statewide interest in the high school basketball tournament every March. Our hometown won that tournament in 1932, and people still talked about it. In 1954, the team from the tiny high school at Milan, in the southeast part of the state, won the state tournament creating a legend of the gallant underdog against the giant schools that lasts to this day. Greatness was possible even in a small town in the Heartland.

 

That small town life connected to the farm was the world we knew. Maybe others understood better, but it took nearly forty years before it began to dawn on me that the old days were gone. There would be no more following the stable lifestyle of the grandparents and parents. Even our family moved away in 1959, the last to go. We didn’t move far away, but we would only visit the old hometown after that.

 

The new day crept up and brought an end to nearby extended families and growing up in the same house. Most all of my family abandoned the old pattern and made their way in the new world of rapid change, working parents, and modern lifestyles. The grandparents lived out their lives in the old hometown and passed on. It’s up to those of us still living to explain how things have not always been the way we see them today. Christmas was different back in the day.