The Youngest Child

When your the youngest child growing up you find out quickly that your to young to play with the bigger kids and not small enough to play with the little kids. So it is very important to have a lot of friends your age. In our neighborhood their were a lot of kids as the neighborhood grew so did the kids. Their were about ten kids my age that lived close by as well as a few cousins.

If one of your older siblings didn't want to do a chore they usually would hand it down to you to do.

When our mother was away from home then our oldest sister was in charge, and she loved to be in charge. I guess it made her feel important to be able to tell us what do do, when we could do it and when we had to come in for the day. Looking back I now know that with that came responsibility that she also had to shoulder.

The Roadside Fruit Stand

As the youngest boy in my family, I also had a sister (Susan) that was the youngest girl. The older kids got to help out in the Grocery Store that our family had but because we were the youngest we couldn't work there so we had to stay at home.

We wanted to be able to have a roadside fruit stand one summer because some of our cousins had a Peach Orchard and they got to sell peaches from their fruit stand and make some extra money.

After many days of discussions with our parents they said that she and I could have a road side stand at the end of our drive and we could sell to people in our neighborhood. We got us some watermelons, cantelopes and tomatoes and a few other items to sell. After a couple of days selling we had sold everything that we had been given to sell that we thought we would try and sell some of the items that we had helped can like pickled peaches, green beans, dried apples, blackberry jam and plum jelly. We had one lady in our neighborhood that kept coming back and buying these items as soon as we would put them out. All was going smoothly we thought until Mother got home and then she realized what we had done. She made us take her to the ladies house and explain that those items were not "For Sale" and that we had to give her her money back and to return the items. She didn't mind getting her money back but she didn't want to give the items back. After a good whipping and privileges being taken away we learned a valuable lesson. Only sell what you have been given.

Wash Day

Have you ever tried to use a rub board to clean your clothes? If you haven't your in for a big surprise. In Georgia the dirt is red clay and it is fun to play in but it is another matter all together to clean it out of your blue jeans.

When you play with your toy cars and trucks you want to build roads and bridges for them to travel on and to do this you are playing on the ground. Yes you have to wet it so you can smooth it out when you are grading the roads and it does get on your clothes. Our mother had decided that she was going to teach us another lesson about getting our clothes extra dirty while playing and that we would have to clean our clothes. First you get a galvanized wash top and fill it with water and soak the bluejeans in the soapy warm water. After they have soaked for a while and the dirt has loosened some you put the rub board into the tub leaning it on the edge of the tub. After busting your knuckles on the ribs of the rub board you learn to get soap on the jeans and on the ribs of the rub board. Sliding the pants up and down over and over and wringing them out and adding more water to rinse you finally get the mud and dirt out of the clothes. You then take the pants to the clothes line and hang them out to dry. It sure makes you think twice before you get them that dirty again.

Have you ever used a wringer washer to wash your clothes with? This is something else all together but it sure beats the rub board.

First you feel the tub of the wringer washer with your water and then you plug in the washer and let it agitate the clothes back and forth in the tub. Then you take the clothes one piece at a time and run them thru the wringers to squeeze the excess water out of the clothes. You quickly learn how to reverse the wringers because you get your fingers caught as you feed the material into the wringer. Then you refill the tub after letting the wash water out and rinsing the tub and fill with rinse water and start all over again. There is no wonder why we enjoy the Automatic Washers and Dryers that we have today. In the winter if you leave your clothes on the line they are frozen stiff when you take them off of the line. But ahahah the feeling of sleeping on sheets that have been hung out to dry on the line there is know feeling like it.

Ironing

My job with the ironing was to sprinkle the clothes with starch. You would take a clean coke bottle and mix you starch and water together in the bottle and then add the sprinkler head to the coke bottle so that you could sprinkle down the clothes with starch. You did this while the clothes were still wet and you would roll them up and put in the refrigerator or freezer if you had one. This would help let the starch set up. Later you would take them out and iron them for crisp smooth garment.

Palmer Waters