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Smearing a hunk of butter on a piece of bread comes easily today. You make your way over to the fridge, open the door, grab a stick or a container of it, waltz back over to your seat, and commence spreading the stuff all over your bread without looking back.
Harold Johnson, who has lunch at the Fairfield senior citizens' center during the week with many of his friends in the area, remembers quite a different scenario when it came to butter--and many other things that come so easily nowadays--when he was growing up in the farm country of southeast Iowa.
His blue eyes gaze over an expanse of almost 80 years of change that has brought him, and his companions, to the present day. He recalls a churn with a crank and wooden paddles for making butter. Some people even just put cream in a glass jar and shook it, and made butter whenever they had a few minutes to spare between other chores. He remembers the milkman ladling milk into their five-gallon bucket, and then continuing down the street in his horse-drawn carriage.
The ice truck came past his house twice a week, just in time to fill an empty, watery icebox for the next few days. Harold says they'd order an extra big piece on Saturday to last through till Monday. Fruits and vegetables came from the farmers' market. His mom sewed for the family, baked bread, cooked jam, and canned pickles. And he hasn't forgotten about the chores kids would have to do every day, like gathering the eggs, pulling the weeds, mowing the lawn (without electric-powered mowers), and milking the cows.
"Why, I used to scrub the front porch with the leftover wash water," he laughs, as he sits comfortably in his chair at the center. The wash was done with the help of a contraption featuring a handle and crank that was pushed to set an agitator in motion. Then clothes were cranked through a ringer to remove the excess water and strewn along a line to float with the breeze until dry.
But keeping the dirt roads dry in springtime was certainly not such a breeze. Smiling, he talks about the city council's decision to "oil" Adams Street, a dirt lane at the time and the main street to the county hospital. "I don't remember a car going up that street till I was 10 or 12 years old," he says.
The town didn't have a lot of money, so the Iowa Electric company donated the oil. It was actually "Creosote oil," a by-product of coal from which the electric company made their gas. It's now known to be toxic, and the Environmental Protection Agency came in a few years ago to clean up the storage sites that contained the oil.
The idea, Harold explains, was to coat the dirt roads so that no water could penetrate. Otherwise, when it rained, wheels would get stuck in muddy ruts.
So Creosote oil was sprayed on certain streets in the spring. "It was black, thick, and goopy, like melted tar," he says. "My dad's birthday was May 21st, and that's when we could take off our long underwear and go barefoot. One of my friends lived right across the street, and so we would have to walk right across it on our tippy toes to get to their home. It was the only way to do it. We had to wipe our feet on the grass, and it wouldn't all come off. We would have to wash our feet with bar soap, and still it didn't completely come off."
Harold's grandmother made the soap for the family. She used the cooking grease and the ashes from the wood stove.
His mom made jelly. He smiles as he remembers one incident. "I was about eight," he says. "I was watching her boiling the juice down, and adding lots of sugar, maybe a few cups, and stirring it and stirring it. We started noticing that it was going up in little volcanoes, and not bubbling or boiling like it was supposed to."
It was in fact heaps of salt that she had been adding instead of sugar. "Those were the days that salt and sugar came in white cloth sacks that looked alike. They did have the name printed on them, but she didn't notice it at first, and probably just grabbed the bag without looking."
Twenty-five-pound bags of flour also came in cotton sacks, but in a variety of bright flower prints, which the flour companies used to promote sales. The sacks could be easily ripped at the seams, washed clean, and ironed flat. Women would then cut out a pattern of a dress or skirt. "I don't think that would fly today, but that's what they did," he says.
"Most people couldn't afford to buy clothes then. Most moms made dresses for the family anyway. My grandmother on the Davis side was a seamstress, and my grandfather on the Johnson side was a tailor. They sewed for the wealthy people. I was in high school when I first started wearing pants from the store--knickers. I don't know why my mom bought me knickers, but that's what I had to wear then."
His blue eyes fix themselves onto the old photographs he has brought, and he slowly places each one in front of me as he describes their contents. One shows his great-grandfather's general store. Another captures his great-grandfather in a dark suit, a longish beard at his chin, wearing neither a smile nor a frown.
Merging back to these places, Harold tells me the story about his knickers and the debate team.
"I was only about a four-foot-tall kid when I was a sophomore in high school," he says. "The debate team coach put me with a girl partner--actually my friend, Christine, who lived across the street from me. He thought it was 'so cute,' so neat that I was this small guy with knickers debating next to this girl--and these events were kind of a solemn thing--but we went along with it. He hauled us around all over southeast Iowa."
In one debate, Harold actually made up a fictitious luminary, the Honorable H. Davis Johnson, with a quote to match because he could see that they were going to lose. After that incident, a schoolmate and now retired local attorney, Tom Louden, began a tradition by addressing him as such. "To this day, even after 64 years, he'll still say, 'Hi H. Davis, how's it going?' whenever he sees me!"
Another tradition that hasn't changed for Harold is a Swedish affair called duppa greta, which means "dipping into the pot." Harold's great grandfather--a tailor for the king of Sweden himself--immigrated to the U.S., bringing duppa greta with him, and settled in Boone, Iowa, about 30 miles northeast of Des Moines.
On Christmas, the entire extended family would converge at their grandparents' home, say a Swedish prayer, dip bread into a big pot filled with broth, and put it on their plates. Then they'd take the pieces of meat in the broth, put those on their plates, and begin a festive holiday meal together. Harold says his own children have kept up this Swedish tradition.
One custom that remains only as a charming recollection involves lighting candles on the Christmas tree. Tiny candles the size of little pinky fingers were put into metal holders that clipped onto the branches. "Everybody would say, 'Be careful with those candles,' but boy, we'd have a lot of fires," he recalls. "The kids would light them on Christmas Eve for a minute or so, and then they would blow them out." If they kept them lit any longer, he says, the tree would burst into flames almost at once.
Harold's blue eyes circle back to the present and rest on the black-and-white images he has brought. He scoops them up with a chuckle, and starts walking home . . . his shoes tapping a clean concrete sidewalk as cars go whizzing by, some butter waiting in the fridge--and no chores.
