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by Bob Gunter
Elizabeth Montaque Whatley came to the Sandpoint
area in 1933. She, in her own words, shares what
it was like to be a young person at that time.
The picture she paints shows another place –
another time.
"You washed dishes and you mopped wooden floors
that had cracks in between them and you learned
how to sweep the floor in the right direction so
that all the cracks, the dirt in the cracks,
went out that way. They were just wooden floors
and a lot of people didn't have linoleum on the
floors and you washed clothes by hand in big
tubs and you had a wash board that went up and
down like this and you had a big bar of P&G soap
and you rubbed it on the clothes and you did
rub-a-dub-dub and you washed ‘em and then you
rinsed ‘em and then you put ‘em over here in a
tub of bluing - the white clothes - and you hung
‘em on the line and hoped it didn't rain.
Then you took ‘em in and immediately they had to
be sprinkled and rolled up and put in a laundry
basket because you had to start ironing the next
morning. You had to do all the ironing and all
the beds had to be stripped and they weren't
sheets. They were blankets and they were double
- some of ‘em were double blankets - and it took
two people - you washed ‘em in a big washtub and
then it took two people to take ‘em out and one
wrung one end and one wrung the other end and
you didn't have any others to put back on the
bed so you had to get ‘em dry and hope the wind
was blowing and get ‘em dry and get ‘em back on
the bed to sleep in that night because you
didn't have two pair of ‘em. That was a real
trick.
Most everybody washed by hand. Very, very few
people had washing machines in the thirties. In
fact, there weren’t a lot of people that had
electricity. And if you did, all you had was the
little lights hanging down in the middle. You
didn't have plug-ins on the wall and all that.
We didn't have hardly any electrical appliances.
I remember that we had a wood stove and when
mama would curl her hair she'd stick the curling
iron down in the coals of the wood stove and get
it hot and then take tissue paper and put it on
the iron and if it didn't brown the tissue paper
it was just right, and you put the little curls
in your hair. Or you could put the iron in the
lamp.
We had lots of lamps because poor people just
couldn't afford to buy electricity. My first
daughter was born on Valentine's Day in nineteen
forty-two in a house out there in Colburn and we
still had kerosene - she was born to kerosene
lamps. It just wasn't a common thing until after
Farragut and Second World War that people
started getting in electricity. You just used
kerosene lamps and were careful how you took ‘em
up the stairs. That was one of our biggest
treats, I think, was when we really got
electricity.
Children all gathered - especially the young
teens - got together in the evening. We loved to
play Monopoly and different types of card games.
We had parlor games. We played Going Out West
and Button, Button, Who's Got the Button. Some
of the games we played they've been playing for
the last two hundred years. That's how the young
people entertained themselves. In the summer
time we'd sit out on the logs in our yards at
night and sing all the songs or maybe somebody
had an old truck with side boards on it and a
whole bunch of us would get in there and we'd go
around town and we'd sing every song we knew.
Then when fall would come we'd put hay in there
with bricks under the hay and blankets.
There was always some of the churches had young
people's meeting so we'd go to the young
people’s meetings and sing all the old hymns and
the gospel hymns. In the summer time we did a
lot of hiking in the mountains, camping out,
fishing. Everybody loved to fish. Sand Creek had
a lot of pools on it, further on up, and we
fished in Sand Creek. Of course, the lake didn't
have that big beach but we always had that area
to go to and have wiener roasts and marshmallow
roasts and meet all the new fellows that had
come to town. Some of ‘em had come in from the
ranches.
But we had jobs to do at home. There were things
to be done. Clothes had to be sewed. Our dresses
and things had to be made for school. We kept
busy. We kept busy." |
