Youth in the Thirties

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."