Food and Shopping

FOOD AND DRINK

Most of our basic foods and drinks were produced on the farm. We rarely bought beef, pork, or chicken at a store. By doing our own butchering, we had beef roasts, hamburgers, steaks, and ribs from the calves; from the pigs we had pork chops, tenderloins, pork ribs, hams, ham hocks (pig’s feet). From the calves we kept—and ate—the hearts, livers, tongues, and brains. My dad would take some of the scraps of left-over beef and make loaves of “head cheese.” I can’t say I really liked tongue and heart unless I put a lot of mustard or catsup on them. Brains were not bad—rather sweet tasting, and I did like liver.

Milk and water were our basic drinks. We would also drink iced tea or lemonade, and once in a while we would have soft drinks such as Coca Cola. I can remember being at the Parker Inn in the late 1930s when RC Cola first reached Parker. Frances Bousman agreed to be brave and try it; when she tasted the strong flavor and the fizz, she really turned up her nose at it. Pepsi Cola was around, but we rarely had Pepsi. Another bottled soft drink that was popular was Nehi, the same Nehi that Radar liked in M*A*S*H. There was a bottled chocolate milk drink, and of course we mixed Hershey’s chocolate with our milk. Another Horlick’s Malted Milk Mix was common. Horlick’s also made a chewable tablet made out of malt; that was one of my favorites to snack on.

One year my mother decided she would make some root beer at home. The process went well, and the root beer was good. She stored the root beer in the shed behind the house. During the summer it got too hot in the shed, and the fizz in the root beer caused it to blow off the bottle caps.

Our breakfast cereals were primarily Quaker Oatmeal and Wheaties. We were great fans of Wheaties, partly because there were pictures of baseball heroes on the back of the boxes. We had a big collection of baseball players from Wheaties boxes; if we had saved them, they may have been valuable today. A new cereal came out in the late 1930s called Cheerioats. The Federal government wouldn’t allow them to use that name because there weren’t enough oats in them, so they had to change the name to Cheerios. Occasionally we would have Cream of Rice and other cooked cereals like Wheatina and Malt-o-meal.

Our vegetables came from the truck patch. Most of the time we had common vegetables like peas, green beans, beets, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, potatoes, and sweet potatoes from the garden. Occasionally Dad would try to raise celery and cauliflower, but they were harder to grow. In 1936 when we got electricity, our options for vegetables increased. With electricity and a refrigerator my mother could buy frozen foods—a new product in the 30s. Now we did not always have to eat canned meats and vegetables in the winter. In addition, our milk stayed fresh longer with the refrigerator.

We did not often get candy bars, but many of the candy bars from that time still exist today: Baby Ruth, Butterfingers, Milky Way, Heath Bars, Bit-O-Honey, and Three Musketeers. Three Musketeer bars were different back then; they actually had three separate pieces in the bar—each with a different kind of filling. For chewing gum we had Wrigley’s Spearmint and Doublemint Gum, Adam’s Clove and Blackjack Gum, and Chiclets. Juicy Fruit was popular, but the packaging was different; the package used to have green and white diagonal stripes.

We did not eat many snack foods. Once in a while we might have some potato chips. My mother baked most of the cookies we ate—her specialty was oatmeal cookies; but occasionally she would get store-bought cookies. My favorites at that time were a cream-filled wafer and a chocolate-covered marshmallow cookie. I still like the wafer cookies, but I haven’t had—or wanted—a marshmallow cookie in years.

HOME SHOPPING

During the 1930’s we didn’t always have to go into town to go to the store. The store sometimes came to us.

The Huckster Wagon

One store was the “huckster wagon.” A “huckster” is defined as a peddler, a hawker—one who sells wares by going from place to place. The huckster wagon was really a grocery store on wheels. Just as in many modern grocery stores, you could buy things other than groceries.

It wasn’t that we didn’t have a car and couldn’t get into town. Most families did have only one car, so if one family member had the car, the others were home-bound. Still, I think the idea of the huckster wagon was a left-over from the pre-automobile days. Farmers were working in the fields all day with their horses, and they didn’t have the time to drive the horses into town to shop. There was always excitement when the huckster wagon came because one of the things he carried was candy.

The Jewel Tea and the Watkins Companies

Another occasional visitor/salesman was the Jewel Tea man. It was something like the huckster wagon, but the Jewel Tea truck had a much more limited selection, mostly teas and condiments. Another similar peddler was the Watkins man. Most of his wares were spices and food flavorings, but he also carried various condiments. These “stores” usually didn’t carry candy, so we never got quite so excited about the Jewel Tea and the Watkins trucks as we did about the huckster wagon.

The Linco Man

Although we didn’t have a tractor at the time, we did have some machines that ran by gasoline. Usually we would get our gas in town and bring it home in a can, but occasionally a gasoline truck would bring the gas to the farm. Usually it was the Linco man (Lincoln Oil Company). The only Linco man I remember was Eldon Helm—the father of the six Helm boys, friends from church.

The Creamery Truck

Another home store was the dairy wagon. When we milked the cows, we kept what we needed for our own use. What was left was processed in the “separator.” The creamery wagon would come every week to pick up the cream from our milking. His truck also carried a line of dairy products, such as chocolate milk, ice cream, a variety of hard cheeses, and cottage cheese.

The Ice Man Cometh

Until we got electricity in the house, we had to keep things in an ice box. The ice box had a place in the top to put the ice; the part below the ice chest was like a regular refrigerator where we kept the milk and other things that needed to be kept cool. Of course, the ice would melt, and the melted water was drained into a container at the bottom of the ice box.

Most of the time we would go into town to buy ice; but once in a while an ice man would deliver the ice right to our house. Usually there were a few chipped pieces of ice left in his truck, and he would give us have a few pieces to suck on. It might not sound like a big thrill now, but on hot summer days it was a good way to cool off.