Winter Weather Wow

This winter of 2014 has been one for the record books. Those who keep the books claim they had to go back to the 1940s to find anything close to our wintery mix.

I do not like this winter of 2014. It reminds me of bone-cold winters when pots froze solid overnight in the bedrooms during World War II. Mother had to carry them downstairs to thaw out before she could dump them outside in the privy.

To stay warm families spent the day sitting around the kitchen table in the kitchen. The cook stove always had a pot of boiled coffee steaming away on the stove. And there were two or three large teakettles filled with scalding-hot water to be diluted with cold for washing hands and face or to pour into the galvanized bathtub for a Saturday night bath. The kitchen was the place to sit and visit and drink coffee while listening to town gossip and local radio stations.

Super-stars like Ruth Lyons and her 50-50 Club on WLW Radio out of Cincinnati was a big hit around our house and my dad liked to listen to and watch Sally Flowers out of Columbus, Ohio whose show was copied after Ruth’s Cincinnati program. When it was cold out, the house was almost always cold everywhere except the kitchen but the good chairs to relax in were in the living room with the radio. So the families migrated there to hear their favorite shows on radio.

We washed our hair on bath night but did not have hair shampoo and the girls had to come up with things mixed with the water to rinse their hair in. My sister used vinegar and raw eggs mixed together to rinse her hair in.I don’t know anything about it or why she used this but it was a big deal to wash hair and rinse it and usually she would have a friend show up so she could wash her hair at the same time and used the same rinse water.

I never asked what to use to rinse hair because my mother used the same water that I just took a bath in. Sometimes the hard water and soap would result in a thick scum forming on top of the bath water and it had to be dipped off if the water was used by another person. But mother always used an old jelly glass of my bath water to rinse my hair with.

We never used to have salt trucks or trucks with snow plows on them. The county did collect cinders from boilers and scatter them at busy intersections to afford some traction on icy roads but once the snow fell it would stay all winter – packed down into a sheet of ice kids could ice skate on. Gordon kids had to walk to school in all kinds of weather and getting there was not easy if you were a small kid. Big kids could climb the field fences and walk out in the fields easier than we could forge our way through the mountain of snow drifts on the road. And once we got to school, our teacher, Miss Brown, would dip out red, cold, hands into buckets of cold water to restore the circulation and prevent frost bite.