An archive of posts by Lillian about cooking, quilting, knitting, and memories of family and the past. Open her cupboard and discover the treasures she stored there.
On Saturday, my daughter and I went to one of our favorite antique malls, Miller’s in Lebanon, Ohio. I found a set of salt/pepper shakers from the era I like (late 1930s-early 1940s), marked “Japan” and a good addition to my Dutch collection.
My daughter found the real treasure – a 1931 Lebanon High School yearbook which also included the 7th and 8th grade classes. There on the 8th grade class roll was my mother’s name, Martha Mount. Unfortunately, she must have been absent the day the pictures were taken since we didn’t recognize anyone who looked anything like my mother at that age.
This was a new, modern high school at the time and I remember my mother saying how overwhelmed she was by the big campus and large classes after moving there from the little town of Morrow, Ohio, in the 7th grade. Just think – a laboratory and a cafeteria!
I made a copy of a snapshot of my mother in her 8th grade graduation dress – one she described as “beautiful”, probably made by her mother.
A picture in the year book would have been nice, but just to find something from so long ago with my mother’s name is exciting.
A few years ago I wrote a blog about last-day-of-school dresses that my mother had made for me and the one dress I didn’t like that looked like her 8th grade graduation dress.
I have so many wonderful collectibles acquired over the last 80+ years. Some were gifts, some were part of my life growing up, some were inherited, some were purchased at antique malls, gift shops or thrift stores – all are precious to me. Some items are kept up year-around while others are brought out seasonally and on holidays. Unfortunately, many priceless-to-me objects go undisplayed and unseen for years, so each week, I’m going to pull out an item and post a COLLECTIBLE OF THE WEEK.
I love all of the covered dishes I’m sharing this week. The rooster and hen are on my kitchen window sill throughout the summer …
In September, I take down the chickens and put up the squirrel and acorn …
In November, naturally, the turkey has the prize spot …
The mini-dishes which are about 3 inches across the bottom are perched somewhere in the kitchen year around – a hen
…and a cobalt blue scottie
All of these dishes were birthday gifts throughout the years. The rooster, turkey and squirrel go back to the 80s and 90s and are reproductions. The large hen and the two small dishes are vintage, probably from the 1940s.
I have so many wonderful collectibles acquired over the last 80+ years. Some were gifts, some were part of my life growing up, some were inherited, some were purchased at antique malls, gift shops or thrift stores – all are precious to me. Some items are kept up year-around while others are brought out seasonally and on holidays. Unfortunately, many priceless-to-me objects go undisplayed and unseen for years, so each week, I’m going to pull out an item and post a COLLECTIBLE OF THE WEEK.
I have a small assortment of little bisque dolls (2-3 inches tall), all gifts from my older daughter. I love the tiny bride and groom in their late 1920s clothes. The groom wears gold-rimmed glasses and has a wonderful coat with tails.
These two little girls might be standing outside the church watching the newlyweds come through the doors.
This is a wonderful collection of Dutch figures.
Dutch items always go up in my kitchen in January when I’ve taken down the Christmas decorations and the other little cuties are in other spots in the house throughout the year.
By the time I was born in 1932, radio was available, but not to people like my family who had no money for frivolous things, sometimes barely enough for necessities like food. My father was always fascinated with radio and by the time we had moved to a one room flat in 1935 and he had a job with the WPA, making enough to feed his family, he started building crystal sets. As he progressed in the WPA, going from the lowliest laborer to time-keeper, we came up in the world and moved to a two-room flat and had a pretty nice radio. I can remember one playing while we sat at the kitchen table in the morning. I liked the jingle that four young guys sang (lyrics the way I remember them):
Shine your shoes and you’ll wear a smile Shine your shoes and you’ll be in style The sun shines east and the sun shines west But Griffin polish shines the best. Some folks are not particular How they look around their feet, But if they wore shoes upon their heads, They’d make sure their shoes looked neat. So, keep your shoes shining all the time, All the time, it’s the time to shine When you hear this familiar chime (ding, dong, ding) It’s time to shine.
Forty years later, I found out it was the young Williams brothers singing the jingle, including the youngest, Andy Williams, who would become one of my favorite singers in the 1960s.
We listened to the Farm Hour, with reports on grain futures and cattle sales, along with weather reports. The broadcast came from a model-farm type operation and they always talked to the farmer about what he was going to do that day on the farm and sometimes to his wife about her cooking and housekeeping tips.
My parents – 1940
Mother kept the radio on all day while she did her housework, favoring the country music of Mother Maybelle and the Carter Family, Cowboy Copas, and Mac Wiseman, learning songs that she later sang to us. The sadder the ballad, the better, as far as Mother was concerned. She never complained, never cried, always had a pleasant smile on her face, but she loved the most doleful, tragic ballads where people died and roses twined around their tombstones.
Mother – 1945
My father liked sports broadcasts – baseball, football and the boxing matches. I can still hear the tinny sound of the announcer from Madison Square Gardens in New York, announcing the name of Joe Louis and his unlucky opponent. We all listened to the news broadcasts and shows like Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Lux Radio Theater.
Lillian and Shirley – 1940
Just before World War II, we could afford to move to a four-room apartment and my father managed to get a wonderful radio that had a green eye that vibrated and pulsed with each sound coming out of it. The radio was glorious and my little sister and I loved to watch the magic eye do its gyrations. It was on this radio that we heard the news on a wintry Sunday that Pearl Harbor had been bombed and we were now in the middle of World War II. Throughout the war and for several years afterwards, the radio continued to be the major form of information and entertainment in American homes. Our family gathered in the living room around the radio, everybody doing something besides just listening – my parents reading, my sister and I lying on the floor with puzzles or coloring books or paper dolls.
On Saturday nights, we usually listened to a barn dance show, probably the precursor of Grand Ole Opry, and heard someone “calling Rattler from the barn – Huyh, Rattler, Huyh, Huyh” and some guy saying, “I’m going back to the wagon, folks – these shoes is killing me”.
Shirley and Lillian – 1943
I can remember sitting in the kitchen with the radio playing Fred Allen while we ate a supper of leftovers from a big Sunday dinner – fried chicken, potato pancakes made from the mashed potatoes, the remaining meringue-covered chocolate or coconut cream pie.
Of course, we loved The Shadow – “Who knows what evil lurks in the thoughts of man — The Shadow knows!”; Bull Drummond; Your Hit Parade and the latest song by Frank Sinatra (a young, skinny kid at that time); The Lone Ranger and Tonto; Little Orphan Annie and Jack Armstrong and so many others. We always wound up each New Year’s Eve listening to Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians.
Radio was so important to us until one day in 1946 when figures appeared on a tiny screen in my father’s workshop as he built our first television set and radio was never a very big deal again.
My sister, Shirley, and I are standing in our front yard in 1949. I was a junior at Withrow High School and Shirley was in the 8th grade at Highlands (Cincinnati). Mother made our “Dottie Mack”* dresses
The first time I ever heard the word “television” was during World War II when my father showed me an article in one of his radio magazines about this new invention which would change the world after the war was over. I was interested (anything my father showed me was interesting), but I didn’t hold out too much hope for it – a lot of things were promised “after the war”.
Then one day in 1945, the war was over and within a year, my father was in the workshop he had built on the back end of the porch of our little red brick house on Gotham Place, fiddling around with trying to make a television set. He had always been interested in radios and my image of him throughout the 1930s-40s was of him reading a radio hobbyist’s magazine. He had made small radios and was a HAM operator during the war. One hot Saturday afternoon in 1946, we were called to the workshop to see a screen about 5×5 inches and on it was the rather faint image of two men wrestling. It was the first time my father had been able to access one of the few local broadcasts.
My father and mother standing in front of the back porch where my father had his workshop
I understand there were kits available around that time to build a primitive TV set, but my father built his from parts he accumulated as he could afford them. He continued to work and finally built his own set – very rough – all of the innards showed and the small screen just sat there without any kind of cabinet, but it was magnificent because there was a moving, talking picture on it. We were among the first residences in Cincinnati to own a television set. He eventually put a huge magnifying glass in front of the tiny screen to make the picture bigger and on Saturday nights he drug out his masterpiece to set in the front yard of the red brick where the folks on Gotham Place could bring their folding chairs and sit clustered around, watching wrestling. By the following summer, most of the families had their own TV sets.
My sister and I are standing in front of the gate where my father would set up the TV set for the neighbors
The most popular show at the beginning was wrestling and little by little other programs were added, although the day was far from being fully scheduled. When an actual live broadcast wasn’t on the screen, there was a kaleidoscope test pattern so people could adjust and readjust their sets to hopefully get it right before a real show came on. I also remember some kind of an Indian head image with rays going out from it to help with getting the sets adjusted. My father ran for the set every time any kind of image was being broadcast and fooled with it continually.
Eventually, we bought a small TV set with a 7-inch screen which required a humongous aerial on the roof and a lot of adjusting with that, but aesthetically the little cabinet looked a lot better in our living room. There were still problems with “snow” – a hazy snowstorm that appeared over the picture; getting “out of synch” – the screen rolling around and around; the adjusting of the black and white screen; the logistics of getting everybody in a position to see the tiny screen – but there were never any serious complaints (except from my father who had to fix everything) since everybody was just enraptured by the sight of that screen and the wonder of it.
A television set similar to the one we bought
Programming continued to improve. In 1947, the first Cincinnati Reds baseball game was televised and for the first time in my life, I skipped school to come home and watch the afternoon broadcast. I had taken the streetcar to Withrow High School but got off and got on another one coming back home so I could see that game. It was a little disappointing. I guess I had thought even on the small screen there would be close-ups such as there were in newsreels, but they apparently only had a couple of cameras in the stands and we got nothing but long shots. This was before the zoom lens that at least brought home plate into focus, but I was still glad I got to see that piece of history.
Sporting events were always big on television, and lots of local shows – Midwestern Hayride; cooking shows, Ruth Lyons (a show for housewives by a Cincinnati legend), news broadcasts, comedy shows, Bride & Groom with local star Bob Braun singing “Oh, Promise Me”, etc. A favorite was Paul Dixon’s Make-Believe Bandstand with pantomiming to music by Paul, Dottie Mack and Bob Braun. Dottie Mack was a young, pretty model who was an expert at pantomiming and had a gorgeous wardrobe. For Christmas in 1948, Mother made my sister and me matching outfits based on one of Dottie’s – black faille skirt and tie, white blouse and rhinestone pin. (*See picture, above)
Eventually, we got feeds from the networks with big time broadcasts like Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coco, live theater, Ed Sullivan’s show, soap operas and variety shows. My father usually scoffed at the variety shows, saying they were just a bunch of vaudeville acts – and he was right, but most of us had never seen a vaudeville act and we thought they were wonderful: Milton Berle, Burns & Allen, Ed Wynn, and scores of animal, juggling and miscellaneous circus acts.
In a few short years after the war had ended, television was truly the marvel my father had said it would be.
I’m standing with my mother and sister at the back porch where my father built his workshop and our first TV set
Summer on East Court Street (downtown Cincinnati) in the early 1940’s was hot and devoid of trees and shade, but my little sister and I were happy there and grateful to have a nice big third-floor apartment next door to my favorite aunt, Mabel, and her kids. We didn’t have a yard to play in – rather a big flat-top roof with plenty of space, provided you didn’t get too near the edge. To visit my aunt, we would climb out of our kitchen window onto the roof, walk a few feet to the portion that connected with my aunt’s apartment, jump down and go in her kitchen window. It was very convenient and much faster and safer than going down three flights of stairs and onto a busy city street.
Aunt Mabel and cousin Buddy. Vine Street going into Over-the-Rhine in the distanceAunt Mabel and cousin Carol on the roof. Central Parkway is in right hand background.
One summer my sister and I had a large wooden box on the roof and Mother let us plant radish seeds. We were fascinated, especially when we got an invasion of caterpillars and we spent one entire day watching, picking up, putting down furry black and yellow caterpillars. That night we both dreamed we had fuzzy critters crawling all over us and I don’t recall ever bothering with the “container” garden again.
There was no swimming pool nearby, but sometimes Mother let us go out in a summer shower and splash around in the puddles on the city pavement. My mother dreamed of the day we would be able to move from the inner city. She was a small town girl and told us endless stories of how she ran all around Morrow (Ohio) when she was a child, how she played in the cemetery, knew everybody in town, went wherever she wanted while her widowed mother worked in a munitions factory during the day. She used to draw pictures for us of the house we would have some day with trees, grass and a picket fence running all around the house and “kids running around the picket fence”, but it was during World War II and housing was scarce. (We did move to a little brick house with a picket fence and a rose trellis in 1943).
One year, a daughter of my father’s boss at Dayton Acme invited us to go swimming at a pool at Guilford School near Lytle Park in another part of downtown Cincinnati. Mother made us red and while polka-dot swim suits and we were so excited, although after I got there I really didn’t care for the confusion and noise of a very public pool. I preferred splashing around in the puddles on the sidewalk in front of 20 East Court Street during summer showers.
Sister Shirley, cousin Dixie, Lillian in front of Scotti’s Restaurant on East Court St.
My sister on her bike in front of the red brick house, with Gotham Place in the background
From 1943 to 1950, I lived with my parents and younger sister in a little red brick house on Gotham Place in the East End section of Cincinnati. To the east was the gas works, to the west was the water works, to the north was Eastern Avenue and to the south, the Ohio River. The red brick was the very last house on Gotham Place, then came a garage and then came the riverbank.
Shirley and Lillian – last day of school, 1947
In the seven years we lived there, we had to completely move out of the house three times during flooding. In the summertime, however, the Ohio River was beautiful and filled with pleasure boats and happy people. Several times a day, the Island Queen steamboat made the trip from the downtown river landing to Coney Island and back, playing lively calliope music all the way.
The Island Queen
On a typical Sunday morning in the summertime in the 1940s, my sister and I would wake up in our second floor bedroom and have the leisure of not hurrying so much as we might on a school day. The room was fairly small, as were all of the four rooms in the house. The bathroom adjoined this room and the stairs leading downstairs were along one wall. The odd thing about this room is that there was a door that led nowhere. In the warm weather, Mother tacked up screening material but we still had to be careful that we didn’t walk through it and take a big step down one floor to the yard below. My sister and I slept together, as we always had, and at this time had a tan metal double bed. There wasn’t too much else in the room that I recall – probably a chest of drawers of some kind. Linoleum was on all of the floors of the house, due partly to economics and partly to the fact that the river covered the first floor quite often and had gotten to the second floor in 1945.
Mother would be in the kitchen downstairs, getting breakfast. On Sunday we would have pancakes with homemade brown sugar syrup. During the week we ate cold cereal or oatmeal, but on weekends we enjoyed Mother’s pancakes, made from scratch We all preferred the homemade syrup and I particularly liked the white sugar syrup which Mother made when she was out of brown sugar.
Mother
We would put on our Sunday dresses, which were only slightly better than what we wore to school. Mother prided herself on keeping us supplied with pretty, homemade cotton dresses which fit perfectly because she fiddled with them until they did, no matter what kind of odd seams and darts had to be taken. We would put on our nice Sunday shoes and wait for Mother to fix our hair. I had long hair at the time which Mother put into broad finger curls, my sister sometimes had curls and sometimes pigtails because her hair was fine, thin and had no natural curl.
Shirley and Lillian in the Victory Garden (Water Works in the background)
We walked out the front door, through the trellis covered with pink tea roses, and started up the cobblestone street toward Eastern Avenue. We might have passed other people walking to St. Rose Church because most of the people on our street were Catholic. It was 6 or 7 blocks to our First Federated Church, but we both liked walking and avoided streetcars or friendly rides from neighbors.
First Federated Church was a nice little stone building which had a flight of stairs leading up from the street. It was an old church, a combined Methodist/Presbyterian, and we considered ourselves Methodist because Mother was raised Methodist. The hymnals were both Presbyterian and Methodist, and they alternated the hymns during the service. There were pretty stained glass windows, nice pews and the fascinating holders for tiny vials of grape juice for the people who took communion on the rare occasions they offered it.
The choir would file in, wearing their black shiny robes with white collars. Julia, the ancient and sweet organist, was banging away on the nice pipe organ for the processional. She was a trained musician but still played something in the style of my grandma, not being too concerned if she hit the wrong keys. The choir was a group of neighborhood women, none of whom had a particularly good voice.
The minister was a nice looking young man who had a tall, thin, gaunt wife who didn’t appear to match him at all. Their daughter was my age and they had two sons, one a cute toddler who gave his mother fits. The sermons weren’t too long or too tedious, but everything in church was tedious for my sister. She twitched, scratched, moved her feet, did everything I thought was unseemly in church and I was constantly correcting her. But we both loved to sing the hymns and I always sang the harmony, although probably too softly for anybody to notice.
My sister’s wedding at First Federated in 1955
After church, we’d make the long trip back home and by then I was absolutely famished. Mother would be frying chicken with that wonderful smell filling the house. There would be mashed potatoes with cream gravy, maybe creamed peas or another canned vegetable (my father didn’t care much for vegetables), and as a salad – some lettuce on a plate with sliced tomatoes topped with mayonnaise. I’m not sure that anybody except my father had the salad – I didn’t care for the mix and particularly I didn’t want the mayonnaise. For dessert we usually had pie – mostly cream pies with a small amount of meringue stretched out over several pies. Mother never seemed to have enough eggs and was always skimpy with them in her recipes.
After dinner, we might help with dishes or not, depending on Mother’s mood. Then my sister and I would have the afternoon to just spend together in the make-believe world we had invented with a lot of teenage characters, male and female. Or we might get together with some school friends and make the long walk up Eastern Avenue to the Jackson Theater to see a second-run film, a serial, a cartoon and a newsreel. Then, we’d make the long trip back as the sun was starting to go down.
In the evening, Mother brought out the dinner leftovers – a few pieces of chicken, mashed potato pancakes, and pie. We’d eat in the darkening kitchen while listening to Jack Benny or Fred Allen on the radio. The rest of the evening was spent quietly writing, coloring, or doing jigsaw puzzles while listening to the radio.
By nine o’clock my mother and sister were always ready for bed, but I was never sleepy. Most of the time I was allowed to stay up and quietly read along with my father until I felt I could fall asleep.
My memories of those Sundays are always of peace and quiet. If there had ever been an uproar over something, that unhappy memory has faded over the years.
Daddy, Mother, Lillian, Shirley in front of 247 Gotham Place
I recently posted something about a 1940s era junkman who visited my neighborhood and how my mother always looked for old pots and pans which she would repair with little pieces of metal. My daughter found this card of Mendets on eBay and bought it for me. This is exactly what my mother used, except sometimes she bought them in a small box.
Mendets were patented in the early 1900s and the dress/hairstyle of the lady on the card makes me think this might be from the 1930s. The back of the card has instructions as well as suggesting some other uses such as repairing a hot water bottle, using on campfire utensils and even shows a lady perched precariously on a ladder repairing a gutter (“Saved the cost of a tinsmith”).
Until World War II was over, I believe every pot, pan and kettle in our kitchen had a Mendet or two helping to give a bit more life.
Obituary Grady Hatton, the former major league third baseman who managed the Houston Astros in the 1960s, has died. He was 90. Alyssa Hatton, his granddaughter, says Hatton died Thursday of the effects of old age at his home in Warren, the rural East Texas Piney Woods town that was his home for 40 years.
Hatton hit .254 with 91 home runs and 533 RBIs in 1,312 major league games in 12 seasons from 1946 to 1960 with the Cincinnati Reds, Chicago White Sox, Boston Red Sox, St. Louis Cardinals, Baltimore Orioles and Chicago Cubs. He had a 164-221 record as Houston’s manager from 1966-68.
The Beaumont native starred at the University of Texas and served in the U.S. Army during World War II.
A funeral is scheduled for Monday at First Baptist Church of Warren. He will be buried Mount Pisgah Cemetery near Woodville.
I can’t remember when I wasn’t a baseball fan, but during the summer of 1946 when I was 13 years old (ready to start high school in the fall), I became a full-fledged Cincinnati Reds enthusiast. I listened to every game on the radio back in the days when games played away from home were broadcast by Waite Hoyt adding his wonderful embellishments to bare minimum details received over the wire. Of course, he called the home games from old Crosley Field with all of the background sounds of fans cheering, bats cracking, and the organ urging everyone to cheer a little louder. I loved the Reds and I especially loved a rookie who came up that year – Grady Hatton. He was 22 years old, single, handsome, and a good player. He immediately became the darling of the teenage girls in Cincinnati or the “bobbysockers“ as the press called us.
Television was new and the Reds were not on the schedule yet – that would happen for the first time on September 21, 1947. It was the only time in my life I ever played hooky. I took the streetcar to my high school that morning and, knowing the broadcast would be over by the time I returned home in the afternoon, I got back on a streetcar heading for home and saw the game on our very tiny television set that my father had built.
The only way to see my idol was in person at the games (and I didn’t have the means to go to very many) or to grab any picture I could find in our daily Cincinnati Post or Sunday Cincinnati Enquirer. All of the pictures I’ve posted are from my scrapbook which still survives with faded clippings of an exciting era for me.
I loved finding pictures of players off the field such as this one of the Reds at the railroad station, returning from spring training in 1948. Grady Hatton is in the center along with some of my other favorites – Ewell Blackwell, Kent Peterson and Eddie Erautt.
From 1947 is this shot of Grady (second from right) in the dining room. It’s interesting that the caption says this is the first year that players in training have received expense money.
I also liked this photo of Grady and his sister who was visiting from their home town of Beaumont, Texas.
I received my first piece of Roseville about 25 years ago as a birthday gift. It was my one and only “perfect” piece as I continued to receive Roseville gifts through the years. I’m very happy with pieces that have a small chip or crack because I know they were displayed and loved by someone. Unfortunately, last Christmas I dropped and completely shattered my perfect little vase and replaced it last summer with one that has a chip or two. The pattern is Bushberry.
I received two more beautiful pieces of Roseville this Christmas, a Columbine ewer and a Water Lily vase…
…and thought it might be a good time to get out all of the treasures and place them on the mantel before beginning my post-Christmas display.
In addition to the three pieces above, there are 3 candle holders (Snowberry, Primrose and Magnolia)…
…two large vases (Hibiscus)…
…a large vase and a bookend (Freesia)…
…a console, a sconce shell and a creamer (White Rose, Magnolia and Zephyr Lily).
I love having these beautiful pieces to display throughout my home at different seasons of the year. I enjoy this collection particularly because it is a product of Ohio. The company was in business from 1890 to 1954, starting in Roseville, Ohio and moving to Zanesville, Ohio in 1898. I’m also attracted by the 1930s-40s style and muted colors.
The Robert Fabe signed print over the mantel is called March Morning and shows a street in the Mt. Adams suburb of Cincinnati. (Click picture for close-up) It’s not where I lived as a child but looks very much like my old neighborhood. I sure hope we don’t have that much snow this year in March.
LILLIAN'S CUPBOARD 