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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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Little
Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
by Mildred Armstrong Kalish |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Formative Memoirs often
present readers with two insights: ways in which others have had the same
experience as ours, and ways in which the lives of others are different. For all
readers of Mildred Armstrong Kalish’s memoir, Little
Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great
Depression, both insights abound. I think more people lived on my block
in Brooklyn than Kalish would see in a year in her Since
professional medical care was all but absent from our lives, children as well
as adults knew a great deal about home remedies. If, for example, one of us
kids was attacked by bees of one kind or another—stings from wild honeybees,
bumblebees, yellow jackets, sweat bees, and hornets were a regular part of
life on our farm—we all knew enough to apply baking soda, black mud, or
earwax to relieve the excruciating pain. If we developed a canker sore on a
tongue we knew just the thing to do: Harvest a green pepper from the garden,
chew it well, but don’t swallow it. The chewed pepper relieved the smarting
pain in an instant. We still resort to this instant cure when anyone gets a
mouth sore. In the wintertime when we lived in Garrison and there were no
green vegetables, we used a crystal of alum to relieve canker sores, but
green peppers taste better than alum and I’ll take the green pepper cure over
alum any day. Perhaps
because of our storehouse of knowledge, parents were remarkably complacent
about all the injuries that were a routine part of the lives of free-range
farm children—cuts from knives (which even six-year-old kids routinely
incurred), stone bruises caused by bare feet on rocks, blood blisters, and
all the bloody, oozing scrapes on knees, arms, elbows, and thighs. When one
of us kids received a scratch, cut, or puncture, we didn’t run to the house
to be taken care of. Nobody would have been interested. We just went to the barn
or the corncrib, found a spiderweb, and wrapped the
stretchy filament around the wound. It stopped the bleeding and the pain, and
was thought to have antiseptic qualities. Generally, healing occurred
without further attention. Skin has got to be one of God’s greatest
creations. We took
care of ourselves for more serious injuries, too. Every home in our area had
Vaseline, lard, baking soda, boric acid, salt, camphor, alum peroxide, Vicks,
Mentholatum, tincture of iodine, and, some few
years later, Mercurochrome. The peroxide may have been the most commonly used
of these remedies. Because we went barefoot all summer it was not unusual to
suffer cuts from double-bitted axes, broken glass, barbed wire, or rusty
nails. If we got cut or stepped on a nail, we “bubbled the poison out” by
pouring a bit of peroxide on it, and it usually healed in a couple of days.
Local lore also maintained that a chaw of tobacco applied to a deep cut could
draw out the poison. We sought relief from the painful throbbing of stone bruises
by soaking the foot in extremely hot water twice a day. But there was nothing
to do about blood blisters. They just disappeared by themselves, though they
were sometimes painful for a very long time. It was a miracle that none of us
kids ever broke a bone, and we rarely developed life-threatening infections. One truly
frightening day out in Yankee Grove, when my brother slashed his leg with a
glancing blow of his ax, I saw my grandfather burn his handkerchief to get
fresh charcoal to apply to the cut to stop the bleeding. Grandpa did one of
his horses that same courtesy when the animal got fearfully entangled in some
barbed wire and suffered deep wounds in his fetlock. Not one of us ever
received a tetanus shot, though for a couple of weeks one summer we
discussed, in appropriately funereal tones, the death of a neighbor’s horse
from lockjaw. The animal developed the infection from a barbed wire injury
and had to be put down. I myself
developed a quite serious infection one summer. I remember whimpering all
night, half awake and half asleep, from a fearful pain coming from the toe
pad beneath my big toe and the one next to it. When I showed it to Mama the
next morning, she responded in an uncharacteristic manner. She actually
sprang into action. Pointing to a distinct red line running from between my
toes almost up to my knee, she diagnosed blood poisoning. Did she call a
doctor? No. In a trice, she poured boiling water into the white enameled foot
pan and, once it had cooled somewhat, had me soak my foot for a very long
time. When she was satisfied that the stone bruise was soft enough, she used
a razor blade to cut a tiny gash deep into the tough, swollen, bluish area,
until lots of bloody pus oozed out. The pain diminished immediately. With
that she poured the ubiquitous, all-purpose peroxide on it, and wrapped my
foot in a bandage made from worn-out white sheets or shirts. After several
days of soaks followed by the deft use of the razor blade to keep the wound
open and a post-nick flush of peroxide, the red streak gradually disappeared. During
that period, I was a bit of a celebrity, for blood
poisoning was something that Big Kids and Little Kids alike knew was a
serious enough matter to warrant the attention of adults. Further, I had the
distinction of being granted official layabout status.
In a family where Industriousness was second only to Godliness, this was a
highly desirable state, and I had come by it honestly. Had I been suffering
as a result of a gluttonous indulgence in green apples or a casual disregard
of an unstable pile of wood, such carelessness would have elicited no
solicitousness whatsoever. But this condition was not my fault. By common
consent of the adults, I was exempt from all chores and all family
responsibilities, and was permitted to reign in the high-backed rocking chair
in the kitchen and read to my heart’s content. My enforced sloth was the envy
of all of the kids. Many of
the home remedies that were the order of the day came from a thick, heavy
book called the People’s Home Library, an
impressive compendium of lore on the treatment and medication of people and
livestock, and on domestic science or cooking and household management. Now
in an exceedingly dilapidated condition, it has been in our family since
1920, and is currently in my possession. In almost
any gathering of women, some part of the conversation focused on a debate
about the various remedies. Was the best sassafras tea made from the bark,
the root, or the actual wood of the tree? Should the onions for a chest
poultice be baked or fried? And which would draw a splinter out the
quickest—the delicate membrane from the inside of an eggshell, or a piece of
salt pork? Much
discussion was devoted to the efficacy of the popular patent medicines. I
recall several: Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Dr. Pierce’s Pleasant Pellets,
Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery and Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.
All of these creations were praised and widely used. A search in the People’s Home Library yielded the
formula for Lydia Pinkham’s concoction. Among other things, it calls for
partridge berry vine, cassia, cramp and poplar bark, unicorn root, sugar, and
alcohol. For some
readers, the recipes alone are reason enough to read Little
Heathens, for others it will be a nostalgic recollection of times past. Even
for those of us with no connection to Steve Hopkins,
August 25, 2007 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the September
2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Little
Heathens.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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