Posted: 8/5/2007 11:38:14 AM EDT
|
We live in a world that was unimaginable to our grandfathers. We are able to ride out in a couple hours and pick up anything that we need to make it through out day to day lives. I am in my late 20's and almost everyday I regret the fact that my grandfather died before I was old enough to pick his brain about how they did things in the old days. If the average one member on here had to live and support a family with what people had to deal with in the 20's or 30's there would be a lot of hungry people around. There is a older guy at the local diner where I eat breakfast who is a cattle farmer, and he has more knowledge in his brain about simple life supporting things than probably 20 average men. I admire people like this. I find my self asking him questions about this and that all the time. He recently started a farm type event every so often where they actually show you how to plow a garden with a mule, hand churn butter. The use an old grinding wheel and a mule, grind up corn and actually make corn bread in dutch ovens. It is pretty interesting. My point to all this is, if you know any older people out there, family members or whatnot, that have this kind of knowledge; sit them down and take a tape recorder and record what they say. There are all kinds of things that you can learn and it will make their day that you are taking interest in their stories. |
|
I agree fully!!! I had the chance to get good tips from both my grandfather and grandmother regarding "city survival"... They were both Depression babies. I'll take advice any day from a man who started working as a rack dipper in a nickel plating factory at the age of 14 to help pay the bills in his mom's boarding house in Detroit. I've also learned quite a bit from the rest of my immigrant relatives. I'm second generation American, the rest all came from Slovakia or Poland. My Grandmother also had great experience in communal sharing when she had kids, all the women around her had kids, and all their husbands were off in WWII. That woman knew how to stretch a dollar!!! -V |
| I taped family members, who if now living would be over 130 years old. It's really nice to 'just' hear them. Word of advice, bug the chair,etc. Set up tape in advance and running, get them in the room and ask discussion-provocative questions. I tried the other way,i.e. sticking a mike at them, and they clam up, or talk all phoney! |
|
I'm in my mid 40s and my last "older relative" died last year. That being said, its not a bad idea to talk to the older generation, and not just for information. Many of them have lost their peer groups and may feel left behind by the younger generations. Showing some interest in them will be good for their spirits, and the value of the oral knowledge they pass along about even just ordinary family history cannot be measured. As for the old ways of doing things, there are still many copies of old farming and "how-to" texts and reasonably priced modern reprints of those texts still available. Not as good as first hand teaching, but at least the knowledge is not lost. |
|
I have done a lot of farmers markets and I get people telling me their life stories and of how much things have changed. Older generations are much more into storing food. Also right now I am getting most of the books, records from a agriculture research stations library. They just decided to throw it all away. Seems really illogical to me. There not getting rid of part of the library, their getting rid of the library. Old books really explain things in practical useful terms. Some of the books are from the 1800's. |
|
I would say that the commonest and probably most useful skill that is being lost is how to cook from scratch. I have been hunting around here in MD to find an oldster who can tell me how to grow and harvest tobacco. There aren't many of them left, espicially here in the city. It only takes one generation for the knowledge to be lost. I wish my Grandparents were still alive. I have a lot of questions for them now that I have adult concerns and interests. My parents are too old to be Boomers but share many of their qualities. I find my Mother and her cohorts in particular, to be very smug and absolutely dismissive about life in the first half of the 20th Century. No desire at all to learn the old ways. Colonel Hurtz |
|
The older generation lived in what most of us would now call a "SHTF" senario. Hell, even my parents lived in a 16' travel trailer with no electricity, only propane lights and propane for cooking. They had an outdoor bath tub they heated the water in kettles on the gas stove to take a hot bath. (this was an OLD trailer, it was old when they got it and that was 35 years ago) I was born in that trailer. It was up on a hill and back then they didn't have money for gravel, so in the winter My dad carried me on his back and a propane tank in each hand about 300 yards up to the trailer, in knee deep mud! |
I call my grandmother at least once a week just to ask her questions about my small garden.She was raised here in Florida and her father always had a garden and like someone said,she just loves the phone call or visit.Now I just need my wife to take an interest in her gravy mmm........... gravy
|
|
Colonel Hurtz, Until the buyout a few years ago EVERYONE grew tobacco around here (Southern MD). Amish around me still are.They were cutting this morning.I'm SURE they wouldn't mind an extra set of hands.  HINT: It's backbreaking work. Everyone helped everyone else, because it was almost impossible to hire any one to do it!I still get a kick out of a lot of this. My Dad is in his 80s. I'll ask him a question and he'll look at me like I'm from another planet. He just ASSUMES EVERYONE knows how to do just about everything. "Just feed it a plug of tobacco.That'll kill the worms" "A little dab of pine tar where the brain is exposed ought to do it." "Just run the primary over there, then put in a jumper to bypass" "Lean 'er out a little more". Heck, when I got back into chickens a dozen years ago or so, my mother in law, comes over with a caponizng kit,and says "Just slit them in front of the last rib, then pull out the wormy looking thing,and snip it.It'll work on you too, I bet!"  I grew up doing a lot of stuff the old way, as did my wife, and we're doing our best to raise our kids the same. But what I don't know never ceases to amaze me. |
Heck when I was in high school you could get excused from school to work in the tobacco fields during the planting season and harvest. Yea its hard work but the pay was really good. People would be buying new vehicles and homes with their tobacco earnings. Got to watch out for that spike when cutting tobacco. |
When my mother was a kid her parents used to move around a lot. Her and her siblings got them to stop moving by saving a bunch of strawberry picking money. Then putting the cash up for a house. Payed about a fourth of the cost. Now it can take a life time of a good job to pay for a house. Another reason to talk to other generations, to see how things have changed. Inflation isn't uniform at all. Clothes, shoes, food, most manufactured goods, as a percentage of income went down. Housing, insurance, medical, went up up and away. Pay for occupations compared to each other has greatly changed to. Who know what the future will bring. |
|
My grandfather was born in 1888. He lived to see 'man on the moon' and then some. My grandparents had their 75th wedding anniversary. When I was in my twenties, I got very interested in preserving the knowledge. I would ask questions and listen for hours as the stories were told. Very cool! When I meet my father-in-law he was 78 (had wife at 56) and his horse herd was 'down to' 130 head. He was a farmer, cattlemen, dairymen his whole life. We lived near by and I spent as much time as I could asking him questions, etc. |
|
Information from the elderly? Use bourbon or scotch... if that doesn't work then move on to sodium pentothal or scopolamine. Or you could go 1960's on their ass and tie them into two seperate i.v. sets... one loaded with barbituates and one loaded with amphetamines. Once the barbituates kick in, get them to start talking about your subject, any aspect of it would help, even lies... Then open the other i.v. up and ask them again. Better have a tape recorder going, because you won't be able to write as fast as they're talking. Bad part: they'll probably die shortly afterwards. EDIT: this topic isn't about interrogation? |
|
I was born in the mid-'50s, so my grandparents were doing stuff like logging virgin forests in northern Minnesota and heating their school rooms with buffalo chips in North Dakota. Unfortunately, when I was 15 and they were interested in talking about that stuff, I just thought they were really old and I wasn't interested. Wish I could do that over. After my Grandpa died, we found a manuscript he had written about his life. It was a fascinating glimpse of life before government subsidies and preemption. Big towns(many thousands of people) just disappeared when the timber was gone, nearby towns suffered and looked for alternatives, new towns cropped up in new places... It was all market driven, into then-endless lands, without practically any government influence. (This was maybe 1916 to 1928.) My grandma had to literally walk 5 miles to the North Dakota schoolhouse where she taught and start up the heater in the winter. Fuel was apparently "iffy." I don't remember if she even finished high school, but she was a teacher. My point is, you're absolutely right, there is a huge amount of basic "survival" knowledge that is being lost year-by-year, generation-by-generation. There are probably few places on the planet where this is happening more frequently than right here in the USA. We're getting close to the point where even most of the "old" people grew up in cities with modern amenities, so this would be a great time to break out those tape recorders. |
| My grandfather was a depression survivor and my father was a child through the WWII era. They lived in a farming community but didn't farm much. What I learned was engineering. Not the computer analysis math heavy but the "field expediant" type - getting it done good enough for now. I also learned common construction techniques and picked up "the nack". I can take apart computer or a toaster and find what's wrong. After getting into firearms I started doing all my own 'smithing. I do all my own modifications on my sports car and my off road 4x4. I make my own electrical and pumbing repairs. This attitude was taught to me by my father and his father to him before him. |
|
For the old ones, I salute them. They lived. Mine are gone. I was raised in Appalachia, poor, but not neglected. Gardens to eat and can. Sorghum cookings (still got the mill). Milked and slopped every morning before walking a mile with sister to catch a schoolbus. Grandpa had a sawmill, other pa had a still and logged. Both granny's made real hominy, soaked by the stove. Real grape juice, from their vines. Wine, from elderberry, and blackberry. Pumpkin beer. So on. Plenty of eggs, every Sunday a chicken gave it's all. Watermelon was in the branch early too, good and cold after the feed. Bear meat, pork, and other canned. cured hog in the house, and fresh ribs was THE STUFF. Souse. Everything but the oink. We always harvested honey, if we wanted it (sourwoods here). 12 stands. Best I'd suggest is the foxfire series, 1-4. That was my life. Try it, you'll like it. |
|
Up to about 15 years ago or so I would drive about an hour to varmint hunt on my Grandma’s family farm (farm has been in the family since 1824). Grandma’s neighbors still lived on the next farm over – well into their 80’s at the time – and I would always try to stop for a little visit and to bring them a little “something” –cheese, trail bologna, chocolate, homemade bread and jelly, etc. Neighbors – Kenny and Virginia -- were always a big help to Grandma after Grandpa died in 1962 and it was just my way of saying “Thanks”. Anyways . . . neighbors would also let me hunt their farm so I had well over 400 acres to roam when hunting. Virginia would always say “Billy – gonna have supper around 6:00 – make sure you stop back”. Man-o-man ! 1 Talk about good old-fashioned home cookin” ! Nothing fancy, just GOOD food ! After supper Kenny and I would talk about the good old days and suck. He not only knew my grandparents, but my great-grandparents and my great-great-grandma. Kenny often said “the Depression was bad, but not so bad as to the people that lived in the county as those who suffered in the cities. Me and my brothers worked HARD on the farm. Got shoes when school started in the fall. Read the news in a week old newspaper that got passed around. Went to town maybe once a month. Daddy did all the “doctoring”, Momma did all the cookin’, cannin’, putting-up. But . . . we ate three hot meals a day and always had a warm bed at night. City folks suffered . . .” Kenny and Virginia both gave me a wealth of information on “how it used to be”. I wrote most of it down. People back then had a lot of “common sense” – not like today. Probably the most important thing Kenny told me was “Billy – stay out of debt ! If you ain’t got no debt it don’t take much to live. Daddy had no debt during the hard times. Other farmers had debt – and lots of them ended up losing the farm. Daddy didn’t have that worry . . .” Kenny’s been gone now for 15 years. His “words of wisdom” cross my mind every day . . . . . |