In 1956,
the National Safety Council, working with automobile associations, reached
agreement on a standard size of automobile license plate with mounting holes in
the same places on all plates. Those plates issued in Indiana in 1955 complied
with the new regulations. When Robert was in third grade, the Indiana Bureau of
Motor Vehicles began issuing plates with a one- or two-digit prefix assigned to
each county alphabetically, with the large-population counties of Marion and
Lake receiving additional prefixes. Robert’s home county, Warren, was 86.
Letters of the alphabet after the prefixes represented further refinements in
coding the locations, as in 86A or 86B.
When Robert
was in the fourth grade, the postal service began recommending the use of
two-letter abbreviations representing the various states, but most people
continued to use “Ind.” The abbreviation “IN” was not in common use until
sometime after the Zone Improvement Plan, or ZIP Codes, became mandatory for
bulk mail in 1967. Robert did not like the two-letter abbreviation because he
thought the way he formed his handwritten I looked confusing with his
handwritten N. He resorted to printing the “IN”—which he thought looked strange
when the rest of the address was written in his longhand, or cursive.
In the
1960s, dialing only numbers became the common method for using a telephone to
call someone. The dialing was done, in fact, with a dial, which had holes to accept the fingertip used to spin the dial
the correct length for each number. To accommodate more than one party on the
same line, the ring pattern indicated which house was being called; for
example, with two parties, the phone would ring with long rings in rhythmic
succession to indicate one home and with two short rings followed by slight pauses
to indicate the other home.
By the early 1970s, men’s hair had
become long. In the early 1960s, the Beatles had begun to change attitudes
about men’s haircuts, but it was not until 1971 and 1972 that the hairstyles of
men in such rural communities as Pine Village had made the full transition into
long hair. In the decade after Robert graduated from high school, the caboose would
vanish from the train while the pump would switch to self-serve gasoline.
Such
changes as license plate sizes, license plate numbering, state abbreviations,
ZIP Codes, dialing phone numbers, and men’s hairstyles were noticeable. Other
changes were less so.
In the
1930s, metallic oxides, such as rust, were used by paint manufacturers to make
a cheap—but poor quality—paint for barns and outbuildings. When Robert was
small, several barns in rural Indiana were painted cheaply, and the color was
nearly a dark orange with much of the wood grain showing through, as if the
building were stained, rather than painted. Joe referred to the orange hue as
“turkey blood” because, when the earliest painting of barns occurred, some
milk-based paints had been mixed with blood to form a red color. Throughout the
years that Robert was in the Pine Village School, fewer and fewer barns were
coated with the rusty orange paint.
In 1900,
when the U.S. population was a fraction of what it would become, more than
twenty million gallons of sorghum were produced. Sorghum is a cereal grain that
is harvested for human consumption in some parts of the world. Benjamin
Franklin wrote about using sorghum straw for brooms, but not until a century
later was sorghum widely cultivated in the U.S. The Fourteenth Annual Report of the Ohio State Board of Agriculture
(1859, published in 1860) announced that the state fair had witnessed “many
samples of syrup of the Sorgho, or Chinese Sugar Cane.” As late
nineteenth-century homes had gallon containers of sorghum syrup (a.k.a. sorghum molasses) to pour on buckwheat
pancakes, to sweeten baked beans, to make cookies, and to flavor bread, there
was widespread interest in techniques for boiling the juice from the crushed
sorghum stalks to transform into syrup. According to the Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1867,
6,698,181 gallons of sorghum molasses were recorded in the census for 1860.
Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri were responsible for approximately half
the total production in 1867. When Robert was small, fields of sorghum were not
uncommon. By the time he was in high school, sorghum had virtually vanished.
During his years in the Pine Village School, more and more farm families quit
using molasses. Syrups were readily available in grocery stores.
Molasses
could be added to livestock feed; for example, Joe often asked the Pine Village
Feed Store to add molasses to the ground feed that he purchased to serve his
Holsteins on Christmas Day. Joe wanted his cows to have a special treat. Ground
feed was usually a light sandy color; the molasses feed looked like light brown
sugar. Over the course of Robert’s childhood, farms were gradually becoming
larger and less diversified; accordingly, fewer farms raised livestock.
Incrementally, livestock fences were torn down, and fields of corn and soybeans
were planted right up to the roadside ditches. Molasses and fields of sorghum
became relics of the past.
Little by
little, the old ways were disappearing. Joe told
Robert that Don Akers and he had once put a floor in a bridge over the dredge
ditch on the Thomason place. Three trees, fourteen inches in diameter, served
as beams, and planks were laid at right angles over the trees. “It was almost
dark by the time we got those last planks in place,” Joe said. He and Don
dipped 60-penny nails in a can of grease and pounded them down. A new moon came
up. “If the old-timers are right,” Joe said to Don, “the nails will pop up.”
... and, sure enough, every month, the nails kept working up, according to Joe.
Such a notion—even one unsupported by scientific inquiry—was a thing to be
appreciated, as it contributed to the spice of life, if nothing else.
There were jobs to be done during a
new moon, when the light of the moon was absent from the sky at night, and jobs
to be done during a waxing moon. Activities for the new moon included planting
root crops, such as potatoes, and making sauerkraut. Those for the waxing moon
included planting vegetables that are harvested above ground and butchering
hogs. Pork produced during a new moon would shrink and turn tough when cooked.
Ida warned Robert never to thank
anyone for a plant because doing so would cause the plant to wither away and
perish. A common occurrence in the spring and fall was the trading of plants
among rural women. Mrs. Bowen would pull into the driveway, open the trunk of
her car, and haul out a bucket full of daisies in the springtime or a bucket
full of iris tubers in the late autumn. “I thought you’d want some of these,”
she would say to Ida, and Ida would stop whatever she had been doing and would
gleefully take the time to choose a location and to plant the contents of the
bucket—while sharing the latest news with Mrs. Bowen. In turn, Ida would dig
peonies or poppies or crown imperials to take to Mrs. Bowen, as well as other
women in the community, and no one ever said so much as a “thank you.” Such
superstitions lent charm to living. While some superstitions persisted, many
others gradually disappeared.
