Tell us about "grandma's "good old days"? (divorce, divorced)

[Clemencia53]

Originally Posted by Tallysmom

No kidding on choices! I’m 58, but my mother preferred the old fashioned wringer washer, so we all did laundry on laundry day. Family of five, and by all of us helping, it went quickly. Plus, with a wringer washer, there isn’t a timer. You put the clothes in the tub, five minutes later, you can crank them out. Daddy’s white dress shirts took very little time.

When I was about 10, I went to a friend’s house and saw my first automatic washer. I’d been standing on a stool and hand agitating the clothing to rinse in the first and second rinses since I was about 5.

I asked the mom a lot of questions about the machine, I’m sure that gossip got sent around the neighborhood. Then I went home and yelled at my mother.

She said she didn’t think automatic washers worked as well.

As fate would have it, the wringer washer, bought used and hauled from house to house over a number of years finally bit the dust sometime that next year.

And my mom got an automatic washing machine. Oh, and a dryer. We used to hang our clothing, outside when appropriate, but our large basement allowed mom to rig up a vast clothesline. I was still too short to reach, so I didn’t care about hanging things.

We used to use a wringer washer too. Had two metal tubs next to it for rinsing. Those things were indestructible.

We had two long clothes lines. Love sun dried clothes.

[brightdoglover]

My mother had a clothesline outside (to save money on the dryer) but warmer weather was just too humid to dry much outside.

[ss20ts]

Originally Posted by BabyJuly

Good old Days! Indeed! No thanks, It was nothing but hard times. All 4 grandparents did not finish middle or grade school. One grandfather could not read. Both grandfathers scraped by on jobs they could get as day laborers; but were mostly unemployed. Both grandmothers worked on and off as domestics and supported their families on meager earnings. Families like mine also faced discrimination.

In contrast, I was the first grandchild to get a degree, a masters degree, and had a financially comfortable professional career most of my working years. Both of my kids graduated from university.

Agreed. One grandmother didn't even finish 8th grade. My grandfather - her husband - didn't eve finish the 4th grade. He was in the army and was severely injured. He had a brain and skull injury that impacted the rest of his life. He had lung cancer when he was young and only had part of one lung. He couldn't read well....grew up a dirt poor farmer with 11 siblings....all didn't survive to adulthood.

Those grandparents had 5 children survive. None went to college. All finished high school....just barely. I'm the oldest grandchild and I was the first person in the family to go to college....which they both thought was a waste of my time and money....ironically he worked at one of the most prestigious engineering schools in the nation.

[Signs9]

I don't know a lot of how my grandparents lived but I know that times were tough.

My maternal grandmother came to this country from Lithuania as a teen before WW!. She never saw her own mother again. When my mother first told me this I realized that this was the norm for many who came to this country...they may have saved money to bring a few relatives over but the older ones stayed behind. How sad knowing that you will never see your parents again and communication was frightfully long!

My grandmother was one of thirteen siblings and while some of them came over here about half stayed behind. I have to believe that as Jews they were all murdered during the war.

My own parents were children during the Depression. Living through that shaped who they became. My father passed away in 1998 but mom is still alive. Those lessons of the Depression are still with her today at 91. She has the money to live very comfortably but watches every penny.

No I wouldn't want the lives that my parents or grandparents had.

[jrkliny]

I could tell the story of my grandparents but it would take a while. Let us just say it was rags to middle class.


There is a portion of the story that relates to retirement. My illiterate grandfather always said he wanted his money to work for him. With a big family and a subsistence farming job it was hard but he managed to save and invest. He did not know anything about stocks or bonds but as a peasant he understood owning land. By the time he died he owned a grocery store leased by Safeway and several other pieces of property that had started out as rural and became urban.

[silibran]

You know, my maternal grandmother is unknown to me because she died of tuberculosis when my mother was a young child. So, the good old days were not so good for her. My other grandma had eleven births in her life, with ten living children. The family could not make a living farming in Atkansas or in Oklahoma. Good old days were not so good for her either, I don’t think.

[rodentraiser]

I wouldn't want the life of either of my grandmothers and my mother who had the same life, says she would never go back to it.

My mom's mom's parents immigrated over just before my grandma was born. She lost 4 or 5 siblings to diphtheria when she was a little girl. She ended up marrying a man who was a drunkard and an abuser. In all the time my mom lived at home (up until 1952) and for years even after that, my grandparents still had an outhouse.

My grandmother on that side of the family ended up having arthritis since she was 12 years old and no one could do anything for her. She had 11 kids, the last of them twins when she was over 40 and her oldest daughters had children of their own.

My dad's mom's parents came over to America about 1906. The parents were killed and when someone found out the only person taking care of the family was a teenage girl, they broke the family up and sent all the kids to foster care. It took them until the 60s to find all their family again.

My grandmother hated her adoptive parents. She told me they liked her at first because she just sat quiet and still. The little boy they had adopted before she came to live with them used to run around and shout, so her foster parents took him back to the orphanage and brought her home instead.

She used to tell me how people would come out and sleep on their lawns when it got hot at night.

My grandmother married a man who was suffering from shell shock, as they called it then, from WWI. She divorced him years later. She was never given any love or nurturing while she was growing up, and was never able to give any nurturing to my dad, whom she put in foster homes as well. As a result, he in turn wasn't able to love or nurture us kids.

The good thing is only one of us kids is married and has kids of his own, and thanks to his wife, they are wonderful well-adjusted kids, one of whom is married with a child of his own now.

[in_newengland]

My grandparents were married and had three kids in the north of England. Life was hard, people went to work in the mills at age thirteen and worked long hours. Their fourth child died of kidney disease and "it broke your grandfather's heart." He'd seen his two older brothers die as well as his young mother.

In 1911 he came here to work in the mills--they used the same machines that were used in England. My grandfather knew how to repair those machines and keep them running! A year later he sent for my grandmother and the kids and they left on a boat from Liverpool. My dad was born here.

They did fairly well and all of those kids went onto college. It was the way out for the working class. My grandfather was determined that his kids would never suffer the way he did, and that no one would ever work in a factory.

We were not supposed to ask him about England--I did once and will never forget that very sad look that came over his face. He died in his 70s; my cheery little grandmother lived into her 90s. Still, it was a hard life for the most part.

My American grandparents married young in the far northern area of Vermont. He worked his way up with the railroad, finally landing a good job with them so that he had his own office in the RR station. They had a nice house and many kids. In Oct 1929, just before the Depression, he died in his sleep.

He never knew that horror that followed with my poor grandmother turning the house into a boarding house and putting the little kids to work cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, making beds. My mother had two dresses in high school and she was very embarrassed. I still have a quilt that was made from patches cut from the children's old clothes. The younger kids like my mother never really recovered emotionally from the poverty and loss of their father.

I can remember that grandmother doing ironing in the basement of a nursing home when she was in her 60s. There was no social security back then. She was good natured and hard working. She died at age 67 in relative poverty.

[Mrs. Skeffington]

My grandfather on my father's side was director of the county "poor farm" (or indigent farm, as they called it) in the 1920's. He ran for county commissioner, but lost. He then became an insurance agent, and opened an office after relocating to the town where he lived the rest of his life.

My paternal grandmother had been a beautiful woman (I was told), but gained a lot of weight after she married, and died in her early 60's of untreated kidney disease. She was quite domineering, from what I've heard...she talked my grandfather out of buying General Motors stock in the beginning when he was offered the chance, and nagged him to sell a farm he owned that had been in his family for generations (where my dad and his brothers spent summers growing up). She did this while my father was overseas during World War II. When she had no contact of my dad for months, she assumed he was dead and proceeded to "clean out" his room, burning his possessions (including a great uncle's civil war diary, and an original blueprint of the "Albatross" obtained by another uncle overseas after the WWI Armistice).

She was also very snobbish about my father's girlfriends...no one was ever "good enough". He once had an Italian girlfriend (and Catholic, to her horror). That relationship eventually ended. He married my mother in his late 30's. My grandmother didn't like her either, always criticized my mother for going to the beauty parlor and wearing makeup. She'd say to my grandfather, in front of my mother, "Aren't you glad I don't throw away money on myself like she does?" My mother was also always put down for having grown up in the sticks and for being "uneducated" (she is VERY intelligent). This was not her fault, the area where she lived did not have a high school close enough to commute, during WWII, and it was common to end school after 8th grade.

On my mother's side, money was very tight during the depression. My grandfather worked for the WPA. There were 3 children in the family (there was also a fourth...an oldest son fathered by another man that my grandmother had given birth to out of wedlock, who was raised by a relative). My aunt, at 15, was sent out to work as a "maid". She lived in the home where she worked (she received room and board in addition to her wages). My grandmother used to go to the employer's house and collect my aunt's wages every week. My uncle (the BOY in the family), on the other hand, was permitted to KEEP his wages for himself, and did not contribute anything to support the family, from what my aunt told me. She was bitter about this unequal treatment for many years.

For a bit of backstory, my great grandmother (my maternal grandmother's mother) had given birth to a total of 12 children (9 survived). She was pregnant with the youngest when her husband died (when my grandmother was 15) in an accident. There were more children in that family than they were able to support, and they were disbursed to different relatives. My grandmother was raised by her grandmother, but had to return home to help her mother when her father died. 12 children in 15 years. Had my great grandfather not been killed, there were sure to have been more. One child died of pneumonia at 5 months, one from diphtheria at age four, and another of a broken neck at age two when the high chair in which she was sitting fell over backward (an older sibling, possibly my grandmother, was climbing on it).

My maternal grandfather had been gassed during the First World War, which seriously damaged his lungs (this didn't stop him from smoking cigarettes). He died of lobar pneumonia in the 1950's. My grandmother outlived him by over 30 years, to the age of 90, when she died of leukemia.

[Steve McDonald]

My maternal grandmother, who was my only grandparent still alive in my time, was born in a covered wagon, on the Oregon Trail. The place they settled, in the high desert, was slim pickings at best and it was a struggle for many years, to survive and establish a way of life. Eventually, she married a 42 year-old man, at age 17 and they established a trading post and post office on a road that was constructed through the area.

As I found as a small boy, she knew how to do and make everything, from the most limited materials. She dug roots to make her own root beer and was a master fabricator, with any kind of material. She learned how to make the fanciest types of candies, which were sold at their store, whenever she could get the supplies.

All her children were taught these skills and could have become just as self-sufficient in a remote environment. I can still see her, cooking all the dishes for a large meal, on a huge wood stove, that was also a water-heater. She was still chopping her own wood, into her eighties and keeping a cow, that needed milking, twice a day. It was amazing what she did with her foot-powered Singer sewing machine and I still use one of her patchwork quilts, on my bed.