69

A. Varesano interviewing Anna Timko -14- 6/23/72
Tape 16-2

wanted to get something. And then as the snow was going down a little bit already, so then he'd come in closer and closer into town. Sometime maybe for two or three days he wouldn't come to town at all, because he couldn't make it, he couldn't get in. There weren't roads like it is nowadays.
AV: What did they have? Just dirt roads?
AT: Dirt roads! That wasn't bad. Ruts! Oh, God! Such ruts they would kill you! And when it was muddy, you know, like in the spring of the year of something like that? Well, just like now, with the cars, when there's snow and the ruts form, and they freeze, that way you will have those ruts. And that was out of the dirt and mud in them days, like that. They would have it, and they didn't come out with these plows to scrape it, that they didn't have that stuff in them days. To do like, you know, smoooth it off. So it just stayed that way, til it went away itself.
AV: Oh boy! So, what else did the women do in the house?
AT: Oh, all their chores, whatever came along. Cooking, washing, cleaning. And like, years way back, well, that wasn't in my time, though, I don't even remember that very well - they even had boarders?
AV: Oh, did they?
AT: Oh, yes! They had boarders. One woman was telling me, she was living up in the corner house - a house like this (she lived way up in the upper end, the last house she lived, there. Then she lived by my mother-in-laws, there, next door) - and she was telling me she had twenty-one boarders! I says, Where did they sleep? She said they took turns at sleeping. They were working different shifts. And they said, all they were doing is baking bread, and cooking all the time. They didn't have time for cleaning, really. See, places weren't like they are now. They were only white-washed. There was just the plain wall, and they were white-washed. They didn't - the floors weren't covered or anything. When I come here, I didn't have floors covered. There was no money to buy it for you. You bought what you needed. You'd buy a table and chairs and a bed, and what ever was necessary that you had to have, but nothing else.
AV: What did you have on your floor?
AT: Nothing! You'd scrub your floor, and then use burlap bags, wash the burlap bags, and then put them on the floor, tack them down, and that's what the covering was.
AV: That's all? Burlap tacked all over the floor?
AT: Well, the walking places. And then later on already, if you could afford to cut up some carpet rags and get some carpet weave, well then you'd throw a strip of carpet here and there, you know, through the house. That was it.
AV: But my goodness, twenty-one boarders! How did she do it?
AT: Well, that's what I was saying, too. Where did they sleep? That was the important - because for somebody - and there was only one room upstairs. Like I have! It was a house just like that one! And in them days we didn't have all this - these houses were just the two rooms, that room and this room and upstairs, and this shanty, that they called it. That was all.
AV: In the Back Street.
AT: That's all. Not all of them. The two blocks. This one, and the one below. And then, down - Helen was living down in the last block - well there were big homes there already.
AV: How do you mean, big?
AT: Well, they had, I don't know, you can ask Helen how many rooms they'd have upstairs. Did they have two or three rooms upstairs, and they had an attic,