42

OverviewTranscribeVersionsHelp

Facsimile

Transcription

Status: Complete

A. Varesano interviewing Anne Timko -7- 7/19/72
Tape 22-2

then one owuld tell the other and they would try it this way - like, for tomatoes, they would put up and lot of times the stuff would spoil for them because I guess they didn't preserve it right or something - so they didn't know how to do it in them days.
AV: Well, what did she feed you during the wintertime, when there was no vegetables or anything?
AT: I told you before. Our diet was meat, potatoes, and cabbage. That was our menu. There was nothing else.
AV: And you could afford that, even after your father died?
AT: You had to eat something.
AV: Did you have less meat then? And more potatoes and cabbage?
AT: Well, not really. I never can forget one time when my brother was...that ought not to go there, I won't even say it...
AV: Was there a grandfather in your family?
AT: My father was an orphan from seven years. My mother had a father, but he was in Europe. I don't know how old he was when he died. But her mother died when she was two years old. Her father remarried, and she had a stepmother.
AV: Around here, what was the role of the grandfather in the family? What did he do to help out?
AT: I don't remember any grandfathers around here. One thing I do remember, we had a neighbor there, and she had a mother. And Iwondered - because she had a son as old as I was. She was our next door neighbor - I wondered, and I wouldn't ask anybody, but I often into myself - what does a daughter call her mother when she is married? I didn't think she calls her Mom, you know. I thought she called her something funny! I never asked anybody! I often think of that now, how funny that was!
AV: What did the grandmother do in the family?
AT: Well, there weren't any grandmothers or grandfathers, not as far as I can - because people came from the foreign countries, so they just had their own children, they maybe had a sister and brother somewhere, but they had no parents around here. That was the only one that I can remember that had a mother. She had no father, or was her father still living? I don't remember. I knew the father, her father, but I don't remember if he was still living. He must have been living yet, I guess, at that time.
AV: In your family, your mother helped out a little bit, before she got sick? Did she do some kind of cleaning around the house or something like that?
AT: What do you mean?
AV: Ah, when you were married, and your mother was living with you?
AT: I was living with my mother. I was in my mother's house. I stayed with my mother.
AV: After you were married.
AT: Um-hum.
AV: Did she help out?
AT: Oh, yes, my mother did everything. Yes, she did the regular work all the time. Well, there was no one else to do it, I was the only girl. So she used to do all the work. Even when we were children, and used to go for huckleberries, and at night we'd go to bed, and overnight she'd be baking bread and washing clothes, and the next day she'd go look for berries with us.
AV: Who was the "boss" in the family?
AT: The man.
AV: Didn't the wife have anything to say, like for disciplining the children?
AT: Oh, yes, that was the wife's work, to discipline the children.
AV: Did she smack them when they got bad?

Notes and Questions

Nobody has written a note for this page yet

Please sign in to write a note for this page