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A. Varesano interviewing Anna Timko -17- 6/23/72
Tape 16-2

the big, you know, like stones. And you pour water with it, and would that boil! Oh, it would be boiling when you poured water on top of it. You had to be stirring it, and then you had to let it stand maybe a day or so, and then it would thicken. And they'd buy, it was a powder, a blue powder, and they'd buy that, that was the blue dye that they would put into it, and they would dissolve that in water and put it into this whitewash. And the color you want it, you know, light or dark. Of course it would appear dark when it was wet, but when you put it on the wall, it would dry out and it was light. So then already when we started papering and putting ceilings up, well, this whitewash from the ceilings was falling off, because it dried on there and it'd be breaking off, falling off. So then, many of the times, the paper would crack, or like at the beginning when we didn't have plasterboard up there we just used to put material, material up for the ceiling. And everybody didn't know how to put it up. First it was nothing, just the beams, the plain beams were there, and they were whitewashed. And then later on they started with the ceilings, because there was no plasterboard in them days. So then you put the - there were just certain women know how to do that - you had to attach it, you know, to each corner, and she needed help, you know, somebody to help her, and then you had to be stretching, you'd get one end up, and then you had to be stretching it stiff, you know, to get it to the other end, and tack it around. Now if you didn't know how to do it, it would get crooked or something, you had to know how to do it. But then as time went on, everybody learned how to do it. First there were just a few women that knew how to do it, so you had to ask them to come and do it, and you had to pay them for doing it. That was expensive, because the material, because take like my kitchen. The floor upstairs was about, well it wasn't a floor, it was that room that I was showing you, well that was about a foot away from where the material went, you know? And when you had the window open upstairs like in the wintertime - we didn't have windows like we have here now, either. We only had one-half of a window, a sash, just one sash was there. That's all the kind of windows we had. Just, like a half of a window. In the kitchen here - that was our kitchen - and upstairs, that's the kind of windows we just had. And yet, I used to keep flowers in the house, soe that was our kitchen. I'd keep flowers there. And the flowers would grow - they won't grow for me like they used to in them days. They used to grow so big they'd close in the window. And yet, it was so dark in the place, you couldn't see anything! And a coal-oil lamp, that's all you had for the light, you didn't have anything else!
AV: About the material on the ceiling - you said it was expensive?
AT: Well, the material wasn't so expensive, but then you needed so much yardage.
AV: Where did you get the material?
AT: Oh, the drug store.
AV: This country store here?
AT: Yes, they usually used to get printed material, different kinds of flowers on it or something. And later on then, they started getting unbleached muslin. Like I was gonna tell you, our ceiling in the kitchen, it was far, and that would be swaying up and down, then them winds would come through the material and it would be hanging. Well I had to put a new one on practically every two years, because I was afraid it was gonna fall down on the stove and it's gonna catch fire. Because that lime would be in it, the whitewash would fall into it, and by swaying it back and forth, then it would come through the material, like rust through, you know, and then that thing would be loose and I was afraid, so it doesn't, like at night, suppose it falls, or even during the day, if it breaks loose and come down on the stove and the stove is hot,

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