Cooking Trends and Convenience Foods

This is a history blog.  I love history and I love learning about and even practicing the way my ancestors lived.  In fact, have I told you that I grind my own flour and bake bread a couple of times each week?  We’ve talked many times on this blog about the modern conveniences that I also enjoy and would really hate to give up.  Well have you ever thought about the modern conveniences your grandmother may have enjoyed?

I’m sure every busy woman was thrilled when she could throw her family’s clothing into an electric washer and stop scrubbing them on a board.  It was a universal relief to turn a knob on an electric stove and start cooking without having to build a fire.  And we won’t even start talking about refrigeration.

But have you ever thought about the nature of the food they were cooking? 

I’ve been assembling family favorite recipes as a gift for my niece’s upcoming wedding.  I specifically asked everyone to share recipes they’d gotten from our older relatives and my aunts really came through for me.  They gave me recipes from my Great-great Grandmother and my Great-great Aunts as well as distant cousins.  And I know these were favorite recipes or they would not have been saved so long.  So you can imagine my amazement at seeing boxed cake mix and packages of Jello among the ingredients. 

Like I said, I enjoy baking my own bread but somehow I always know that in a pinch I can run get a loaf off a shelf.  Those packages of sliced bread have only been available since 1928.  You know my grandmothers never made their own loaf bread despite baking cornbread or biscuits for almost every meal.

Baking a cake with sifted flour, adding in the baking powder and salt, then folding in the eggs seems nostalgic and is actually the healthiest way to get a dessert.  But when boxed cake mixes became available in 1947 they must have seemed miraculous.  And we’ve passed down a lot of recipes that start out with one of those boxes.

Just having self rising flour was a convenience.  While this baking combination was created way back in 1845, somehow it wasn’t readily available in rural areas for many years after that.

As we’ve become more aware of the impact that chemical preservatives have on us we seem to be cycling back to more basic foods and the old-fashioned cooking-from-scratch.  Yet I can’t help but remember that the quick trip to the store when I run short of time is a modern luxury in itself.

Now, I’d really love to hear what “convenience foods” you remember your grandmothers relying on.

Clyde’s Career

For the past few weeks I’ve been sharing stories from Clyde Whittaker’s life.  This local boy had an amazing career serving his country and I wanted to wrap up this series with a summary of that work, in his own words.

I applied to the graduate school in physics and was accepted at Florida State University.  I graduated without a job offer.  I thought I wanted to be a college teacher.  At the time there weren’t many physicists available with advance degrees.  The first offer I got after looking for two months was with the Navy Mine Defense Laboratory in Panama City, Florida.

A week or so after I started working at the Navy Lab I got an offer from Virginia Tech as an assistant professor.  At the time I would have liked to get the job but the Navy people had gone to some trouble to hire me so I couldn’t quit after such a short time.  A couple of weeks after that I got the same offer from Louisiana Tech.  Then after two years I got a call from the ex-principal of my high school who had become some sort of manager at the Tennessee Tech University.  He offered me an assistant professor job at Tennessee Tech.

A few weeks after starting working at the Navy Lab our branch was working on some problem.  I don’t remember what it was.  I thought of how to solve it and told the fellow, Art, I was working with.  I drew and electronic schematic in explaining it to him.  About that time our boss was coming down the aisle.  Art grabbed the schematic and rushed down to meet the boss.  I heard him telling Dr. Elliott he had figured a way to solve the problem.  His MS was from famous Cal Tech, mine was from a school with no reputation at that time.

I got to be friends with the lab’s commanding officer, Captain Anderson.  On Fridays we had a meeting after work at the Officers Club for the upper level people.  When I went in Captain Anderson would be talking to a group of managers above me.  He always left them and came to talk with me.  I had gotten two patents and two superior achievement awards.  Each of them resulted in a picture with the captain, I think he liked that.

I worked ten and a half years at the Navy Lab.

Near the end of 1960 six or eight people from the Lab left to join an Army group testing the Pershing short range ballistic missile.  They asked me to join them.  I did mainly because their grade structure was higher than the Navy Lab.  I was with the Army test group for less than two years.  We lived in Cocoa Beach, Florida then.  In late 1962 the manned space group had moved from Virginia to Houston, Texas.  The Mercury program had just one mission left and they were increasing their manpower to work the Gemini and Apollo programs.  I knew a few men from the Army group who had gone to Houston, one of them asked me to join them.

There was interesting work going on in the Apollo Project Office where I worked.  My job involved making sure the electrical and electronic systems on the spacecraft would work properly when the spacecraft was mated with Saturn Launch Vehicle which was managed by Marshal Lab Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama.  It is difficult to make a significant contribution in a program which has many thousands of workers including both NASA and contractors.

After about a year the air pollution seemed to be causing trouble for [my son] Craig’s sinuses and throat so I asked a friend to get me back to Florida.  W came back to Florida in October 1963 after a year in Houston.

In Florida I started in an integration group.  After a few months I headed a branch with flight control, guidance and navigation and electrical systems.  While I was in that position I was assigned as chief engineer for the checkout of Gemini VI in St. Louis at the McDonnell plant.  There was around twenty people in the checkout crew.

Not long after coming back to Florida my boss asked if I would make a talk to Stetson University students.  When Apollo first started there was a lot of interest in hearing about the program.  I made a few other talks but the student body at Stetson was the largest.

Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford

We got ready to launch Gemini VI.  It was sitting on the pad with Tom Stafford and Wally Schirra on board.  The switch was thrown for lift off.  Nothing happened.  The engineers in the control room and those in Houston were trying to figure out what went wrong.  No one knew if the rocket was going to explode or what was happening.  One thing of interest was the heart rate of the waiting astronauts.  Many astronauts would go up to near 200 beats per minute but here was Tom and Wally on rocket that had an unknown problem with heart rates in the 70’s.  Gemini VI was launched about 2 weeks later and rendezvoused with Gemini VII.

After about 3 years in that branch head position I was moved to assistant to the division chief.  I didn’t like the change, but it turned out to be interesting.  I got the tasks that Sasseen didn’t want to do… I had to sign off on any changes to the ground support equipment and any software changes on the Apollo checkout computer.  Someone found that x-rays could destroy transistors so I had to look at proposed x-rays, usually looking for potential leaks in fluid lines to see if any electronic devices would be in the x-ray beam.  I also became the engineering division expert on lightning.  We put a large fiberglass tube on the service structure with a lightning rod on top maybe forty feet above the spacecraft.  One spacecraft on the pad was slightly damaged by lightning.  The lightning rod would prevent that.  During this period I also spent a lot of time making charts showing how much manpower would be needed in each engineering area in the future.  Each branch chief helped supply figures of their area.

One time we had eleven people going to St. Louis.  To save travel money I arranged for the NASA executive plane, a Grumman Gulfstream, to take them there.  I was told we could get a ride back on the plane but Dr. Debus the center director pulled rank on us to go to Washington.  Marshal Center in Huntsville, Alabama had a DC3 so I asked them to bring our people home.  I had eleven people mad at me.  There was no heat and it was rough.

Maybe three years before my retirement I was made head of the digital equipment branch.  There was a hardware section and a software group.  I didn’t know very much about either one but I had some very good people.

The Apollo fire which took the lives of three astronauts made everyone working at Kennedy Space Center feel terrible even if you had nothing to do with the test of the oxygen filled spacecraft.  When the fire happened we were in a motel on the coast south of Tallahassee.  When I got in the next day there was a discussion about whether or not the suited astronauts could store static energy charge enough to ignite something in the space craft.  Another physicist, Risler, and I spent several days investigating the energy level that could be expected.

It was decided there was a more likely source of a spark than static charge.  It was, however, and interesting investigation.

I retired in 1979 after approximately 34 years in government service including almost 3 years in the Navy.

Mountain Fun

Clyde Whittaker remembers some of the fun he had growing up in Monterey, Tennessee

In mid and late April when it got warm, my friend, James Way, and I started thinking of playing in a small creek about a mile away.  Every year James and I with sometime help from James’ brother Ray would move logs and rocks in place to make a crude dam.  It was not very good, but it raised the water in the hole several inches and made the hole wider.  When James and I were about 13 years old we learned to swim in that little hole.  The following year we started going to the Monterey Lake.  We usually walked almost three miles to the lake.  Soon both of us were good swimmers.  A fellow later told me that when they got to the lake if they saw two heads out in the middle of the lake they would say, “Well I see that James and Clyde are here.”

In winter James and I couldn’t afford store bought sleds.  We made our own.  The city dump was near our house about a half a mile.  We found short pieces of lumber and made a sled.  You couldn’t steer it but it would go fast downhill.

[One time} Ray Way and I were taking a long walk in the woods.  We went up a mountain and decided to go a different way back to town.  We didn’t usually use that trail.  We saw ahead of us an old man with a rifle in his arms blocking the trail.  His name was Ike Buckner, a distant cousin of mine.  He asked who I was and I said Frank Whittaker’s son.  Ike said he didn’t know Frank had a son as young as I was.  I realized he was thinking of my great uncle so I said I am Tommy Whitttaker’s grandson.  When I mentioned my grandpa a large grin came on his face and he said, “Do you want a drink?”  I was about 13 so I declined.  Ike and my great Uncle Frank made moonshine together.

There is a story about Uncle Frank Whittaker and Ike Buckner making whiskey together.  They had two barrels of mash ferment and it already had some alcohol.  Uncle Frank noticed Ike using a wheat straw taking a drop from the barrel.  He figured Ike would drink up their profit.  When they put the sprouted corn in the barrels some corn was left on the ground and rats were eating.  Frank used his pistol and shot one of the rats and put it in the barrel Ike was sipping.  Ike started sippin’ the one with the rat.  He moved to the other barrel and started sipping.  Then he went back to the barrel with the rat.  He looked at Uncle Frank and said, “Frank the one with the little rat in it is the best.”

Clyde Whittaker: Ambitious from the Get-Go

I mentioned in an earlier article about Clyde Whittaker that the whole family worked – which was the general rule of his generation.  Today Clyde will share stories about several of his jobs as well as work he did within the family.

One evening, just before Christmas I was heading home when a lady called and asked me to get her a small Christmas tree, and that she would pay 25 cents.  I did work for the family before, and she would pay me 10 cents per hour.  I remembered where there was a tree of the right size about a mile away.  It was almost dark, so I ran home to get my hatchet and ran to the tree.  Eventually, I cut the tree and delivered it to her for 25 cents.

One year I picked up potatoes in a field of several acres.  At the end of the day I couldn’t straighten up until I walked two or three blocks.  I made 20 cents per hour which was the most I had made up to that time.  They had a tractor to turn over the raised rows.  They also had several people picking the potatoes that were uncovered as well.

At 12 years old I started selling “Grit”, a weekly paper published in Pennsylvania.  On Thursday morning I got up early and got to the Post Office about 6:30 a.m., well before the place opened.  I went to the back door and got a bundle of papers.  I would go to my customers on the far side of town and to the rest after school.  Each paper was five cents and I got two cents.  But I could save for several weeks and buy a pair of bib overalls or shoes.  I don’t think I had more than twenty customers at a time.  I realized that had I been more aggressive in seeking new customers I could have made more money.  Even so I bought most of my clothes from the time I was twelve. 

A family near us offered $1.50 per month, five cents per day, to carry coal and wood to their back porch.  I did it for four or five years.  (I did other jobs for that family.  They lived in a large but old house.  They had a front porch of maybe 35 feet.  I washed the wall for the front of the house with a scrub brush and water and ammonia for 75 cents.  Lots of coal was burned [and] it made white houses gray.  This pay sounds like very little but in those days there were men working on hard jobs for 15 cents per hour or even less.

I was working in the garden for Mrs. Carraway.  She lived by herself.  Sometimes she would stand around and talk to me while I worked.  She was from Ohio and came to Monterey about the turn of the last century.  She said her mother-in-law told her not to say anything to the Whittakers about whiskey.  She said they are very nice people but the men saw nothing wrong with making their own whiskey.

During the summer before eleventh grade I had a job helping build a building that was a chair factory for one year and became a Chrysler Plymouth dealership.  It was paid for by the National Youth Administration in a program employing high school age boys to enable them to stay in school.  We worked two weeks and were off two weeks.  We were paid 15 cents per hour.  I had been doing lawn and garden work for about 10 cents per hour so 15 wasn’t bad.  The last period I worked I plumbed the building.  A regular plumber was hired to supervise the job but he sat down and told me where to put the pipes.  We used iron pipes which had to be cut to length and threaded on both ends.  He did pour the melted lead in to seal pipe joints.  I had a helper to carry pipe and hold it when I cut it.

My two friends and I were the only ones who did exactly what the boss wanted at the chair factory.  [We] were transferred from job to job when part of the chair building got behind.  We made straight back chairs like you see in libraries.

In the eleventh grade I helped the janitor for an hour after school.  Again it was 15 cents per hour paid by the National Youth Administration. 

The summer before I started high school my cousin, Cordell Matheney, was told by an uncle on his dad’s side that he could have some wood where a small tract had been logged and logs the sawmill wouldn’t buy for some reason were left on the ground.  Most people in the area cooked with wood.  So we cut the logs into about 14 inch lengths with a six foot cross cut saw.  We then split into size for a cook stove.  We worked hard for about six days and had seven ricks stacked eight foot long and four feet high as thick as the stick length.  We felt good, but we had to hire a person with a horse and wagon to deliver the wood.  When all was done we had $2.55 each.  I bought used books for the first year of high school and had 5 cents left.  There was a little carnival in town so I used the nickel to ride the merry-go-round.

During my senior year in high school I worked two hours per day in the principal’s office.  Again I was paid 15 cents per hour paid for by the National Youth Administration.  This federal program helped me a lot during my last two years of school. 

Clyde Remembers the Family

Important events when I was a child and young boy was a visit with Grandma and Grandpa Key. 

Grandma Ida Key

One of my earliest memories is Dad renting a horse and wagon to take us to Grandma Key’s.  I must have slept most of the way.  All I remember is starting and ending.  They lived at the “old place’ then, but soon moved to near Martha Washington School. 

A later trip Dad hired Uncle Erby Teeple to take us.  There was a creek maybe a half-mile from Grandma’s that had no bride.  Most of the time cars could cross the shallow place, but it had rained and the creek was up so he let us out at the creek.  There was a foot log to walk.  I remember being afraid I would fall in the creek.

Our family on both sides didn’t go for much hugging and kissing.  They followed the old English tradition of treating kids after about eleven years old, particularly males, as adults - a brisk handshake and wide smile.  Grandpa didn’t say much but grandma had a soft loving voice that made you feel like you were being hugged.

The inside of their house had newspaper pasted on the walls inside to seal the cracks.  When I had nothing to do I read the papers.  I guess I was in the fourth grade and reading everything I could get.  Grandma saw me reading the words in a paper back hymnal which is what small churches used in those days.  Grandma told me I could have the hymnal.  I still have it after about 80 years.  No one was more kind and considerate than Grandma Key.

Donald and I would gather a few cows and herd them around.  I guess we were playing cowboy.  One day a cow at full gallop came around the corner of Martha Washington School where I was standing.  Donald was holding onto the cow’s tail and his feet were off the ground.

In the morning when we went to the “old place” to work corn Grandma wend along with [the children] Golda, Violet, Donald and me.  Grandpa went ahead with the mule.  Grandpa plowed the middles while the rest of us chopped weeds and loosened [dirt] around the corn stalks.  An hour or so before lunch time Grandma left to prepare food and at that time the midday meal was called dinner, no lunch, and the late meal was supper.  We always had a good meal and we all had a good appetite.

My mom told me things she remembered from her time at home.  When she told her parents she was to marry Frank Whittaker, Grandpa said, “He is a Democrat you know.”

Donald Key

My Uncle Donald was a few months older than me and we had lots of fun.  There was a small hole in Slate Creek where we went to play and swim after we learned how.  One time Gerald, my brother, was with us.  I guess he saw Donald and I having a good time.  He jumped in even though he couldn’t swim.  Donald and I didn’t notice but Uncle Coy was there so he jumped in and got him out.

Grandpa worked in the mines, I think it was during World War I when demand was high.  He carried his lunch win a bucket with a snap lid.  One time he grabbed his bucket and went to work.  When he opened his bucket he had only sorghum for lunch – it was the same kind of bucket they put sorghum in.  Grandpa worked in Oak Ridge during the war (World War II).  I don’t know how long.

If I was there when the corn was laid by, Grandpa would hew cross ties.  Donlad and I would go with him and saw several long lengths for him then go home.

One day Grandma said Billie was taking Donald and me fishing on the East Fork.  Donald and I started digging for worms.  It was hot and dry and we didn’t have much luck.  He didn’t say anything but broke off a leafy bush about two feet long.  He vigorously waved the bush around and reached into a bush and grabbed a wasp nest without a sting.  [It was] about four inches across.  We had plenty of wasp larva for bait.  We caught a few very small fish.  Grandpa said when a hole got several good sized fish someone threw dynamite in it.

On our last day of our visit Grandma fixed a wonderful breakfast.  She called Ted, the dog, and pointed to a chicken she wanted.  Ted would catch the chicken and hold it down without hurting it until Grandma came to get it.  We had fried chicken, fried apples, home churned butter, sorghum, gravy and biscuits.  Grandma and my mom made biscuits alike and the best I have tasted.

In the 30’s someone stole some corn from Grandpa.  They hauled it home on a sled with some snow on the ground.  Grandpa followed the sled tracks but never said anything to the person.  That reminds of my dad.  We kept six or either hens during the winter.  Someone stole on of our hens.  I was mad about it but Dad didn’t seem to be.  I asked him why.  “They may have needed [them] more than us,” [he said.}

I think it was during the 30’s Grandpa came upon a whisky still in the woods.  He used his ax to chop it to scrap.  In his sixties Grandpa like to amuse young grandchildren at his house.  HE would stand on his head, walk on his hands and hang from a limb.

  Onetime when it had rained heavily there was a good sized pond about a foot deep in the dirt road in front of the house.  There were several geese in the pond.  I had never seen fowl swimming.  Coy was near me so I asked “won’t they drown?”  Coy said no then ran into the water, caught one of the geese and pushed it under the water and said, “see they won’t drown.”  He was probably about 13 at the time.

When I was about five we visited Grandpa Todd’s mother, Tobitha Ingle Todd, who lived on the main road through Clarkrange.  She lived in a two story house with a upstairs porch over the front porch.  I thought that was nice so I went up there.  Some planks were missing from the railing so they immediately got me down.  Upstairs she had two spinning wheels, a tall flimsy looking one for wool and I suppose cotton and a smaller heavier built wheel called a flax wheel.  I never found out why flax required a different wheel.  A five generation picture was made that day, Tobitha, Daniel, Grandma Key, Mom and me.  I never saw the picture.

5 Generation Photo similar to Clyde's memory.  This includes his sister, neice, mother, grandmother and great-grandfather.
L-R: June Howard, Tommie Jean Howard, Stacie Whittaker, Ida Key, Daniel Todd