Winter - Social and Community Activities

Winter - Social and Community Activities

In the winter, many farm families looked forward to church, when they could get there through the snow. There was no 24-hour per day electricity on farms in the 1920s. There were no evening television programs or video games. Mother often mended clothes or did needlework by the light of kerosene oil lamps.

The family gathered around a battery-powered radio, using headphones to hear their favorite programs. Herbert Heine said their family used a radio powered by batteries. All family talk stopped when "Ma Perkins" or the "Amos 'n' Andy Show" came on the radio. "Amos 'n' Andy" first aired in Chicago in 1928. It soon had a huge national audience that lasted for 30 years.

The program was a humorous look at stereotypical black characters… played by white actors. Later, the show moved to TV in 1951, but was met with protests from the black community. The show was cancelled after two years. But in the 1920s and 30s, the popularity of the show and others sold a lot of radios and, on the farms, a lot of Delco home battery systems to power the radios.

Do you ever fight with someone over the TV remote control? The same thing happened back in the 1920s – except they fought over the radio.

"I can remember my brother and I used to – The first radios you had a headphone, there was no speaker. And we'd fight over who was going to get the headphones… And there were shows that went on like 'Amos and Andy' and some of those we liked to listen to." -- Darrell Ronne (Quicktime required)

	Walter Schmitt talks about the early days of electricity. Watch This Video (Quicktime required)

Written by Claudia Reinhardt.

Winter - Chores and Work

Winter - Chores and Work

	How can you keep ice in the summer if you don't have a fridge? Norma Ehlers lets you know. Watch This Video (Quicktime required)

On winter mornings, children had to get out of warm feather beds in the dark. The house was cold in the morning, so they dressed quickly as the fire in the heating stove slowly warmed the house. Families kept an eye on the wood supply — fuel for the cook stove and the main heating stove. Keeping the wood box full was an important winter chore. Winter morning and evening chores were done in the dark before breakfast because winter days were short. Cows had to be milked, horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, and chickens had to be fed and watered. Then children washed, ate breakfast, and got ready for school. Snow was no excuse for staying home from school.

Before electricity and refrigerators, harvesting ice during winter was the only way to keep things cool during the summer.

Harvesting ice

In winter, creeks, rivers, and the mill pond froze solid. It was time to harvest blocks of ice for the ice house. Albert Friesen remembers harvesting ice from a nearby pond.

Ice tongs were used to pick up the slippery ice blocks.

"During the winter when that pond would freeze solid, we'd go and cut ice and they had ice saws. You did it by hand, just like wood. Saw it like that… You'd slide that, put tongs around it and pull it up along the skid way, up into that wagon… and then haul it to the ice house. That would be a sort of silo, a deep hole, and they'd pack this ice in there and then with straw. You had to have straw around it or else it would melt in the summertime. And we went to ice houses in the summertime and got ice to make ice cream." -- Albert Friesen Written by Claudia Reinhardt.

Winter - School

Winter - School

	1920s Teaching One teacher describes her class and school in Seward County, adjoining York County. "The schoolhouse was a large one-room building with windows on each side. It was heated by a coal stove. We did not have a well on the school grounds so the children would take the pail and go for water over to the adjoining farm house. The children were from 5 to 16 years of age, in classes ranging from first to eight grade. Two of the boys were taller than I. The children would come to the front of the room for classes. They played games at recess and noon, such as Andy-over, baseball, hide and seek, keep away, and kick the can. My salary was $72 a month for nine months, and I was to do my own janitor work; sweep the floors and get the goal for the stove." Bernice Lyon Pioneer Schools, Produced by York Area Retired Teachers, 1976 Nebraska Historical Society Collection

Cold and snow were not excuses to stay home from school. Only illness or a blizzard kept children home from school. The teacher rang the bell and school began. When the weather was dry, children played outside at recess. On the rainy or sleeting days, students played word games or had spelling bees at recess.

Merna Bailey taught school. She rode her horse the two and a half miles to school and was paid $50 a month for nine months. Later she made $75 a month at a school near York. She taught reading, spelling, penmanship, geography, history, and arithmetic. Herbert Heine remembers school in the winter.

"We had chores in the morning … take care of the horses, and there's always cattle to feed. And we had to see to it the dog got something and the cats. Eat breakfast and take off for school…We walked to school, about two miles… And then there was a time we had snow or too much rain, Dad would take us to school with a horse and a sled [or] a kind of buggy we had… He would give us a ride to school, put some hot bricks for us to stand on … to keep [our feet] warm." -- Herbert Heine (Quicktime required)

Mystery Number Game

Take any number up to a thousand.
Multiply it by 7.
Add 100.
Multiply by 33.
Multiply by 9.
Multiply by 481.
Take the last 6 figures of your result and add them to the preceding figures.
The last 6 digits of the answer will be 285,714.

On cold winter days the classes would stay indoor during recess.

When the weather was bad in the winter, the teacher would invent work for students to do at their desks. Here is a sample:

• Take a page from your reading lesson and arrange the words in alphabetical order.
• Make a list of all the words in your reading lesson containing a given sound. Example: K sound (corn, car, king, cracker)
• The teacher put a list of words on the blackboard. Pupils copied the list and then wrote the opposites. Example: Up and down.
• Write the names of creatures that: fly, run, jump, swim, or creep.
• Write the names of animals that growl, purr, cackle, sing, laugh, neigh, bark.

Winter

Winter

Extreme cold weather has frozen this mill's waterwheel in place.

York County farm families in the 1920s faced Nebraska's harsh winter weather without a furnace or an indoor bathroom. Winter meant short hours of daylight, long winter nights, and illnesses for people and animals. Despite the weather, most children walked or rode horseback to school, where a wood burning stove heated the schoolroom. Cold and snow were not excuses to stay home from school. In the winter chores were more difficult. Animals had to be fed and watered every day, even when the snow was deep and water froze in the troughs. In the evening, families used kerosene lamps and a lucky few gathered around a battery-powered radio to listen to comedy programs. Sometimes they would get together with neighbors to share a meal and enjoy some music or games. Family gatherings at Thanksgiving and Christmas were welcome breaks before the coldest winter months of January and February.

When children became ill, the doctor was often far away. People often died from the flu, pneumonia, diphtheria, or other diseases.

"If someone had pneumonia or a cold, you put a poultice on them. It would be like a mustard plaster or something that would radiate heat… on their chest or steam in their head… No antibiotics…a lot of people died. My brother had diphtheria when he was a tiny child… I remember the high fevers. And we just would keep wringing out cloths and putting cook cloths on him to try to bring his fever down …A lot of towns had their own doctors…who would...come out to the places…for childbirth or for broken legs, but they just didn't have the technology or the medicines." -- Norma Ehlers (Quicktime required)