The Greeley Tribune was delivered every afternoon around four. This was dad’s paper and we couldn’t touch it until he broke it open at the dinner table.
Mom would prepare the meal. Either Nancy or I would set the table with all the silverware in its proper place. I don’t remember having napkins for every day meals. Maybe we did have paper napkins. Paper products such as paper towels and Kleenex were not used to the extent we use them today. There was no dish washer except the women of the house. Dishes were washed by one person in soapy water, rinsed and placed in a drainer for the other person to dry. I was sometimes the drier and maybe my sister or mom the washer. If you were too short to reach the drainer, then a chair was pulled over so you could stand on the chair to reach the dishes. It was so cute to see little Nancy when she was a young child stand and that chair to do the dishes. Then it was my turn as I was 10 years younger than Nancy. Seems a little less cute today now that I think about it and more like child labor. I don’t think either my sister or I have stopped the dish activity in some odd fifty to sixty-five years. I still prefer dish towels to paper towels. However, mine are not the variety that my mom used that came in the laundry soap or held chicken feed. They didn’t have discount store such as a Walmart at the time and it was probably unheard of to buy dish towels when you get them free from soap boxes or feed sacks.
We blew our noses on handkerchiefs. Mom had a drawer with a small box padded with light blue satin that she kept her special handkerchiefs. They were ironed carefully, then folded and put in the box. Some had hand embroidery of delicate flowers while other had her initials. Some had lace edges. More ordinary ones were printed with flowers on the borders. My dad had red bandana type handkerchiefs. He tied them around his neck and brought them up over his nose when he worked in the fields with dusty hay or thrashing the wheat. I remember seeing him all covered with dust and dirt at the end of the day. He always changed his clothes before he came to the dinner table.
Mom had pulled out the comics for him and folded them in fourths so he could read them at his place. We always sat in the same seats at the dinner table with dad at the head. No one touched their food or fiddled with their silverware until we said grace together. It was a Swedish prayer that I know by heart, but can’t read or write any Swedish. Sometimes when we had company we would say a prayer before the meal in English. It was not the same words as the Swedish one. My brother-in-law Bob is the best person for grace. He always has something pertinent to the situation at hand.
We could read the funnies after dad was finished with them. Dagwood Bumested and Beatle Bailey were a couple of favorites. Dick Tracy was in the comics too, but I was too young to follow the story line.
Mom would look through the obituaries to see if anyone she knew had died. This was long before computers with email, facebook and twitter that provide instant messaging. Even phones were party lines that you shared with the neighbors. Some times you had metered phone service that only allowed so many calls per month. I guess that is similar to restrictions on minutes per month on cell phone usage. We used the phone infrequently. So the paper was the communication tool for the community. I suppose I read through the obituaries in the Denver Post occasionally just to see how long people live. I’ve been doing that once I head toward the finish line just to gage your possible live expectancy.
Mom would also cut out quilt patterns that were in the papers. She also subscribed to a few magazines such as Capper’s Weekly, Life and Look. Mom kept some racy True Story romance novels and magazines hidden from the rest of us that she read occasionally probably to break up the day to day monotony of being a farm wife that was filled with a day of chores and responsibilities.
The Sunday paper was the most fun. I think there were colored pages for the comic pages that day. Now we have colored photos throughout the paper.