(Phyllis Smith Bungart left this written note (date unknown) about her mother.)
Mother was probably 5 ft. 4 or 5 ft. 5 when she was young, as most of my early adult life she was about my height, until she grew older and became shorter and smaller, till she was very small it seemed. She was always very thin. She always said she had her Grandma Wolfe’s big feet and big ears. Her feet were a size 9 or 10 Triple A.
Her hair had been quite curly when she was young. She never had to have a perm. In later years she kept it quite short, and it waved and curled a little around her face. Mama had big hands too with long fingers. Her hair had been blond when she was a little girl but turned darker till I remember it as being quite brown.
I believe probably her favorite food must have been potatoes. I really don’t remember anything she didn’t like unless it might have been watermelon. She used to tell us she never got full, she just got tired of chewing. When I was a kid, there were many, many, many meals of plain boiled potatoes with butter on them. I just couldn’t stomach them fixed that way. It wasn’t until I became pregnant that they began to taste good to me.
Daddy would spank us but Mother would slap us. She talked a lot and I would sass her, then I would get slapped. Daddy would just say something once. We knew he meant business if he said anything at all.
Daddy was never hesitant about hollering for help when he needed it. Before we kids got old enough to be much help Mama would be dragged into it. Of course, one of her summer jobs was tending the stand, and anything she did she had to keep an eye on the stand. If it was evening or Sundays Flip & I could be there. Daddy liked one of us to be there with him as he was so hard of hearing.
Mama sewed quite a bit. She made herself house-dresses and aprons, kitchen curtains and clothes for me. In the winter her and Grandma would get down the worn clothes she had been saving and together they would cut them into strips, sew them together and Mama would crochet a rug. She crocheted doilies too, and also tatted.
When we butchered pigs she would fry down lard. She had big crocks that she would layer slices of fried pork and melted lard. It would preserve the meat, as we had no freezer then and little refrigeration.
We always had a garden. She canned tomatoes, green beans and corn and took care of the garden. She would make catsup too. We would put it in glass bottles, then attach metal lids with a bottler. The bottle sat on a rubber mat to keep it from sliding. The lid was placed on its top, then you pulled down a lever which crimped the lid tight.
She made dill pickles in crocks, 7-day chunk pickles and bread and butter pickles, grape jelly and strawberry jam because we raised those things.
One time her and Grandma gathered up all the leftover material from her sewing projects and made a crazy quilt. They dyed some feed sacks a dark green to back it. I thought it was one of the prettiest things I’d ever seen. I could pick out so many of Mama’s and my clothes in it. I just loved that quilt. It was always on Mama’s bed.
Mama had only one lung. The other had been destroyed by pneumonia when she was a pre-teen. She tired easily and was never really well. Many is the times we would come home from school to find her laying on the davenport with a headache.
She had terrible nosebleeds for one period. She would stand at the kitchen sink to let it drip. Philip kept pumping clean fresh water to use until it stopped.
Mother was quite particular about the things she did. She didn’t have much to work with, but she made it all count.
She was a good cook we thought. Of course, no one had heard of cholesterol then so some of our food was rather fatty, but she was particular about us not having too many sweets. She did not bake a lot and there were no snacks between meals except for fruit we might have. We were allowed to eat all the apples, grapes, pears or plums we wanted, in season.
Neither Philip nor I liked cooked carrots, but we liked them raw. She always planted some in the garden, and we could eat those any time we wanted. We would pull a few, wipe the dirt off in the grass and set right there and eat them.
She would put half soles on our shoes when they got holes in the bottom to make them last longer. You could buy a package of two rubber half-soles, the glue to use, and a little metal grater-looking-thing to rough the sole a little before applying.
We owned only one pair of shoes at a time and sometimes a seam would come un-sewed. She kept some very coarse thread and a ball of beeswax to pass the thread through so she could sew our shoes.
