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Grandmother's Receet
Added to site April 29, 2001

 

Background:  On his CBS Radio show on Friday morning, March 30, 1962, Arthur Godfrey read an article from the Little Rock Variety.  It began, "Years ago when my mother was a bride, my Kentucky grandmother gave her her 'receet' for washing clothes.  This treasured bit of writing now hangs above my gleaming automatic washer."

My mother was listening, and the recipe for laundry day reminded her of her own grandmother from her childhood in the hills of southeastern Ohio.  She wrote to CBS in New York, and they sent her a copy.  Then she asked her brother Ralph, a vice president of the Whitman Publishing Company, to have the document typeset and framed.  When we moved into our new house the next January, this reminder of life before appliances was hung on the wall of the laundry room.  It stayed there for 36 years.

 

  Grandmother's Receet

  1.

bild fire in back yard to heet kettle of rain water.

  2.

set tubs so smoke won't blow in eyes if wind is peart.

  3.

shave 1 hole cake lie sope in bilin water.

  4.

sort things.  make 3 piles.  1 pile white.  1 pile cullord.  1 pile werk briches and rags.

  5.

stur flour in cold water to smooth then thin down with bilin water.

  6.

rub dirty spots on board, scrub hard, then bile.  rub cullord but don't bile just rench and starch.

  7.

take white things out of kettle with broom stick handel then rench, blew and starch.

  8.

spred tee towels on grass.

  9.

hang old rags and briches on fence.

10.

pore rench water in flower bed.

11.

scrub porch with hot sopy water.

 

12.

turn tubs upside down.

 

13.

go put on cleen dress, smooth hair with side combs, brew cup of tee, set and rest and rock a spell and count yore blessins.

  
In this photo from August 1927, standing between my mother's parents (Emma and Harry Buckingham) are her Aunt Lizzie and Grandmother Mary.

 

TBT

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