An interview by mail with Holden and Laura Doane, 1995

A Bay City, MI hospital in the 20s

A Friends meeting-house in East Fairfield, VT in the 30s

I really have to thank my parents for managing to dig this old homework assignment up, as well as (I presume, this being November of 1995) my fifth-grade teacher Lisa Loichinger for assigning it to me, and of course to my grandparents themselves for answering these questions. Now that both of my maternal grandparents, Holden and Laura Doane, are no longer with us, I not only (and more importantly) really miss them both, but I also miss the opportunity to ask them what life was like back when they were growing up. Thanks to this old homework assignment, I have something of a window into that past, and I am happy to share it with my family so that they can read it as well. I typed these questions out, I am sure, on my old electric typewriter that I purchased at a garage sale from one of our Middleton neighbours for two bucks. Or perhaps not: this may have been a word processing computer printout. I sure was fond of that Matura MT Script Capitals typeface back then. Ahem. Anyway, these were the questions I asked -

Dear Nana and Papa,

Here are sorne questions I would like to ask you. Since I know you can’t come here for Grandparents’ Tea, I wondered if each of you could answer these questions by mail.

1. Did you have pets when you were young? If so, what kind?
2. What was your city like then?
3. Where did you live when you were in 4^th grade?
4. Did you play a musical instrument?
5. What did things cost, like candy, movies, houses, cars? How are prices different?
6. Did you have electricity? Appliances?
7. What garnes did you play? Sports? What did you do for fun?
8. What kind of school did you go to? What was it like? Did you have art, or music, or gym? What subjects? How far was it to get to school?
9. What were your chores and jobs in your household? What was it like to do them?
10. How big was your family? How many siblings? [What were their] names?

Thank you for taking time to answer these questions. I look forward to learning about what your childhoods were like. I hope you have fun writing about it.

With love,
Matthew Cooper

Here was Papa's reply:

Dear Matthew:

Here are the answers to your questions from Papa:

1. Pets - yes, I had lots of pets - we lived on a farm all my life, and we had dogs, cats, and once I had a tiny little turtle. We also sometimes made pets of the calves.
2. Our city - we lived near a small town, not a city, but it was a fairly lively place. There was a biacksmith shop, barber shop, two doctor’s offices. a lawyer’s office, three general stores, a grade school and high school, and two hotels! Both hotels burned before I was 12 years oId. One reason the town was so prosperous was that we had a private High School with an excellent reputation - students came from miles away,and "boarded" in town.
3. When I was in the fourth grade, and all my school days, I lived on the farm.
4. Musical instruments - I began on the piano, but then played clarinet.
5. Prices - candy bars were 5 cents, a small house in the village cost about $ 1500 to $1800; I don’t remember being aware of the cost of cars, but they were probably $700 -$850; as far as movies were concerned, I only remember going to one before I was in 6th or 7th grade and my Aunt took us aIl to see Snow White.
6. Electricity, appliances - no elect. until 1940 - other people had it much earlier, but farms would have to pay for the poles and wire from the nearest "mainline" - too expensive. Our appliances were wood cooking and heating stoves, and an ice box. We had no bathroom plumbing until 1937. (I was born in 1925, so you can figure my age then).
7. Games - in grade school we did little or no organized games mostly tag and rough housing. In upper grades, we did organized team sports with intramural standing over the state, mostly basketball. At home we played many games indoors and outdoors - chinese checkers, dominoes, monopoly, puzzles, erector sets, and outside: sledding, skiing, snow tunnels, fishing - but not much time to play in summer.
8. School - at first (maybe 4 or 5 years) I went to a one room school with abouL 25 or 30 kids. Then they added a 2nd room, and in 7th grade I moved to the Academy about 2 blocks away, until I graduated from H.S. In the first 6 grades we had basic math, reading, English, geography, history, art, music. In a one room school the subjects were integrated in the course of the day. It wasn’t until 7th grade and on that we had art, music, gym, science, math, etc. as separate time periods. We walked just a mile to school every day. If it was really unusual - almost a blizzard - our Dad would hitch up the horse and buggy and take us - a rare occasion.
9. Chores and household jobs - for farm boys, chores meant barn work, and we helped daily with cleaning off and bedding calves, feeding them some (before and after school) and when we were about 12, we began to milk (by hand). In summer we went after the cows and helped in haying and the garden. Our regular household jobs included taking turns doing dishes, and the boys kept the 2 woodboxes filled, and were responsible for keeping our rooms tidy, and from about 13 for pressing our own pants! I really didn't like to do dishes, preferring the barn work, but our mother was strict and we didn’t dare argue about it.
10. Family - there were six in our family, as well as our maternal grandmother who lived with us for several years at the end of her life. Besides mother and dad (Floy and Tennyson), my sister Kathryn was the oldest, then 2 years younger, Holden Tennyson (me), two years younger than I, brother Harrison Marshall, and finally 10 years later, brother Carlton Lee.

I hope this is what you wanted I did enjoy remembering these things.

And here was Nana’s!

Letter to Matthew Cooper, answering his questions:

1. Pets - yes, we had pets when I was young - goldfish, a bird for a while, and several cats, but the most important one was a dog. Her name was Penny, and she was a black Cocker Spaniel.
2. The city where I lived the longest was Bay City, Michigan and it was very much like Middleton, about that size and a very moderate size for the State. It looked considerably different than it does today - the downtown area looks older, buildings were smaller, and not so tall. The biggest difference would probably be the narrower streets, and simple traffic patterns.
3. I lived in a smaller town, suburb of Bay City called Essexville you could not tell when you left one and entered the other.
4. I took piano lessons for YEARS but none of my teachers ever would admit that I "played an instrument". It was very disappointing to my mother, as she and my sisters played quite well, and my father played by ear on his "fiddle".
5. Prices - candy bars and many other things could be bought for 5 or 10 cents. In fact our largest and most popular store was called "The Five and Ten Cent Store". Movies were, I believe, 10 cents for children and 25 for adults. He often went to the Saturday afternoon matinee. About once a week, theaters had "Ladies nite" and gave each lady a dish, cup, or tumbler. Many households had complete sets of these dishes. In the summer, a large outdoor screen was set up in the park, and movies were shown free after dark. These were often series that ran week after week and called cliff-hangers. (Ask your parents). Cars - I don’t recall prices, but the first house we owned was $8000, and my father was very worried that he would never be able to pay for it. My feeling is that prices today are at Ieast 10 times as much, and certain things , much higher.
6. Yes, we had electricity all my life and it was as much of a curiosity for me to visit where they didn’t have it as it would be for you. One grandmother (who lived on a farm) had no indoor toilet, and her water was pumped from a well just outside the "stoop" until I was in high school. The other grandparents (in the city) had all the things I was used to, but their old house still had working (but not used) gas lights on the walls. We had the many of the same appliances you have except for microwave ovens, dishwashers, and dryer. The washing machine was a wringer washer model (ask your mother about that - she has seen it work).
7. Games - we played quite a few board games at home, but I preferred jig-saw puzzles. My sisters both like outdoor games like hide and seek, tag, king of the mountain, but I preferred climbing trees. They did lots of sledding & skating, but I did not like cold weather, I’m afraid. Sports - we had organized teams of softball, some basketball - which I avoided if possible. For fun I read, read, played with my sisters (dolls, mostly or "house"), and read.
8. Schools - I always went to city schools, but never to schools with several rooms of the same grade, like yours. In those days if there were enough students for 2 or 3 second grades, they apparently just built another school in the neighborhood as needed. During my first 4 or 5 years in school, we moved a great deal I went to 8 different schools in those years. It was not very fun - meeting new kids and teachers, making new friends, and some times missing something like long division because of the change of school district. We had art, music, gym, as well as the usual subjects. We had never heard of computers or calculators, and the other difference I can think of is that "social studies" was divided into history and geography. At your age and for several years we walked about the same distance as you do to school. The "country" kids must have been bussed but I don’t remember it. Later I rode a city bus to high school.
9. Chores at home - the ever present job of dishes, hanging up and folding clothes, (no dryer), setting the table and helping a little with cooking. My sisters and I squabbled a little over whose turn it was, but in general we didn’t mind too much.
   
10. Our family conslsted of five: parents Grant and Clara, and three sisters Barbara, the oldest, myself (Laura), and Elizabeth (Betty Lou), the youngest.

I hope these pages give you the answer to your questions probably much more than you ever wanted to know!!

Love, Nana and Papa

I am grateful to both of my grandparents for this fascinating look into what everyday life was like in both Bay City, Michigan and Bakersfield, Vermont back in the 1930s. I still miss them very much. May God make their memories to be eternal.

A handful of Vetter photos, May 1978

During late spring of 1978, my mother, my grandmother Laura Doane and my great-grandmother Clara Burgess went on a trip to Switzerland and Germany to visit family. This was during a year when my mother was doing a year of work abroad for two families in Cornwall as a farmhand, and at the end of her stay there she introduced her mother and her grandmother to the families she stayed with. After that they flew to Switzerland to go on a guided tour of the lakes and cities in Switzerland, including Lake Lucerne and Lake Lugano. However, toward the end of the tour they ditched the tour group and went to Stuttgart in Germany to visit my great-grandmother’s family there, the Vetters.

This is the same Vetter family from which this blog, Featherquake, takes its name (with a little bit of a twist on the wordplay). The name ‘Vetter’, in German, means ‘cousin’, and it appears likely that they were related to one of the landowning families in Württemberg (since the 1950s, Baden-Württemberg). Note therefore the redundancy of referring to ‘Vetter cousins’… At any rate, my great-great-grandfather, Clara Burgess’s father, was named Friedrich Jakob Heinrich Vetter – a blacksmith specialising in custom parts who immigrated to Michigan in the 1890s. He was the son of Lukas Vetter and Barbara Jung (whose maiden name was later anglicised to ‘Young’), both of whom hailed from this area of Württemberg – villages in what are now Leinfelden-Echterdingen and Böblingen, respectively, located in the Schwarzwald region, in the vicinity of Stuttgart (which the locals, in the Swabian tongue, call ‘Schduagert’). Once they were in the United States, in what may have been a bit of an affront to their more Calvinistic neighbours, Clara recounted that her Swabian Lutheran father used to illegally brew beer in the family bathtub in defiance of Prohibition. A man after my own heart!

At some point after Friedrich emigrated, though, the German Vetters moved off northwest into the Franconian-speaking region of Karlsruhe. Back in 1978 they lived in Oberderdingen. When my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother went to visit the German Vetters in May of that year, a cousin of theirs, Adolph Vetter, came to visit them at the train station in Stuttgart. He took them back to his home in Oberderdingen where they met with some more of Clara’s relatives. Adolph was married to a woman named Maria, and they kept a wine cellar in their basement. Making your own booze seems to have been a Vetter knack! Adolph was the only one of our German Vetter relations who was able to speak English comfortably, and the only one of my immediate family who could speak any German was Clara, and she only perhaps a handful of words she overheard from her father. As a result, much of the conversation was mediated by Adolph.

My mother, grandmother and great-grandmother were only able to spend a very brief time in Oberderdingen with Adolph and Maria Vetter – one day and one night – before they had to leave Europe. Even so, this excursion meant a great deal to all three of them – and, I think, my great-grandmother in particular. In any event, here are the photos in question, with a few notes from each on the reverse. I have transcribed the notes exactly, including all of my mother’s original spellings of places and people’s names.

Oberderdingen, Germany
May 12, 1978
Nana, Mom & Adolph sitting in the breakfast room, discussing family

13 May, 1978
The home of Martha & August. Martha is a 1^st cousin of Adolph, Nana, Else, Bertha & Friedrich. Elsa lives upstairs.
Women: Bertha, Else, Nana, Martha
Men: Adolph & Friedrich.
Martha’s dtr. Rose & her husband Rudi were there too - Rudi & August took us to the train in Stuttgart.

13 May, 1978
The wine cellar in Adolph & Marie Vetter’s house in Oberdingen, Germany (near Carlsruhe)
a fabulous house; most hospitable people.

Oberdingen, Germany
May 13, 1978
Adolph Vetter in his brother in law’s hut - where he keeps his tools and things needed in his small vineyard.

Germany
Visited on our Rhine holiday
May 8, 1978
One of our lunch stop restaurants. Eric Treadway & Bert Amerten (?) in background;
Mrs Kale, Marguerita and Cornelius Kale and Mom in foreground.

11 May, 1978
Miniature Swiss village on Lake Lugano, Switzerland.
Clara & Laura.