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.

Featherquake – by way of introduction

Middletown Meeting House, Bucks County, PA

My name is Matthew Cooper. I’m an Orthodox Christian; husband; father of two; native of Madison, Wisconsin; machinist; schoolteacher; lefty blogger at The Heavy Anglo Orthodox, Front Porch Republic and Solidarity Hall; philosophy buff; and China nerd. This blog, Featherquake, will be my fourth attempt – hopefully my second successful one – at writing a separate blog based on a separate interest from my usual political-philosophical and general history fare.

I have been interested for a long time in family history and have dabbled a little bit in genealogy. I come by this honestly, on my mother’s side at least – though my interest was really spurred after my visit to Qazaqstan (where family history and jüz membership is intensely valued). The Doane family of northern Vermont does indeed have a long and beautiful tradition of closeness to their roots; it is largely due to the careful efforts of my extended family members on the Doane side of the family – which is allied to the equally tight-knit extended Camp family through the marriage of my great-grandfather Tennyson Doane to Floy Camp – that the history, and the individual stories of the people who make up the tapestries of both families, has been so well-preserved and so well-recorded, going all the way back to ‘Deacon’ John Done of Plymouth Colony (and probably originally of Alvechurch, Worcester, England).

As a complete amateur, therefore, I started to undertake research into the Cooper family tree, which is not particularly well-attested – my immediate Cooper side relatives not generally having been as interested in preserving genealogical records. The Coopers were, after all, poor landless sharecroppers in the South Carolina backcountry – specifically, Travelers Rest in Greenville County. However, through some investigations into the connexions between the Coopers and a couple of other allied families – notably the Watsons – I was able to (tentatively) track back the Cooper line. In the broad strokes: the Cowper family – headed by William Cowper – came to southeastern Pennsylvania from Low Ellington (near Masham in Yorkshire) on the passenger ship Britannia in 1699. A convert to Quakerism, he came here with his wife Thomasine (née Porter) and his eight children – all teenagers to adults – seeking a haven among the fellow Friends in the colony founded by William Penn. He had an estate in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and was – it seems – an intermittent member of Middletown Monthly Meeting near Langhorne.

Jonathan Cooper – William Cowper’s third child by Thomasine, who was twenty-three when he made the voyage over the Atlantic from Yorkshire – married Sarah Hibbs in Pennsylvania Colony and had at least seven children, the youngest of whom was William Jacob, born in 1731, who took up trade as a wheelwright. William Jacob married a woman named Elizabeth Ann Clark at the age of 21. It was apparently Elizabeth Clark’s idea to move the family to South Carolina, and this happened around 1770 in advance of the brewing war. Moving to the backcountry likely seemed a good way to stay neutral and well clear of the fighting. There was a haven established in Bush River in Newberry County – and William Cooper is mentioned among the early members of the Bush River Monthly Meeting.

However, Elizabeth’s aim to keep her family out of the Revolution did not seem to have succeeded. At least two of her children with William Jacob were disowned by the Friends for joining either side. Jacob Cooper – my direct paternal line ancestor – was disowned on 27 June 1778; family tradition has it that he was killed by a Tory, but an enemies list compiled by Colonel Brandon for the colonial Committee of Safety indicates that he joined the Tory militia in the backcountry. Two other sons of William Jacob Cooper – Samuel (disowned 1781) and Stacey – fought in the militias on the Whig side. Jacob Cooper survived the war and died in Spartanburg County, South Carolina in 1829.

In the broad strokes, that’s how the Coopers I’m related to ended up in South Carolina, and that is where they stayed. Family records kept by the Watsons suggest my descent from Jacob Cooper, and genealogical DNA tests I’ve done positively confirm that I’m related on the paternal side to a descendent of William Jacob Cooper now living in Texas. Well – that’s a bit of background on me, and perhaps enough for an introductory blog post!

By way of explanation for the name of this blog: Featherquake is a play on words. The fun visual displayed in the blog banner came rather naturally to mind after the name did! ‘Quake’ comes, of course, from the Quakers to which the Coopers belonged. ‘Feather’ is a common anglicisation of the German surname Vetter, which belonged to my Swabian great-grandmother, Clara Vetter, on my mother’s side.