Y’all will remember when I reported on the passing of my great-Aunt Jo at 102 earlier this year.
Well, I was over at her house yesterday, helping my mother and her two brothers take Aunt Jo’s bed apart. When we first saw the mattress, with its classic striped ticking, I thought, “Wow. That looks like something from the ’40s.”
Good guess on my part.
According to the label that was still attached, it was apparently delivered to my great-grandparents’ (Jo’s parents’) house in Marion on or about Nov. 11, 1941. To be so old, it was in remarkably good shape.
But here’s the thing: The materials in it were even older, as the label said it was “manufactured or remade of previously used material.”
Way, way, way before recycling was cool. And exactly one month before the first WWII rationing went into place.
I found this impressive, and thought I would share.
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Nowadays, a computer is ancient when it is a few years old….
My mom’s first kitchen tools survive, including a manual meat grinder, long after the cheapo plastic electrics she replaced them with…..
Some of my favorite cooking utensils were my mothers. But what can I make a dead phone into?
Check etsy.com….I’m sure someone has figured out something!
You name it, my parents saved it and used it over and over and over again. So did my wife’s parents. It was a way of life for anyone who was raised during the Great Depression. Coffee grounds, potato peels, and any other food waste was placed in a composte pile and used for fertilizer in the traditional garden my parents always planted. The cast iron frying pans my parents used are still being used by my sister and me. I still have her hand carved oblong bowl she used for making biscuits and other baking needs.
The last set of cookware my parents purchased was a set of waterless stainless steel and the set is still as good today as it was when purchased in the 1960s and when the utensils are polished, they look like new. My wife doesn’t like to use anything else to cook with except her slow cooker.
We could learn a few things from our parents and grandparents, couldn’t we?
Because we are human, all of us hold on to beliefs even when they’ve became useless. But planned obsolescence is the order of the day for a lot of consumer products.
That tag says that the material used in filling is the “owner’s material”. I’d like to know what the owner’s material is. Was an old mattress re-covered, or is it filled with old quilt scraps and cloth? Maybe horsehair?
After it had been taken away, it struck me — since it was “owner’s material,” maybe we should have cut it open. Who knows what family secrets may have been revealed?
I would wonder if that mattress wasn’t an allergy attack waiting to happen, though….
That photo is pretty cool!
Isn’t it, though? My first surprise was that there was a tag attached. Then I read it, and wow…
I guess you can still get a custom made mattress, but the photo makes me wonder about life in small-town Marion, SC in the 1940’s. She had that mattress for 72 years. It certainly didn’t owe her anything.