Pinky and Blacky: Dessie Morril Jacklin

Cut from a letter by Sharon Tristani to her grandchildren around Mothers Day 2007.

When we were young, my mother took in Aunt Ila, her older sister, who was dying of cancer. She cared for Aunt Ila and 3 of her 4 children, in addition to her own 3 girls (Mike wasn’t born yet). During this time we were living with my Aunt Lura’s family in a one bedroom apartment in the basement of Uncle Arnold’s tiny house in Provo, Utah. Uncle Arnold and Uncle Elmo and their families lived in the top part of the house. I don’t even remember where we all slept but my older sister says there were rollaway beds that were folded up in the day. She says two of us girls slept at the top and another two at the bottom of one of the rollaway beds. (We were short enough then that it worked.) The older boys slept in a trailer by side of the house (which I don’t remember either). I do have wonderful memories of the fun we had with all the kids in that small unit, but I’m sure it was a difficult time for my mother.

“Mother loved being a mother and a lady and enjoyed the arts of homemaking. She has passed this on to my sisters and me. It was with great patience that she taught us to sew, cook, clean house, iron, etc. Can re-ironing one of Daddy’s white shirts until it was perfect be a blessing? Or getting up to do the washing and ironing before school be a blessing? Or peeling beets, shelling peas by the hour, husking bushels and bushels of corn for canning, picking berries at the crack of dawn before the sun got too hot be a blessing? You couldn’t convince me then, but you can now. They taught me great lessons in value of thrift, work, and responsibility.”

Washing the clothes in that day was a terrible drudgery! I don’t think this generation can understand what washing and ironing was like when I was growing up in the 1940’s to 1950’s.

Using wringer washers! What work that was, and if you didn't get your arm caught in the wringer, you had to lug a basket of wet clothes to the back yard and hang them on the line.
The washing machine my mother used had a tub in front that you loaded with water either by using a hose or by carrying in hot water you heated on the stove.
(My mother’s handmade lye soap ingredients were lye, lard (fat ~ often pig fat) and ash. We used that homemade soap most of the time I was growing up. It smelled horrible when mother was cooking it, but it did get the clothes clean.)
After the clothes had washed ‘long enough,’ you slowly put each wet piece of clothing through the rollers and turned a hand crank on the side of the machine to put the clothes through. The clothes fell into a large bucket of water on the other side which caught the ‘wringed’ clothes. This was the rinse water and after rinsing the clothes by hand, you again put them back through the rollers to squeeze out excess water, catching them so they wouldn’t fall back into the washer.
You then took the clothes outside and hung them on a clothesline ~ all year round. In the winter, after you brought the clothes in, you had to let them ‘thaw’ out before you could do the next step.
Sprinkle bottles ~ We had to sprinkle down the clothes after they dried and roll them up tight and put them in a basket, or the end of the ironing board. Then came the hard part! We ironed everything!
Because of how well my mother completed the physical work of caring for her children and the 3 children of Aunt Ila, and because she had the patience to teach all of us the value of work, sewing and a clean home, she is one of my heroes!