As I write this, there have been 76.5 years in my lifetime. In those years I have seen a number of changes so I will try to enumerate those as I answer this question.
I was born early in the morning on December 7, 1944 in a hospital in La Crosse, WI. My parents lived 45 miles from LaCrosse but because of some complications in the early months of my mother’s pregnancy with me, she had switched to a Dr. in La Crosse rather than keep the Dr. in Viroqua who thought there was no hope for her to carry me to full term. The photo below shows the La Crosse Hospital where my mother worked during her high school years and where I was born in 1944.
My mother attended La Crosse Central High School from which she graduated in 1939. She was able to attend this school because the Gundersen-Lutheran Hospital in La Crosse had built a Nurses Home where girls from the country could live while they had jobs at the Hospital. This building is still on the grounds of the hospital but is no longer a girl’s dorm.
My mother attended high school during the day and worked as a Nurse’s Aide in the evening. She walked 23 blocks to and from school each day.
The photo below is a recent picture of the high school in La Crosse.
My father attended Viroqua High School. He and one of his brothers got to school on foot and one horse. One of them started out walking and the other started out on the horse. The distance to school was probably about five miles. The one who rode the horse stopped and tied the horse to a fence after about one mile on the road and started walking. The other brother walked until he got to the horse which he then untied and rode on beyond the brother who was walking. They kept this back and forth walk and ride system until they arrived at school. The school had a barn for the horses that students rode to school.
Both of my parents finished four years of high school after completing grade school in one or two room country schools. My mother was the fifth child in her family of 7 children. None of her older siblings had gone to high school after eighth grade. My mother wanted to go to high school but her father told her that there was no transportation for her to the high school from their farm in the country and besides, “Girls didn’t need more education than eighth grade.” Two years after completing eighth grade, my mother moved to live with an aunt and uncle whose two sons were attending high school. Mom was able to begin high school at that time. After her first year with her aunt and uncle, she learned of the opportunity at the Nurses Home Girls dorm available for female employees in La Crosse and she moved there for her last three years of high school.
My father attended a Normal School after high school graduation. This was a one or two year program to prepare people to teach in one-room country elementary schools. He completed this course, did his practice teaching and decided that he was much more suited to farming than teaching. He was never employed as a teacher but was a very well respected farmer who practiced wise and innovative methods of farming as he transitioned from farming with a team of horses to farming with tractors.
I have somewhat the same story about my grade school years as I also went to a one-room country school for grades 1-8. I, however, did not have to walk to school as my parents had done. When I started first grade, the transportation was in a large Packard car. There were quite a few children packed in and I sat in the back seat on an arm rest. As more children needed transportation to school there was a transition to a school bus during my elementary school days.
My father attended a Normal School after high school graduation. This was a one or two year program to prepare people to teach in one-room country elementary schools. He completed this course, did his practice teaching and decided that he was much more suited to farming than teaching. He was never employed as a teacher but was a very well respected farmer who practiced wise and innovative methods of farming as he transitioned from farming with a team of horses to farming with tractors.
The year I completed the eighth grade, Cross Ridge School (shown above) closed and all the children from farms in the area were bused into a school in town. A new high school had been built between Fountain City, WI and Cochrane, WI.
This consolidated high school opened space in the former town high schools to be used for elementary school students. I never attended the town elementary school as I was bused to the new C-FC High School between Fountain City and Cochrane. The new high school ended the era of one room country schools such as Cross Ridge School had been for many years.
My family was living on the farm owned by my Great-Grandmother Minnie Cox Groves near Viroqua, WI when I was born. That farm home had an indoor bathroom and electricity at that time. My Great-Grandmother needed additional care so moved from her home to live with a daughter. She then sold her farm. Rather than buy that farm, my parents decided to move 75 miles away from the Viroqua area to another farm they purchased near Fountain City, WI. The farm they purchased was out of the tobacco raising area of WI. My parents and their parents and Grandparents had never grown tobacco on their farm but the price of tobacco had risen during the WWII era and that increased the value of farms in the area where tobacco was raised. My parents bought a farm out of that area which made it less expensive. It also did not yet have indoor plumbing or electricity to the farm buildings. That means our bathroom was an outhouse which was a walk of about 50 feet from the house. Water was carried from outdoor hand pumps which were on top of a cistern and a well supplied by a windmill pumping from a deep underground water source. All water for use in the house and barn was carried in pails to wherever it was needed. To heat water in the house, there had to be wood burned in the kitchen stove which heated water in a tea kettle or other pots. Baths were taken in a tub which is also where the laundry was done. Laundry was hung on outdoor clotheslines if it wasn’t too cold. During the winter months clothes were spread on a clothes rack which would be placed near a register with heat coming from the wood burning furnace in the basement. Wood for the furnace and kitchen stove was sawed and thrown into the basement through a trap door on the side of the house.
Our farm home got indoor plumbing in October of 1950. I was nearly six years old at that time. We probably had gotten electricity to the house shortly before that. It may be that electricity had come earlier than that as I don’t remember burning candles or kerosene lamps except when the electricity went out which would mean that the cows had to be milked by hand instead of with the milking machines.
Our farm homes both had telephones. The first phone I remember was a wall phone with a crank on the side to make a call and a receiver you picked up and put to your ear to answer and talk which was on a “party” line. This museum telephone is what I remember as the phone we had in our house at our Fountain City farm.
We heard the rings of at least eight other homes. You only answered the phone when it was your ring but you could “listen in” on other calls if you lifted your receiver and remained very quiet. The calls went through an operator at the telephone office. That person was called “Central” and she wore a head set to answer a call and direct it to wherever it was needing to go. Long Distance calls could be made to other parts of the state, nation and other countries for a price. The first dial phone for our family was installed while I was away in college. Dial phones continued for me until about the year 2000. About that time we had a second phone in our home and both were switched to touch pad phones. My first cell phone came shortly after that and a cell phone for each family member came around 2014. We still have a landline in our home but use our cell phones more frequently than the landline.
My childhood home had a typewriter but it was not an electric model. I learned to type in the ninth grade on a manual typewriter which had a ribbon to provide the ink needed when a letter was struck and transferred to the page of paper that was rolled into the typewriter. I had an electric typewriter when I started college.
My childhood home had a radio which my mother listened to all day long including the Milwaukee Braves baseball games. Our whole family gathered around the radio at 6:30 in the evening to listen to the serial program, “One Man’s Family” When my Dad’s parents retired and moved from Chicago to Fountain City, they purchased a television. We only knew one other family who had a TV at that time. These first TV’s were in these homes in about 1958. Sometimes we went to our Grandparent’s house to watch TV. It was really an exciting time to see these great programs in black and white. I remember “Lassie” and “Perry Como” plus many others. Our family had gotten excited in the mid 1950’s when we got a stereo record player.
My Dad farmed with a team of horses when I was born but got a tractor when I was about three years old. We had a team of horses for farming until I was about eight years old. Those last horses were Sadie and Boots. My Dad would sometimes let me sit on top of Sadie when he was driving the team somewhere on our farm. But at about the same time that we got electricity to our farm, he sold the horses and farmed with tractors only.
My husband and I always had a car but we did not have a second car until our children were reaching high school age. We got a second car in 1985.
I had my first airplane trip when I was 23 years old. Commercial flights
were a fairly new thing. My husband and I flew to Europe for a Quarter
Abroad experience at the University of Strasberg, France in 1970 while
he was in seminary. I enrolled in the seminary for that quarter also. In
a few more years, flights were growing to be quite common.
After my husband finished Seminary we moved to Loomis, NE. While there we became friends with our family doctor and his wife, Stuart and Lynne Embury. On two different occasions during the mid 1970’s, I was introduced to something in their home which would soon be an item in every home in America and beyond. The first item was casually introduced to me on a morning when I was invited to the Embury home for coffee while our preschool children were at a Play School. Lynne asked if I would like some coffee which was a definite “Yes.” She took a mug from a cupboard, filled it with water and placed it into an appliance which had a door on its front and seemed to be built into a wall of her kitchen. She closed the door on the mug, pushed a button and in about a minute, opened the door and brought me the mug with hot water ready for some instant coffee with a handle that was room temperature! I was astonished! How come the water was hot but the handle was not? I was having my first experience with a microwave oven. It would be a few years before we had a microwave in our kitchen, but that was about to be a huge change for me and the rest of the world.
The other first that we experienced at the Embury’s home came following Thanksgiving dinner with them. During our conversation, we had begun to learn of a major project that Dr. Embury was working on in his basement. After our meal together, we were invited downstairs to see the room in the basement in which Dr. Embury had built his personal home computer. Equipment filled much of the wall space in his office where there was a desk with something that he operated in order to make something print out of this room sized machine. It was another amazing moment that we were experiencing for the first time but which would soon become an essential element for all businesses, schools and homes.
There may be other changes that I remember but I will end this story here for now. I realize I haven’t exactly discussed how the country has changed during my lifetime but in each thing that I have mentioned as changes for me have also been changes for the whole country. If other things come to mind I will add another paragraph in the future.
I think that all the changes I have mentioned so far have been changes that have been good for our country and for individuals. But I want to add that there are some things about my family and my life that have not changed and for that I am very grateful.
The number one thing in that category is that my parents were Christians when they got married and they were faithfully attending church and living their lives in the way that they felt pleased the Lord as their children were born. From my earliest memories I knew that my parents loved Jesus, loved each other and loved me. Those facts never were unclear and were never in doubt. For that I am very grateful.
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