Mama’s home remedies always worked
My mama probably should have been a doctor. She was simply talented in that direction.
As kids, she and the boy next door operated a private bug cemetery.
Back in those days, residential lots began at the sidewalk and stretched beyond the house, into the backyard and past space for the carriage house, garden and cow lot to the alleyway. Yes, there was plenty of room for a grassy front yard, wrap-around porches and expansive property beyond the back steps. There also was plenty of what Granddaddy called “elbow room” between neighbors.
Back to the bug cemetery.
The kids had built a squat stone wall around the cemetery’s expanse, with flat, river-washed stones standing upright, marking the final resting places of all variety of insects. Neighborhood playmates used empty matchboxes to deliver the dead to the cemetery gates. There, Mom and Max took over, recording the type of bug -- if they recognized it -- and where it was buried.
Cemetery rules forbade the interment of snakes, although earthworms were accepted, and all who entered into the cemetery’s gates had to be dead, real dead as in “no moving when poked with a twig.”
Mom and Max made a good bug mortuary team. Neither feared anything. Both could pick up anything without so much as a wince. They both were appropriately somber when a deceased bug was delivered into their care.
Mom was never squeamish about the sight of blood, helped her mother when it came time to wring the necks of chickens for Sunday lunch and could dress any bird her dad brought home from hunting trips.
In high school, Mom earned a scholarship in mathematics to attend Hockaday College in Dallas. But, even with tuition covered, her mother said, “a college degree didn’t make having babies any easier,” so college was a no-go and mother ended up at business school, learning to be a comptometer operator.
The Comptometer was the first successful key-driven mechanical calculator, patented in 1887. This key-driven calculator was extremely fast because each key adds or subtracts its value to the accumulator as soon as it is pressed -- and a skilled operator can enter all of the digits of a number simultaneously, using as many fingers as required, making them sometimes faster to use than electronic calculators.
After business school, Mom went to work as an operator with Sears Roebuck. Then, as the war was waning, she married and began homemaking and a family -- as did most women in that era.
For some reason, Mom had this sixth sense about what was going on when we kids got sick. I complained of sore throat, she spotted enlarged tonsils. The fix: swabbing the throat with merthiolate.
For good health, we gagged down cod liver oil, chased by a soothing glass of orange juice. Otherwise, we took no vitamins, but ate a rounded diet that included liver once a week.
Soon, the neighborhood moms were “consulting” Mom about what to do about croup (whiskey, lemon juice and honey), colds and sinus headaches (dip a wash cloth in water as hot as tolerable, ring it out well and place it on the patient’s face until cloth is cool and repeat).
Coal oil was also a part of Mom’s repertoire. Ringworms seemed much more prevalent when I was a child, and I remember my cousin and several friends became infected. Mom’s remedy was soaking a cloth or small cotton pad with coal oil and applying it to the “worm” two or three times a day -- and it usually worked.
The coal oil remedy also was used for head lice. Simply soak the hair in this greasy stuff, comb through with a fine-toothed comb and leave it on the hair for (I don’t remember how long) as long as it took to kill all the lice and the baby nits.
Mom, of course, was sensible and realized she was untrained, so if the child didn’t respond to her “remedy” within 24 hours, she encouraged the child’s mom to visit their pediatrician promptly.
When we became congested, Mom immediately propped us on pillows, started nosedrops and plugged in the vaporizer, which ran – morning and evening – until the congestion cleared.
For ear aches, Mom would heat the inevitable conclusion was a dreaded trip to the ER and a pop of penicillin (and not in the arm). Back in the ‘50s, I’ll remind, hypodermic needles were not disposable. The glass barrels were sterilized and reused, and the needles were sterilized and then resharpened, often not well, so when they were inserted, they usually didn’t just glide into the skin like today’s disposable needles do.
One summer the mosquitos and chiggers were especially treacherous for all of us who loved the outdoors, so Mom met us with her can of coal oil to dab the bites until they stopped stinging.
Later in life, Mom was able to go to college and especially enjoyed her biology classes -- and to supplement her medical training, once we girls were through college and married, Mom worked for close to 30 years in doctors’ offices, including the last 20 with a pediatric surgeon, where she assisted him with suture removals, office patients and routine injections and first aid.
Many of Mom’s remedies worked. I think she would have made a great doctor!