The Time Capsule | Roy Marshall
How many people today keep a diary or daily journal? Very few, I suspect, and that’s too bad.
I’m currently transcribing one written by a southwest Iowa woman who was born in 1905. As a teenager, Virginia was smart, attractive, wore the latest and loved to dance and socialize. She was, to use a term of the day that’s since been shortened to a single word, “hotsy-totsy.”
Hers was the age of the Flapper. She did the Charleston, Fox Trot and probably the Shimmy. Skirts were short and loose and, unless mother was vigilant, corsets stayed home on dance night.
Virginia roller skated to the music of a steam-powered calliope, chewed gum, dated boys who wore both a belt and suspenders. Girls of her generation drove fast cars, tried cigarettes and speakeasies, wore bathing suits that exposed flesh previously left to the imagination. They called the movie theater a “petting pantry.”
The portion of her journal that most interested me were daily entries depicting life on a southwest Iowa farm during those years when the Great Depression merged with the blizzards, heat and drought of the “Dust Bowl” era.
Virginia was a 27-year-old mother in 1933, the year of the chinch bug invasion. Her frivolous youth by then a memory, she helped her husband as he and a team of horses plowed a furrow around their rented farm fields. They spent days shoveling the furrows to make shallow trenches having a smooth, well-packed base, then filled them with creosote. This deterred the chinch bugs, but not the hordes of grasshoppers that came later.
Virginia raised four children in a house without plumbing. While full-fledged sun-darkening dust storms in southwest Iowa were brief, lasting only a few hours, they were only part of the dust problem. During day after day of 100 to 114 degree heat, the powdery substance found a way through the smallest crevice to coat furniture and curtains and make ridges across her floor. “Air conditioning” was an open window and open windows admitted even more of the red Oklahoma grit. She wrote of protecting her laundry by hanging it in a bedroom to dry.
In an oven-like kitchen she baked bread and pies and fixed dinner and supper for crew after crew of oat shockers and threshers and corn pickers and shellers. She cut cloth and made her children’s clothes, canned beef, pork and vegetables and butchered her own chickens. She also partied. Virginia loved movies and dances and went often. They took the children. She and her husband did the Fox Trot with their three-year-old daughter perched on daddy’s shoulders.
I’ve read four years of her journal and she has not once complained. They were poor but didn’t acknowledge it, would have gone hungry rather than take a handout.
Was she of stronger character than young mothers of today? I can’t say, but the time she lived in was different. The work was different, as were the food and entertainment and methods of communication and transportation.
Virginia’s journal is a treasure, and will be for future youngsters who are taught very little about the past. Her descendants will have the opportunity to connect with her in a manner that goes beyond the census and marriage and birth records available to genealogists.
Changes since Virginia’s lifetime are dwarfed by those that have taken place in ours, and we have little grasp of what the future will bring.
Virginia left a marker, describing in the simplest of words the way things were for her. Some of us should do the same.
Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.