WCMessenger.com: Reaching across the centuries

Eight years into the new millennium, there are those who can still reach back across a couple of centuries. We can remember parents and grandparents who were born in the late 19th Century. My parents were born in the first 20 years of the 20th Century.

At three score and 10, I reach back nearly three-quarters of a century and I was privileged to know several great-grandparents and a grandmother, who, collectively reached from times of birth in 1860 to 1894. That's a lot of history most people only get in books, videos, movies or the Internet.

Their outlooks and perspectives were more limited than ours today in that they were born in simpler times without today's technology. News was not instantaneous as it is today.

One great-grandmother told me of coming to Texas from Alabama as a young girl in the 1870s and she rode in a two-wheeled oxcart pulled by a single ox. Her tales were of a months-long journey filled with fears of either being confronted by warring Native Americans or savage beasts such as bears or panthers (her term for mountain lions or cougars). Her family could bring only so much food so they lived off the land.

The times in which we live shape our habits and how we handle day-to-day life. Automobiles and airplanes have replaced the two-wheeled oxcart. Today, we can plan and prepare for years in the future. People such as those elder relatives could only dream of distant times. Those great-grandparents, the grandmother and my parents all lived through the Great Depression. That single time probably forced stronger habits and methods of managing life than almost any other event in our relatively young 231-year history.

Being deprived of some bare necessities made conserving and saving absolutely essential. There was little money to save and credit was almost non-existent so spending wisely, re-using materials and learning to stretch food supplies were the hallmarks of that era.

Each of them kept milk cows, hogs and chickens and had large gardens. From those came a great deal of their food supply and their only sources for generating income. They farmed but had been born too soon to qualify for Social Security, so they existed with assistance available only from children or neighbors and that was scarce.

All those lessons were brought home to me through the wisdom of my parents as they delegated to me the chore of grocery shopping for my great-grandparents and my grandmother. We lived "in town" and the elder two generations lived five and seven miles south of our small town in a tiny rural community. They no longer owned oxcarts and certainly had never had an automobile.

So, I was given the family automobile every Saturday to drive out to their homes, get their grocery orders and money, do the shopping "in town" and then deliver the groceries to them. It was not nearly as simple as it sounds, at least not in the time required or for my teenaged mind.

In our little town, there were three grocery stores (no supermarkets or big box stores existed). Each ran an ad in the local weekly newspaper with the "specials" (lost leaders in retail parlance). The grandparents got their paper on Thursday and spent the next day or so going over the three ads, picking the specials with the most reasonable prices and making a grocery list that contained the lowest priced items from each store. I collected not only three lists from each household, but also three handkerchiefs with money tied up in them. A handkerchief was designated for each grocery store and, more often than not, had the exact amount it would take to pay for a particular store's list. I then delivered the items, separated according to store, to each of their households with appropriate change tied in the appropriate handkerchief where necessary. It took up several hours every Saturday.

While the grocery lists and the money represented seemed meager, I had what to me were sumptuous meals at their homes after church on Sundays.

It was my grandparents' way of managing their lives, stretching their money and making ends meet. There were no mortgage woes, no credit card debt, they entertained themselves and took care of their own. That's what I learned reaching across the centuries.

Willis Webb is a retired community editor-publisher of more than 50 years. He can be reached by e-mail at wwebb@wildblue.net.