1950s homemakers had game

I am a reader. One of my greatest dreads in life is to be stuck waiting somewhere with nothing to read. Since I don’t use a smart phone (I know, I know...that’s another column), I have to remember to keep a magazine or book with me for doctor’s visits or the odd times I might have to wait somewhere for my husband.

I’m not terribly picky. If nothing else is at hand, I will read the entire cereal box at the breakfast table or every single notice on the bulletin board at the veterinary clinic.

In my in-laws’ home, I came across a little spiral bound book printed in 1951 called “Your Household Guide,” a collection of 1001 helpful household hints.

I suspect most folks would have immediately tossed a 73-year-old collection of homemaking tips straight onto the Goodwill pile. But I am curious, love history, and need all the homemaking help I can get.

Naturally, a lot of the hints apply to cooking and baking. (Anyone who ever watched Leave It to Beaver knows that in the 1950s June Cleaver rarely left her kitchen.) If the household guide is to be believed, a phenomenal amount of baking was going on back then. As with modern bakers on The Great British Baking Show, soggy bottoms on pies were apparently a huge problem then, too.

Were most of the hints antiquated? Sure. Today, nobody would dream of treating arsenic poisoning with mustard and water, nor would we cover a cut with a generous amount of black pepper, as suggested. I really don’t need to know how to keep my pump handle from icing over.

Were some of the hints convoluted? You betcha. Many items mentioned left me scratching my head. Vel? Permatex? Sugar of lead?

I was charmed, however, to see logical, simple solutions to things that have frustrated me in the past.

For instance, when my boys were little, I would love to have had the tip for mending plastic items. According to the guide, you can light a match and hold it to the broken pieces until they soften. Then you just push the edges together until they hold. Presto!

I want to break a plastic kitchen utensil and try this tip just to see if it works! How many little plastic action figures could have been saved from the trash bin if I had seen this tip twenty-some years ago?

I actually like to sew and used to let down the hems on my boys’ jeans as they grew taller--the few pairs that they didn’t wear out first. The white line left where the original hem was always bothered me, but I had no clue how to fix it.

The book’s solution was to color over the line with a matching blue crayon and press with a warm iron. (Fortunately, many tips also explain how to clean an iron.)

When next I wash windows, I want to remember to wipe crossways on one side and lengthwise on the other so I can easily tell which side of the window is streaked. But who are we kidding? I never wash windows. Ask my mother.

Rubbing candle wax on a zipper that keeps catching will help it run smoothly. I have a couple of sticky zippers! The book says it works on dresser drawers, too.

Slicing bananas with a silver knife keeps them from turning brown? Haven’t tried it yet, but if it works what a game changer!

I could go on and on--there are 1001 tips in the book, after all. What I’d really like to share, though, are a couple of realizations.

I can’t imagine having the time to take the care needed to perform many of the simple fixes, much less the more involved ones involving rug flattening and food preservation.

Taking care to get the most use out of things was more important to that generation. The adults dispensing this advice were born and raised during the Great Depression, so that explains a lot. Today, we are more likely to toss something than try to mend it, be it an appliance or a sweater with a hole in it.

Finally, it made me wonder if people back then didn’t enjoy a better quality of life in some areas.

They certainly seem to have had a strong dessert game--no Sara Lee or Entenmann’s for the homemakers dropping these hints!

They knew how to make dried out rolls (homemade, of course) fresh and soft again.

They had the bathtub ring problem solved, and their tea kettles didn’t bear unsightly lime deposits.

Maybe our modern solutions aren’t the best answers just because they’re the easiest or quickest. Maybe cloves would actually be better at deterring ants than the expensive, ugly poison traps we litter around the kitchen.

Maybe taking the time to hang lemon peels in bags in the closet and letting them dry would be just as good as using stinky moth balls. Clothes would certainly smell better. (They did have moth balls back then; they stomped them into the edge of their gardens to keep dogs out.)

Who knows? Maybe black pepper is just the thing to put on a cut. I guess I could Google it.