Mom Made Dresses for the Toni Doll

Toni doll named Belinda wearing the dress made by Gail Lee Martin.

 

 

If you’re old enough, you might remember the Toni doll made by Ideal in the 1950s. The one shown here is my sister’s Toni doll. She named her Belinda.

The Toni doll promoted Toni hair products and the doll had hair that could be styled. Some were ruined when their young owners gave the doll a haircut. Belinda never suffered that indignity and still has her original hair.

Over the years, she did lose part of her eyelashes from one eye and most of the pink in her cheeks was scrubbed away over the years. Somehow she broke the tip off of one finger. Perhaps we dropped her on the sidewalk in a moment of carelessness.

My mother made some old-fashioned dresses for Belinda that have sort of a literary flair. The green dress above makes me think of Jane Austen’s Regency fashions. There’s a blue plaid one that makes me think of Dr. Zhivago and another that reminds me of Scarlett O’Hara’s green dress in Gone with the Wind.

The red dress shown below gets displayed every December as Belinda dresses for the holidays.

Below is Belinda in the blue dress my mother made for her. I think it gives her a Lara from Dr. Zhivago look. Mom didn’t have any patterns to make the dresses, she just measured and cut and sewed to magically produce a doll dress. It was a secret, so she had to work at odd times on the clothes to have the wardrobe done by Christmas.

Toni doll (Belinda) in her blue plaid dress made by Mom.

That was the Christmas that we were all making presents for each other. Can you imagine helping six children make gifts for each other? Where did she find the time to fashion all these outfits for Belinda?

I liked this blue dress a lot, but she also had a Cinderella-style dress of off-white brocade trimmed with lace. That was made with the remnants from our living room curtains.

Toni doll under the Christmas tree in her new dress made by Gail Lee Martin.

Here’s Toni in Her Dress Made by My Mother

Sorry, Sis, for showing you in your hair curlers. There’s the Toni doll under the Christmas tree. She’s wearing the ivory satin dress with lace overskirt that Mom made for her. It’s a beautiful outfit that Marie Antoinette would have been proud of.

Did you have a Toni doll? What doll was your favorite?

 

The Carr Street Years

Gail Lee Martin created this story on the My History Is America’s History website. When the site closed, the stories were lost. Recently, we found this on the Wayback Machine so it could be saved on Gail’s blog. Gail’s daughter, Virginia Allain added the photos to go with it. 

Oil drilling around Arkansas City became slow so Clyde went to work for Red Wilson, who drilled around the El Dorado area. We moved to 715 W. Carr Street in El Dorado in August 1957. The move was just in time for the kids to start to school with Karen in kindergarten. She was the only one to have that opportunity.

The Martin kids – Owen, Susan, Ginger, Cindy, and Karen. This photo is probably taken the year before the family moved from Ark City to El Dorado.

Going to school here in El Dorado was no hardship as our house was on the same block as Washington School. We all joined scout troops. Karen and Cindy in Brownies; Susan and Ginger in Girl Scouts and Owen in Boy Scouts. Since I couldn’t be with each of our children to help with their scout activities, I was getting discouraged.

In the spring of 1958, Clyde was injured in a car accident near Ark City and he was still in the El Dorado hospital when Shannon was born, June 1. When she was 10 days old, a killer tornado tore up the town, just a few blocks west of our home.

Shannon was with Dorothy Jones and they went to the Gas Service basement. I was visiting Clyde in the hospital, where we watched it go through town. The rest of the kids were with relatives and friends, while I was in the hospital having Shannon. Karen, Cindy, and Susan were with Clyde’s sister, Zella, going to Vacation Bible School in Madison. Howard Martin brought them home the evening after the storm. Owen and Ginger were with Dorothy and Wayne Baysinger in Oklahoma.

The Carr Street house in the background. Ginger, Cindy, Susan, and Karen Martin. Summertime.

We discovered 4-H and joined the Prospect Wranglers group in 1959 where all the kids could be in the same group. That solved the scouting issue.

We lived on Carr Street for two school years before we found a house in the country. It was three miles north on Highway 77 and we moved there in the summer of 1959.

The Martin kids – Cindy, Ginger, Owen, Karen, with Susan holding baby Shannon.

How to Make Baked Pineapple – An Old-Fashioned Recipe

An eHow article by Gail Lee Martin.

My mother-in-law used to make this dessert back in the 1950s. We all loved it. It’s easy to make and really tasty.

Things You’ll Need:

• large can of crushed pineapple
• 1/2 pound of rolled graham crackers
• 1/2 cup sugar
• cream

1. Crush the graham crackers with a rolling pin. If you don’t have a rolling pin, just run them through a blender to make coarse crumbs. You can also get these in a box now.
2. Mix the graham cracker crumbs, the crushed pineapple, and the sugar together.
3. Stir in the cream, adding just enough to make the whole mix pourable. You can use half ‘n half for this.
4. Grease a 1 1/2 quart casserole and put the mix into it.
5. Bake in a 350-degree oven for one hour.

Retro Pineapple Postcard

by tnmpastperfect

For other recipes by Cora Joy Martin, check out these:

Sourdough Pancakes

Molasses Taffy

Sour Cream Raisin Pie

Remember Sitting on the Front Porch?

Porches Bring Memories of Gracious Bygone Days

In the days before air conditioning, people kept cool on the front porch. Vines or a tree provided extra shade. Swinging on the porch swing created a breeze and a cardboard fan helped too.

Gail Lee Martin enjoys the shade of her front porch with great-granddaughter, Shay.

Let’s bring back the front porch. For many years it was considered old-fashioned, but creating an appealing outdoor living space makes the house look inviting.

Families can disconnect from the television and computer to spend some quality time relaxing together on the front porch.

I love seeing a front porch with the ceiling painted sky blue. That gives a cool feeling too.

Ideas for Furnishing Your Front Porch

Add an outdoor rug. Group the wicker furniture around an outdoor carpet. It will look great!

The front porch gives you a place to decorate for holidays from patriotic ones to seasonal holidays like Halloween. The tradition of decorating the front porch for the 4th of July goes back for generations. Deck yours with plenty of red, white and blue with stars, stripes and Uncle Sam too.

Relax on a front porch this summer

Think of summer days, glasses of lemonade and a porch swing. Here’s what you can do on that front porch:

Rock gently in the porch swing while reading a book.

Sit out at the end of the day, watching the sunset.

Play cards or a board game on the porch on a rainy day.

Watch the people go by. Greet the neighbors and get to know them.

Sit and talk.

Don’t you think it’s time to bring the front porch back into fashion?

I love some red, white, and blue bunting for the 4th of July.

Gail’s Memories of the Flood of ’51

Last month, I posted a pieced-together account of the 1951 flood, but now I have recovered Mom’s account of it using the Wayback Machine. Here is Gail Lee Martin’s story of that event.

“My husband and I with our four children were living 3 miles northwest of Madison in northern Greenwood County, Kansas in the summer of 1951. We had never had to worry about the river, as it was a good half-mile away. But in 1951, after several days of steady rain, the Verdigris river became fuller than ever before.

While we were asleep the river started backing up every creek and stream that normally flowed into it. When our youngest woke up in her baby bed and began to cry at the sight of water in our bedroom, she woke us up. What a shock it was to swing my warm feet into cold, muddy, river water.

The river had silently backed up the tiny stream nearby and overflowed everywhere. It had slowly crept into our back porch on the ground level, then up higher and higher above the two cement block high foundation, before spreading its dirty mess into our house.

We waded around through the house trying to put everything up high on cabinets, the sink, and the stove because they were already standing in two foot of water.

When we first discovered the situation, the water in the county road was already three foot deep, so all we could do was watch the water rise higher and higher to the door handles of our car, parked in the driveway.

Our children, Owen, Susan, Ginger and the baby, Cindy were wild with the excitement of actually ‘wading’ in the house, until they saw the rabbit hutches had tipped over into the water drowning their beloved pets. We never had swift water, I think my terror came from the silence as the water just steadily flowed backward, rising higher all the time.

My brother-in-law, Norman Harlan, waded in from the shallowest west side and helped carry the children to safety. Our toddler ran out to jump into his arms and not being able to tell where the floor ended, she stepped off into the water and would have sunk if he hadn’t been quick to grab her.

Gail’s sister, Melba and Melba’s husband, Norman Harlan in 1949. Their children – Vicki, Tim and Bob.

I’ll never forget the beautiful breakfast my sister, Melba, had ready when my bedraggled, wet family arrived on her doorstep.

Of course, the rain did quit, the water went slowly away and we were left to clean out the mud and haul away what couldn’t be saved. Our children held a quiet funeral and mass burial of their pets.

To this day, some of our furniture has knee-high water marks, sad reminders of what can happen while you sleep.”

Ark City Days

I recently found some family stories that Mom (Gail Lee Martin) published on a site called My History Is America’s History. Sadly, the site disappeared along with everyone’s stories.

“When Clyde’s oil field job in 1956 took him to Arkansas City, Kansas, we moved to a house on State Line Road. The Shelaka Indian School was across the road in Oklahoma. (note: the actual name of the school was Chilocco Indian Agricultural School and it had about 1,300 students)

The children went to a county school called IXL which was a mile north and 1/4 mile east of our house. Cindy was in first grade; Ginger, third grade; Susan, fourth grade; and Owen in the fifth grade.

The school had a great art teacher that taught clay molding. Cindy made a plaque of her handprint; Ginger made a plaque with a horse. Susan made elephant head bookends and Owen made a small lion and a circus wagon. We were proud of how nice they looked when they were fired with a glaze finish.

I babysat for money for the first time taking care of a neighbor’s son Danny. He was the same age as Karen. When Danny’s sister was born, I cared for her from 6 weeks old until we moved.

Ginger and Susan in their Brownie uniforms and Owen in his scout uniform. Gail Martin in her den mother cap and scarf. This must be the front landing for the Ark City house. (blame the sun for the sullen looks on our faces)

I’d become a den mother for the scouts in Madison, so Owen and I were still in Cub Scouts in Ark City. Since we lived close to the Indian reservation, the pack took a trip there.

 

1956 – Susan, Virginia (Ginger), Owen with Karen and Cindy in front. This is the Woolaroc Museum in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

Susan was invited to take part on the IXL float for the Arkalalah parade that Ark City has every Halloween. The girls were all in pale yellow fancy dresses. Just beautiful.

Arkalalah parade in Arkansas City, 1957. Sister Susan is wearing a yellow dress on the float.

Owen caught scarlet fever and gave it to Ginger and Cindy. All the children had to stay home until it was past.

Just before school started the next year, we moved to El Dorado, Kansas.”

From Gail’s Bookshelf – As I Remember It

Esther Imhof was born in 1914 and recounts her family’s efforts to turn virgin Kansas prairie into a productive farm. Her memories are preserved in As I Remember It.

Their hard work brings some success until the drought and dust storms of the 1930s come along. The memoir contains fascinating details of daily life of a farm family with activities like hog butchering, wheat threshing and raising chickens and eggs for a cash crop. (review by Virginia Allain)

Ray Imhof encouraged his mother, Esther, to write her memories which he compiled to make this book. Esther Imhof died in 1996. I wonder if my mother, Gail Lee Martin, met Esther or her son, Ray. Esther and Mom would have had a great time talking about the old days.

Saving the Cooking Grease

As long as I can remember, mama drained the bacon grease into a container kept handy on the stove. The next day, the saved grease was added while heating up home-canned green beans. It made that vegetable super-tasty. It was also used when frying eggs for breakfast. I’m guessing many women who grew up during the Great Depression, not just Gail Lee Martin, saved their leftover cooking grease.

Vintage grease container from Catnutti’s shop on Etsy.

During WWII, housewives were urged to Save Your Waste Fats to Make Explosives. Previously, the U.S. imported a lot of vegetable fats from the Far East, but the war disrupted that supply. The fats were needed to make glycerine which was used in explosives for the Allies.

Here’s how it worked, housewives were told to keep every single drop of used cooking fat. This included bacon grease, meat drippings, and frying fats. They strained the grease through a metal strainer and stored it in a tin. The grease was taken to a meat dealer once a pound or more was saved. They rewarded the housewife with two red points which were ration stamps for buying meat.

The meat dealer would pay for the waste fats and send them on to the war industries. They would have a sticker on the window or door that proclaimed, “Official Fat Collecting Station.”

Thanks to World War Era site for this poster. It can be purchased from them if you would like one for your kitchen.

Although Gail spent part of the war years in a rented room while she worked at Boeing, I’m sure she was very aware of this campaign to save fats for the war effort. On the occasional weekends back, she would see her mother carefully strain the hot grease to save.

Other home front contributions to the war effort included collecting scrap metal and cans, plus helping with paper drives and silk drives (silk stockings were reprocessed into parachutes). Driving was kept to a minimum to save rubber, which was another vital resource for the military.

Do you carry on the tradition from your grandmother and mother of saving used cooking grease for reuse?

 

How to Make Breaded Tomatoes

Gail Lee Martin originally shared this recipe on the eHow website in 2008. It’s a thrifty addition to a meal.

Breaded Tomatoes

This old-fashioned side dish is easy to fix when you need to fill everyone up cheaply. It’s one way to get more vegetables into your meals. Here’s how to make it.

Things You’ll Need:

• jar of stewed tomatoes
• bread
• sugar or salt (your preference)

1. Stewed tomatoes were just peeled tomatoes that are cut into chunks and cooked well before canning. You can buy canned tomato chunks at the store, but they probably need some extra cooking to soften them up. Put them in the microwave in a covered bowl and heat until soft.
2. When serving just a jar or two of the plain stewed tomatoes, I usually heat them in a pot over a low fire. Add chunks of day-old bread (several slices). This is a good way to get rid of the heels of bread if no one will eat them.
3. Salt to your taste. My husband likes his stewed tomatoes with a sprinkle of sugar. I never thought it needed anything but a slice of fresh bread and butter to go with it.
   

   Vintage Cook 

   by rainsplitter

Old Fashioned Muffins Made from Scratch

It seems like muffins evolved over the last 20 or 30 years into miniature cakes. They are baked in muffin tins in muffin-shaped paper linings, but they are different. They aren’t like the muffins we ate as children back in the 1950s and 1960s. Those were homemade from scratch, not from a mix and certainly not from a bakery or coffee shop.

Muffins often have fruit baked in them and are thus more of a breakfast food than cupcakes would be. They don’t have icing on top, so that distinguishes them from cupcakes too. The texture and sweetness of modern muffins seems more and more like cupcakes these days.

Old-fashioned muffins, not the cakelike ones. Photo by Virginia Allain. Muffins made by Karen Kolavalli.

 

Back when I grew up, we learned to make muffins in 4-H. They were bread-like, not sweet and cake-like. The old-style muffins benefited from liberal applications of butter then spread with jam or jelly. At times we put apple butter on them. These were the kind of muffins my mother ate as a child in the 1930s and baked for her young family in the 1940s.

Recently in a fit of nostalgia, my sister made some old-fashioned muffins for me. They tasted just as good as I remembered. She used the vintage Household Searchlight Recipe Book (published by Household Magazine) that Mom always used.

 

The 1940s Searchlight Recipe Book just like Mom had.

 (Originally published on the Daily Two Cents website by Virginia Allain)