Lifestyle Reflection:
Aprons
July, 2014
My sister, Penny, and I have been talking lately about aprons. Her daughter wears aprons while working in the kitchen. Penny and I never much did. We’ve read that the younger generations of women are intrigued by aprons, are buying and actually wearing them. “Vintage” aprons are sold on eBay! But when Penny and I became housewives in the early 1960s, did we consciously rebel against the apron tradition? Did other women in our generation?
Our mother (Ernestine/Ernie) and grandmother (Ruth, called by us Ma) always put on an apron in the kitchen, aprons made by Ma. Some were pinafore aprons with ruffles and various pretty patterns. We especially remember one that had a pattern of strawberries. And I’ve written elsewhere about my very early memory of being in the garden with Ernie, who was wearing a pinafore apron. I don’t remember the pattern, but I remember ruffles over the shoulders—and a pocket from which she produced a salt shaker. She picked a tomato, salted it, and we ate it, warm and sunny.
In our childhood, Ernie mostly wore housedresses, donning slacks more often by the time we were in our teens (when she wasn’t dressed up for her return to work then, a law-office-secretary job that demanded dress, girdle, nylons). Ma always wore a dress or skirt. Pinafore aprons were serious protection against kitchen spatters on clothes that had to be ironed after washing or had to be dry-cleaned.
Is that the difference?
Penny and I started out our young-married years well-supplied with aprons, but we usually cooked in jeans and sweatshirts and such. Easily washed, aprons not necessary.
Ma made regular aprons also, with bibs and without. There was one bib style that you didn’t have to pull on over your head (“and muss your perm,” as Penny recalled. Ernie and Ma did have perms). This type was designed with two straps that fastened behind your neck with a button. Ma made bib-less dressy aprons, too; hostess aprons. Penny still has one, in a pattern of roses under an overskirt of see-through chiffon, its chiffon pocket trimmed with the roses fabric.
The first project in Laconia Junior High home ec’s sewing class was making a placemat and napkin and matching apron. At Baker’s Remnant Store on Main Street, I chose yellow plaid cotton, a sort of gingham. After we students struggled through the ordeal of sewing them, we used them in our cooking classes and, when home ec ended, we took them home. So I had my very own handmade apron for cooking in my mother’s kitchen.
When I was sixteen I bought my next aprons, two of them, while buying two uniforms for working at Sawyer’s Dairy Bar. Like the uniforms, the aprons were white nylon. They were small, not quite French-maid style but similar and barely adequate for wiping ice-creamy hands on. The uniforms and aprons accompanied me to my next summer job of waitressing at Keller’s Restaurant on Main Street. When Penny (two years younger) started working summers, she waitressed at an inn that supplied aprons from an assortment from which you picked out your size. We both recall that in order to tie a prettier bow, we put our aprons on backward, tied the bow in front, and spun the aprons around.
Then came college and those young-married years. Then the middle-age years. Penny and I were always interested in cooking and also in gardening. We canned and froze what we grew, but we can’t remember ourselves even wearing an apron while chopping mountains of vegetables for pickles.
Then, when I was fifty-one (a couple of years older than Penny’s daughter is now), I saw an apron and coveted it. Penny and I were spending three weeks in the Cotswolds, and there in a shop was an apron with scenes of our sightseeing. It cost more than I should’ve spent, but I bought it. And therefore when I got it home I couldn’t simply hang it up to enjoy as a souvenir, I had to use it to justify the expense. So if a meal I’m making is going to be messy, on it goes—and I look down at the scenes and reminisce about the sights and about the food. Bibury . . . that’s where at a tea shop I chose treacle tart with clotted cream
Lifestyle Reflection:
Summer Job at Sawyer's
October 11, 2013
In The Cheerleader, Snowy is asked, “How was your summer?” and she replies, “Ice-creamy.”
That’s the way I remember the summer of 1955, when my best friend, Sally, and I worked at Sawyer’s Dairy Bar, across pastures from the Sawyer farmhouse in Gilford, New Hampshire. It was the summer between our sophomore and junior years in high school. We were sixteen, and this was our first job, besides babysitting. Our first official job.
Sawyer’s is still there, in larger form, with a restaurant added on to the original little dairy bar. Each year after Sawyer’s opens for the season, Don and I still go there, and that’s where we were this year on a rainy May 29 for the start of Sawyer’s sixty-eighth season, when a man our age came up to our booth and introduced himself. Larry Litchfield, the new owner.
Don remarked, “Ruth used to scoop ice cream here.”
Larry Litchfield asked me, “Would you like a job?”
Much amusement! I told him about working here with Sally. He asked if I’d like to see the latest renovations in the old dairy-bar section. Would I?! So Larry took me backstage, into the area where George Sawyer used to make the ice cream and Larry’s wife, Pati, now does. Sawyer’s Dairy had delivered milk out of this part of the building too. I was suddenly disoriented; things had changed, perhaps during the rebuilding after a fire. Then Larry ushered me into the dairy bar and told the young woman at the counter that I used to work here. I added, “The summer of nineteen-fifty-five.” We all laughed about how very long ago that was. Prehistoric to the young woman, I’m sure.
Larry explained that the front wall of the dairy bar had been moved forward to make more space. It sure was roomy compared with the cramped quarters we had worked in, where we’d have to sprawl across the ice-cream cabinets to get to the lemon sherbet or some other not-so-popular flavor at the back.
As I thanked Larry for the tour, I said, “I wish Sally could have been here!” But Sally lives in South Carolina, so I couldn’t have given her a call and told her to rush over to join us.
Back in high school, however, Sally lived near Sawyer’s, on Varney Point on Lake Winnipesaukee. I lived farther away in Laconia, about a twenty-minute drive, and although I had got my driver’s license, my family owned only one car (typical in those days) and thus my mother or father had to drive me to work and pick me up after. So I stayed over at Sally’s even more than usual that summer, and we would walk to work together down the narrow road past cottages and Gilford Beach, in our white nylon uniforms, white nylon aprons, white socks and sneakers.
We began work in June after school let out. We didn’t work a full day; the schedule was divvied up amongst Sally and me and two other high-school girls. Our hours varied, sometimes starting in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. On Fridays Sally and I worked until closing time (eleven o’clock) and had to be back to open up Saturday mornings at ten, with a midday break that sometimes included a swim at Gilford Beach, then back to work until closing. I’d always been an early bird, but for the first time in my life I found myself wanting to sleep late those Saturday mornings.
Ruth Sawyer, George’s wife, a very nice woman with whom I joked about the coincidence of our first name, taught Sally and me how to make change: “Count backward.” I’d been trying to do math in my head, always a challenge, particularly so in this case because the cones cost thirteen cents for a small and seventeen cents for a large, not simpler ten and twenty cents.
In June things were slow enough so we could sit and read between customers. I remember finishing A Tale of Two Cities at Sawyer’s and walking back to Sally’s house sobbing over “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
Then came the Fourth of July. We didn’t sit down again. The place was busy. We were always glad if people asked for a hamburger and we could say that we only served ice cream, directing them to a nearby lunch stand. What we lived in dread of was the arrival of busloads of little boys from a nearby summer camp.
When we walked home to Sally’s from work in the evening, our white uniforms would be smeared with ice cream, hot fudge, hot butterscotch. Across the road from Sally’s house was path that was a right-of-way to the lake. On occasion we stopped and went swimming there, stripping to our underwear or skinny-dipping or walking straight into the water in our disgusting uniforms. One time we attracted bloodsuckers. You can imagine the eeks.
The diary entry in One Minus One about working in a dairy bar is of course a fictionalized version of my diary entries that summer.
Don too spent the summer of 1955 involved with dairy products. He worked for Horne’s Dairy in Winnisquam, near Laconia. For him, the summer of 1955 was his summer between high school and college. Horne’s had a dairy bar, very small, but Don didn’t work there; he drove a pickup truck stacked with cases of jangling milk bottles to deliver to customers on a summer-cottages route around Lake Winnisquam. Also cream, buttermilk, cottage cheese, and ice. He made about twenty-five dollars a week, which seemed a fabulous sum to me. I was making twelve-something dollars a week plus tips, of which there weren’t many in a dairy bar. (No paper cup on the counter labeled College Fund back then.) On Saturday nights he’d pick me up after work, laugh at my bedraggled state, and drive me the short distance to Sally’s, where we’d sit in his car in the driveway and discuss the dairy business. And get up to other things, of course. I do remember that we actually did discuss the newfangled homogenized milk as opposed to milk with the cream on top you had to shake in or pour off into a creamer.
Much as I loved staying at Sally’s, the commuting problem made me start thinking of working nearer home the next summer. Sally decided she would like a change, and thus we both got jobs waitressing at a Main Street restaurant, Keller’s, which later became the inspiration for Sweetland in The Cheerleader. Sally’s commute was the same as during the school year; her parents would drop her off at my house on their way to work. So Sally and I still walked to our summer job together. And thanks to Keller’s soda fountain, the summer of 1956 was also ice-creamy.
© 2013 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved
