Radio and television mirror (Jan-June 1950)

I Like Old-Fashioned Wives spread with butter and honey. "Food may not be the most important thing in life," my father used to say, "but your mother's meals take any doubts out of marriage." Mother's meals were something I'll never forget but I don't believe they were much different from those of the average old-fashioned wife. On Sunday, especially, she just let herself go. It was the only day of the week that we ate on the dining room table with a fancy tablecloth and had lots of extras. We'd get down to the dining room at seven in the morning wearing our Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and pull up a chair to a breakfast of steak or fried chicken, bacon and eggs, milk, buttermilk, coffee and hot biscuits. After church, Mother proved her cooking magic again, and for dinner there were three main courses, usually a roast chicken, veal cutlets and country ham, five cooked vegetables. And I can't forget the soup — thick, delicious, a creation in itself. I never ate a store-bought dessert until I went away from home. We usually had four kinds of sweets. Maybe ice cream, a cocoanut cake, or a couple of pumpkin pies. And there was never a servant in our house. Mother did her own housekeeping, cooking and sewing for her family of nine. A modern wife is different. She gets enough stuff out of cans and packages to put into her stove before she takes off for an afternoon of cards. She sets a couple of thermostats. When she returns after a few rubbers of bridge, she feeds her family, whishes the dishes into an automatic washer, and is ready for a movie. It was never that way in my home. Gloria, my wife of five years and mother of our little girl, Michele, had to be educated to old-fashioned ways of living, since she was a city girl from New Orleans. Basically, however, she's sound — she, too, believes in the principle that a wife's chief duty is to her family. And we nearly always agree on how to bring up our own daughter. I was raised in the heart of tobacco country. My father owned a couple of stores and farms, but don't get the idea things were easy for me. What with the big depression and being the youngest of seven children, luxuries were spread pretty thin. It isn't easy to put seven kids through college. "Bob is my baby," my mother always told her friends, even when I was seventeen years old. But she never treated me like a baby. There was none of this new-fangled business about letting children have their own way. Mother believed in the old-fashioned rule, "Spare the rod and spoil the child." She made me toe the line. And this is the funny part of it — as a child I feared my mother but when I became an adult I suddenly realized as much love and respect for her as any child ever had for a parent. She taught me respect for elders and saw that I said my prayers before every meal and at bedtime. Michele, our two-year-old, resembles Mother in many ways. She has Mother's R blue eyes and fair complexion and M brown hair. Like Mother, she is a little hot-tempered. And since Michele is our first child we have to work hard to 76 (Continued from page 29) keep from spoiling her. I have to admit to one thing though. I am still too chicken-hearted to spank Michele and the job falls to Gloria most of the time. She does it well but with good reason. Recently, I bought Michele a new pair of white shoes and that same day we went out to see an apartment that was being painted for us. While the painter showed us through the rooms, Michelle found an open can of paint and daubed her brand-new shoes. "I'm not going to spank her for that," Gloria said. "The paint shouldn't have been left there in the first place and in the second place Michele didn't know what she was doing was wrong." That was wise and then there was no reason to scare Michele away from paint and a brush. She might grow up to be a housepainter. Anyway I hope she has more talent than I had. It seemed that when they were passing out gifts to new-born babies, all they gave me was the gift of gab. As a kid, I was rather puny, but never too weak to talk off someone's ear. Then I wanted to be a great lawyer like Daniel Webster. I didn't lose my ambition to be a lawyer for a long time in spite of working on the farm during the summer and after school. If you visit the principal's office at the Stoneville High School you can still see where I made the Valedictorian speech my senior year and won the state oratorical championship to boot. Cuess Dad got taken in for he shipped me off to the University of North Carolina. My freshman year a speech teacher auditioned the class for a radio job at WBIG in Greensboro. I got the job and by the time I graduated I was offered a full-time job announcing. I stayed down south until war broke out. The Navy made me a petty officer and, believe me, I was just as petty as you can be. I got a rating as a Specialist T, which was a special rating for a teacher. Then they decided I'd better do some learning first and sent me to a weather forecasting school in New Orleans. But when I arrived, there was no school there. Pretty soon I got to doing some radio broadcasts. It was in New Orleans that I married Gloria Rothschild. It was love at first sight (for me) and I came uninvited to a party at her home. She was and is a smart, stunning brunette. Whatever she saw in me, I don't know. As a matter of fact, she didn't see anything in me. I called her the day after the party to ask if she had a few minutes to spare for me that evening. "I haven't," she said and hung up. For two weeks I persevered, and finally got a date. I hoped to woo her with old-fashioned courting like my mother told me about, taffy pulls, buggy rides in the country. To me that sounded a lot more romantic than modern courting, where a man drives up in a slick convertible, with an orchid under his arm, to make the rounds of the nightclubs. Romance with a hangover. I wasn't going to do that. In the first place, I didn't have a convertible. Anyway I couldn't afford to buy orchids on Navy pay. But when we stopped at a traffic light (in her family's car) on our second date, I asked her to marry me. "Tonight?" she asked. "Tonight," I confirmed. "All right." Just like that. Of course, I didn't have a dime in my pocket, and we Waited three months. But we were in love and always will be. After the war we got a dream house in old New Orleans and I went to work for WWL with my program, Poole's Paradise. Apparently a couple of people besides my wife were listening, for Mutual came along to ask me up to New York City. I wasn't too anx ious, but they gave me a five-year contract which I figured would give me plenty of time to learn the language. So up to New York we went, just country folks in the sharp, slick city. Well, I learned something mighty fast about New Yorkers. They may look sophisticated, but throw a New Yorker off his stride, let a subway break down, and he's lost — just like any other hayseed. Get to know a New Yorker and he's as kind-hearted and generous as country folk. We've made a lot of friends up here and making friends is about the happiest business in the world. There is no investment that pays larger dividends. That's a little of the philosophy Mother taught — but actually, her relationship with friends was more gratifying than ours could ever be. And the evenings and Sunday afternoons when people visited my parents, they entertained themselves. Winter evenings found a number of men and women gathered around the piano with Mother leading them in songs. During the summer we would have our soft cider and cookies on the front lawn, and in the evening stare up at the stars and fireflies. The old-fashioned wife was the near-perfect hostess, for she had to get her guests in a relaxed, friendly state since they provided their own entertainment. Compare that to today's social life from the time Gloria says, "Larry and his wife are coming over this evening." Well, we make sure there are some Cokes in the refrigerator and a couple of bags of potato chips available. Larry and his wife arrive, and we turn on the television set. For hours nothing is said. At eleven, Larry yawns, the lights go on, and we have a few minutes of conversation over coffee. As Mother observed, "Seems to me that cows standing in a pasture swishing their tails at flies have more to say to each other." As an old-fashioned wife, she believed friends were contributing factors to the happiness and growth of her family. The problems of her husband and children were personal challenges. She improvised brilliantly in clothing, entertaining and educating a family. But most important, the welfare of her family was her first concern. That's my case for the old-fashioned wife. But don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to convict the modern wife. After all, I'm married to one. In many ways she is superior to her mother and grandmother. She has taken advantage of progress to develop into a better rounded person. But she can live a richer life within the family by applying many lessons her mother taught. No, I wouldn't want to turn the clock back. I love my wife but, oh, you kid, you old-fashioned kid.