Country Gal/City Woman: 'Oh, That Dora!'

Most family historians tend to "play down" the antics of the so-called "black sheep" of the family.  Once upon a time, I would have bought into that.  Today, that is a  real problem for me, in the act of becoming a dyed-in-the-wool blogger at this stage of my "career."

In a carefully measured way (there are "interested" relatives reading this) I'm sitting here thinking/writing about what those annual Hoffman Family Reunions would have amounted to if they did not include the latest episode in the life and times of our fabled Aunt Dora, not your ordinary run-of-the-mill "black sheep."  

Huge platters of country-fried chicken, German cole slaw, German potato and macaroni salads, Mom's oven-baked beans served up with the latest tidbit on, "That Dora!" are among my favorite memories of growing up with an Auntie who was just a tad bit ahead of her time. 

She was vivacious to the extent that my Mom and her other sisters were steadfast and, besides that, did she not only "nip" upon occasion, she smoked!; she had this extra special "zest" that was a complete puzzlement to her rather conventional and somewhat staid sisters and brothers.  

Sitting in the adult section of the Reunions, eavesdropping (Mom thought I was resting on her lap because I was overfed and tired) on the escapades of "That Dora!" was exhilarating, especially after being exposed to "See Dick and Jane Run" all week long at Grant School, as much fun as that was.

Lest you begin to get the wrong idea of "That Dora!" let me explain that in a small town sometimes "stuff" gets blown way out of proportion, hasty opinions added, and important (truthful) details left out when passed along the party lines that made up the telephone system in those days. 

Having told you all this, so help me Hannah, she did "paint" her face, dyed her hair to its once natural shade of black, wore shoes with three-inch heels, glossed her nails a blood red, "nipped" and smoked!  It was about that time I heard the family members refer to her as "That Dora!" And sigh! (Not all that unusual by today's standards. You have only to look around, people, and you will see Baby Pageants featuring at least one tiny tot resembling "That Dora!" holding a candy cigarette.) 

About those party lines?  My own case of "Mumps" was greatly exaggerated because of those telephone party lines.  In that instance I was given the dubious credit for exposing more than a few citizens of the town of Atlantic and surrounding territory to "Mumps" by the mere fact that I had participated in a Talent Show (ca 1936) at the City Hall, attended by a packed audience seeking cheap entertainment after shopping downtown all day, won Second Place for my rendition of "And the Music Goes Down and Around" waking up the next morning with a much rounder face than normal.  It took two of my good buddies, Knute Dean and Frank Toddhunter, the Singing Pals, to capture the most applause and the Blue Ribbon. Show business!

Aunt Dora would have made a great entertainer according to one story that made the family sit up and take notice at one Hoffman Reunion.  By then, the revered Grandparents Hoffman were no longer with us...no need to whisper.

The story that had to have been spread by someone who must have been in that audience would be considered by today's standards as rather pedestrian but in those days the fact that "That Dora!" actually DANCED The Charleston on a table at the cafe that she owned in a small town not far from Atlantic was unthinkable. I, personally, was enraptured by that news.  Not so much the more sober-sided Hoffman siblings. 

For a lady of her years, like 53 or 4, I am guessing, that couldn't have been easy.  After a long day of tending to business at the cafe, and then to DANCE on a TABLE?  I hasten to add that this was at a time when liquor was not served to customers and The Charleston is not that easy to perform on a wobbly table or even a sure-footed one. 

Like her contemporaries of the Flapper Girl era, evidently Aunt Dora was a "natural" but her career was about to end, then and there.  Sitting at the table nearest the kitchen where Aunt Dora turned rather "plain fare into cuisine" was a middle-aged bachelor who had an "eye for Aunt Dora and a tummy for her cooking" and whose hand he sought in marriage, Henry Rohwer, gentleman farmer.  Auntie, at the time, was a divorcee and the mother of two grown sons, to add to her Resume.

"That Dora!" was my very favorite Aunt, but not for the reasons just listed above, as easy as that would be.

A Sunday drive to the new home of my Mom's sister and her farmer-husband was a trip that we, the younger of the "city slickers" living at 210 Birch, anticipated with mixed emotions.  For one thing, we had "indoor plumbing".  That was on Aunt Dora's list of improvements for the homestead.  Needless to say, my admiration for my 4-H schoolmates increased considerably after each visit to the farm.

The farm that was known as The Rohwer Farm was located not far from Fletcher Chapel (two blinks and you're past it) on Highway 71 (that would be going south from Atlantic as the crow flies). Mom was the best cook in town, and we never went "without"; but, Aunt Dora, having owned that cafe and daily experimenting with customers' taste buds and such, cooked up dishes that had a taste of the exotic that Mom's never achieved.  And that continued even after she became the settled-down farm wife and "tone-downed" celebrated hostess to Hoffman family affairs.

Whether it was the Manischewitz or the in-house wine that Auntie used in the fancy dishes she concocted, her recipes were the-spur-of-the-moment kind, but I don't remember my Dad ever taking an afternoon "siesta" quite as quickly when he ate Mom's roast beef on a stay-at-home Sunday.  He was a teetotaler, preferring well water freshly primed from the pump.

Perhaps the evidence lay in the fact that many a haystack was artfully destroyed by the Cranston Kiddies after one of Auntie's meals.  However, all the cookbooks I've collected tell me any wine used for cooking purposes "cooks out".  So it probably was our youthful energy and not a "buzzed condition" that caused us to run rampant o'er the "kempt" barnyards, clean out the likewise chicken coop, pitch some hay, slop the pigs, ride bareback the pet pony and neatly re-stack the haystack before heading north on the road to Atlantic, exhausted but already planning for the next "work" day at the farm, deciding that any milking of the cows would be left to the hired hands.

Bless his heart, Uncle Hank uttered not a solitary mutter as we "wined-and-dined" nieces and nephews literally destroyed a hay stack so neatly piled high, climbing to the top and sliding down, time after time while the menfolk tended to other farm chores.  Truly beats sliding down Cedar Street on sleds when the City Council would block off that street for us Buck Town Kids on a given wintry day, though that was cool! 

The year I was 12, they invited me, no other cousins, to spend a week on the farm.  At day's end, and after the supper dishes were put away, Aunt Dora and Uncle Hank...1) broke open a new deck of Bicycle cards and taught me how to play Pinochle by the light of a kerosene lamp, and...2) tried to help me confront my fear of encountering a harmless little garden snake on my way to the pristine outdoor "privy" which stood so proudly at the end of a well-trodden path. 

At the end of the week, I had mastered neither but I do know how to fill a kerosene lamp.

This visit to the Rohwer Farm was high adventure to a kid who, as the baby of my large family, was pretty much a "tagalong" on those excursions to the Sunnyside Swimming Pool, to the movies, or to Earl May or Frank Field's garden shops in nearby Shenandoah to pick up bushels and baskets of fruit for immediate canning.

Even today, a feeling of being "special" overtakes my every sensibility as I think back to the loving "character" that was my Aunt Dora, and to Uncle Hank who  smiled a lot...he was one happy man.  You could just tell!

A Bit of Back Story:  During the Depression Years, many of the local farmers were hit hard by those times, and Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Farm Division, stepped in to finance and manage the farms, letting the farm family remain on the homestead, sharing in the fruits of their labors, always looking forward to the day the Deed would, once again, be in their name.  (Reverse Mortgages work in much the same way today for further clarification.)

When I was a young stenographer at Met. Life (my one and only employer in Atlantic following high school graduation in 1943) I was responsible for keeping records of any animal that was born, raised, sold or died...and every ton of hay and bushel of feed and corn that was grown by the farmer and consumed by those animals or sold at market, making sure that the tenant's fair share was calculated, paid in full and properly recorded.

Of course, the real muddy boots-on-the-ground work was done by the several Field Representatives at our Branch Office.  It was the Field Representative's job to visit each farm on a regular basis, do head counts of all livestock, oversee harvesting of crops, schedule trips to the Omaha stockyards for cattle sales and head for the wide-open spaces of Wyoming to look over prized bulls, to return to the office to set it all down on paper. 

Those various reports outlining the progress of each farm, pounded out in duplicate and triplicate on well-used Remington and Underwood typewriters, sent along for approval to the head "city slickers" working at that grand old building located at 1 Madison Avenue in New York City, Met. Life were loaded with "facts-of-farm-life" and probably sent more than one young steno to the Dictionary, as it did me.

So, with all my visits to the Rohwer Farm, one would think that by the time I was 18, I would know what "dropped" meant when it came to cows, right? Nope, not a clue. But, by the time I handed in my letter of resignation in January of 1948 to Carl N. Kennedy, the Branch Manager and for whom I then worked, I knew what that meant and a bit more about the "delicate conditions" that every farm kid knows by the time they are three!  Here is more of what I learned while taking dictation from Mr. Jesse L. Iftner, Field Representative, who took delight, as was divulged later, in watching my face turn "rosey-red." The note was supposedly handed to my boss by the eight-year-old daughter of a tenant-farmer while he was inspecting the cattle stalls on the farm and is now safely filed away in a cabinet in the basement of a tall and majestic building in New York City, is as close as I can remember it...

The Milking of Cows...by Ginger Young 

Before there can be milk and food like buttermilk, moldy cheese, whipped cream, butter (used for the famous Butter Cow at the Iowa State Fair), sour cream and ice cream, a cow has to have borned (dropped) her first calf.

A girl is a heifer until she is about two years old, when her first calf should be born.  A boy is a bull, and I don't know when his first calf should be born.  Heifers grow up to be dairy cows.  Some rich farmers we know own milking claws.  We are not rich, and my Dad washes his hands in warm water and sits on a milk stool.  Sometimes he lets me sit close by, and he squirts warm milk into my mouth.  Claws can't do that.  My Dad used to pitch softball for a team from Massena.

After "dropping" her calf, a cow is milked twice a day, and fills up a lot of buckets which Dad pours into a big vat and takes to the market.   A cow is "tight" or "bagged up" because her udder is filled with 30 to 70 pounds of raw milk and she "moo's" a lot.  Mom says "don't worry."

Sometimes we are in town, and we have to stop shopping and hurry home to do the chores and milk those (deleted) cows.  Mom says it takes about eight pounds of raw milk to make one gallon of pasteurized milk.  I don't know how much it takes to make chocolate milk.

My Dad says a dairy cow will eat 35 pounds of hay, 20 pounds of grain and drink 35 gallons of water a day 'cause I guess it knows it has a lot of milk to give someone.  My Dad doesn't have time to play ball anymore.   The End

Priceless, and of course, these figures are subject to change considering all the modern techniques being introduced to today's farmer, but that's the way it was back in 1943-48 when the living was easier...and before some fancy California advertising agency with award-winning cheese commercials brought new meaning to the word "contentment" and a certain adorable quality to the ordinary non-verbal "working" cow.  Show business!

Each one brings a smile and a remembrance of a very young girl, elbows over the fence, watching all the Rohwer cows straggle home after a lazy, cud-chewing kind of day in the pasture, more than ready for warm hands.

I'm smiling a wee bit, too, remembering "That Dora!" whose antics "perked up" many a Reunion, an old recipe with a new "liquid" and my even grayer-haired Uncle Hank as he walked in the door at a long day's end, winking at me as he crossed the kitchen to his lovin' wife, standing there at the cook-stove, stirring the pot with one hand and reaching out to her husband with the other....