I think of my Mom often, not just on Mother’s Day. She had a remarkable life which is detailed in her memoir which I edited and published, MEMORY LANE: MY SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.
Mom was born during the Roaring Twenties. Her life experience living in rural Louisiana was vastly different from someone living in a city.
Here are some random thoughts about her and her life as they have popped into my mind this morning.
GREAT DEPRESSION
When the great Depression hit, she remembers how her mother would save anything left from a meal to feed the men who traveled the country, looking for work. They’d knock on the back door, and she’d givc the men whom people called hobos who rode the rails whatever she could scrounge up.
LIPSTICK
She never left the house without her lipstick. She came of age when red lipstick was what all the women wore. Although she changed lipstick shades with the passing years, she still made sure she had her lipstick on when she went to town.
BOOKS
She always had a book she was reading. Subconsciously, that must have been why I was an early reader who discovered the magic of reading. She never got rid of a book she bought. I have most of her collection now.
HAIR STYLESMy mother had beautiful dark brown hair with an auburn cast to it. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she didn’t “bob” her hair until she married. She used bobby pins to secure finger waves and curls each night.
ROSIE THE RIVETER HAD NOTHING ON MY MOM
Like many women, when the country went to war, she went to work—in a factory that made cannon shells. Many of her friends worked there and so did men who had been rejected for armed service for one reason or another.
She, like the other girls, fixed their hair, put on their lipstick, and dressed nicely to report each day for work. She never thought her “war service” was anything out of the ordinary. It was just something she did out of patriotism.
SKIN CARE
I can remember very few times when my mom didn’t “cream” her face at night to remove her makeup. She used Pond’s Face Cream, slathered it on, wiped it off with Kleenex, and blotted with a warm wash cloth to remove any greasy residue. Then came her nightly moisturizer before bed. When she passed at 83, her skin was still beautiful—soft and lustrous. Sure she had wrinkles, but the texture of her skin was amazing.
FAMILY
Family and family histories meant everything to her. Her father lived to be 100, and she knew all the family truths and legends. She wrote 4 books on family genealogy that are in the collections of the NY Public Library, the Mormom Library in Utah, and in other public libraries.
Sadly, all of those have been pirated and posted online over the years without any attribution to her. When that first started, she was so sad. She respected copyright and was shocked that many people didn’t.
She wanted me to do something about it, but there was little that could be done. She’d really be upset to know how often books are pirated in today’s world.
FOOD
She was an amazing home chef. Every week she made a cake. That’s why I wrote a cake recipe book and called it
FRIDAY IS CAKE DAY. Much of what I cook came from her recipes. Yet, none of it ever matches my memory of the taste of her food. I think hers always tasted better, but I guess that’s just sentimentality.
RELIGION
Like her parents, my mother was christened in the Methodist Church. Her great grandfather’s brother had been a Methodist Circuit Rider so the family religion was Methodist. Later, my Dad persuaded her to change to Baptist, but she was at home in many churches from Catholic to Pentecostal. I think she believed like her dad that religious affiliation wasn’t checked at the door to Heaven.
MOVIES and MUSIC
The movies inspired the styles for hair, makeup, and fashion. Big Band music was the soundtrack of everyone’s life in that era. My mom’s favorite was Glenn Miller. She had his 4 record volume and played it often.
I grew up listening to that music of her teen years. Later, she loved all of the early rock and roll music and played it often. It wasn’t unusual to get a call from her and hear her say, “I’ve been dancing on the porch to Jerry Lee Lewis.”
Tap dancing, jitter bug, romantic comedy with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, and all the other famous movie stars provided the entertainment for America. My mom loved it all and never lost her fascination for those stars who became part of the war effort.
MEMORABLE DAYS
The Martians Are Attacking
She was a child when the radio show “War of the Worlds” starring Orson Welles was broadcast. The radio in her home was broken so she didn’t hear the broadcast. The next day when she went to school, the other kids was talking about. Everyone was afraid. Apparently, they had missed the introduction to the radio show that said it was a story by H. G. Wells. She was terrified and rushed home. Her father told her it wasn’t true. No Martians were attacking. That fear stayed with her for the rest of her life. She hated science fiction and refused to read or watch it in movies or TV.
Pearl Harbor
Mom lived in a rural area with only a very small town nearby. They subscribed to the daily newspaper, but that was old news by the time it was delivered. Everyone received news on their home radio.When news of the attack on Pearl Harbor came, everyone checked their hunting rifles and shotguns—making ready to defend their families and their homes. She said everyone was scared but patriotic and had faith that the President would set things to rights. She heard Franklin Roosevelt’s impassioned speech about Pearl Harbor, after which boys just out of high school and those who hadn’t yet graduated were signing up for the army.
Rationing
Nearly everything was rationed—sugar, meat, tires, gasoline, coffee, butter, shoes, and processed foods. Every family had a raion book. Women rallied to the task of “making do” with what was available. My mom learned to make things like Tomato Gravy over rice, pilchard (a canned fish similar to sardines) gravy over rice, and cakes made without eggs, butter, sugar that tasted amazing.
The End of War
When the war ended, everything changed again. The soldiers came home. No more rationing. No more job working for the war effort. My mom was suddenly unemployed because the returning soldiers needed jobs. She went to work as a telephone operator. She was one of those at a switchboard at the telephone company who would respond to a ring on the switchboard and answer with, “Number please.”
You see, back in those days, there were no touch tone phones and most of the country did not have dial phones. The operator used a board with plugs and wires that would connect one caller to another. In fact, may people did not have private phone lines. They had party lines with several people sharing the same phone line. Each person had a different ring, i.e. one person’s phone might ring twice and repeat. Another’s might ring four times. Etc.
She loved her job and ended up working switchboard at various times thorugh the 1960s when switchboards were done away with.
TAKEAWAY TRUTH
My Mom was a beauty, a hard-worker, a survivor, and the smartest woman I ever knew. I love her—present tense, not past tense because love is everlasting. If your mom is still with you, cherish her.
Joan participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, affiliate advertising designed to help websites earn advertising fees by linking to products on Amazon. If you click an Amazon link in her post, she may receive a small commision at no extra cost to you.
Joan Reeves aka SlingWords: The Word Slinging Adventures of Joan Reeves
Source:
https://slingwords.blogspot.com/2026/05/memories-of-mom-ww2-beauty.html
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