Hollenbeck: Scrap Savers

            When my neighbor’s daughter came for a visit, she decided to help her mother deep-clean her kitchen and was amazed at the unnecessary items her mother had saved and stored in her cupboards. There were several stacks of plastic cottage cheese and margarine cartons, plus neatly folded well-used sheets of tin foil. As she described these findings, I thought of my own mother who saved the same items, even saving waxed paper, and made sheets from the lining of cereal boxes to lay out warm cookies as she removed them from the oven. Our neighbor, Thelma Dodson, laid newspaper over her kitchen floor to “save on her new linoleum”…new ten years ago. In every home of our mothers and grandmothers you could undoubtedly find the same scenario, and realize the one thing the elderly homemakers had in common was the fact that they went through the Great Depression. It was hard for them to throw items away when they still had a use. (If you every tried to wander through their husband’s shop, you would find the same situation, or perhaps worse.)

            At a time when our elders grew up, there were no plastic cartons, no plastic anything, no tin foil, no new linoleum, and no handy kitchen gadgets as we enjoy today. What little items found in the kitchens-of-the-past were simple and useful. Food was prepared from “scratch” as they called it; mixing was done by hand without the use of an electric mixer; coffee was brewed in a kettle on the wood cook stove; and because of the lack of electricity, there were no refrigerators.

            Another item my mother saved, as did many women of her generation, was fabric and sewing supplies. Not only were many clothes made by hand, but many items useful to the home were made by hand. People did not have the amount of clothing or accessories as they do today. If a garment had a tear, it got mended. Some items, especially kid’s clothing, had multiple patches. If a shirt lost a button, it did not get tossed in the dumpster as is the case nowadays, these gals always had a button box and in no time the shirt was wearable again. When clothing was no longer viable, any good portions was salvaged and put into a “scrap box” to be used as patches, or even made into patchwork quilts. My mother made literally hundreds of lap robes, comforters and quilts through her 94 years on earth, and much of those were made from clothing headed for the dumpster. Her products were gifted to shut-ins, folks in area nursing homes as well as the Veteran’s Home at Hot Springs, South Dakota.

            There are lessons to be learned from these “scrap savers” of old, and how the economy would be in much better shape if we indeed learned some of their lessons. Not only did they hate to throw away anything useful, but they also did not buy anything that was not necessary, thus usually resulting in having some money saved “for a rainy day”, as they termed it. Not only did they not have a lot of the frivolous amenities most of us enjoy today, but most of them did not ever have a credit card or engage in online shopping. I, for one, would be better off if I would have applied to some of those lessons, and after trying unsuccessfully to remove a hot grease stain, I wish I would have covered my new linoleum with newspaper.