Fran Colburn’s memories, as told to her
granddaughter, Heather Marks, on July 13, 2003
I was born in 1912 and many changes have occurred since then. I grew up on the near north side of Chicago.
I remember wonderful visits to Lincoln Park, located on the edge of Lake Michigan. Its zoo had a monkey house. Large animals like bears, elephants, zebras and deer with a line of separate cages built into a small hill. Polar bears had a small waterfall and a pool. The others all had caves in the hill to rest and cool off in the summer. Sea lions had a large, fenced-in pool. They were fed at 4 p.m. and we could watch. We walked because I lived about four blocks away. Early on, my Dad would take me there in a stroller. My favorite thing about the park was watching the sea lions get fed. The man near the pool would throw the fish in and the sea lions would jump for them.
Cameras were expensive. Men would walk down the street and take pictures of children playing and sell them to their parents. I remember getting my picture taken.
We had a player piano. It operated with pedals for your feet to run the bellows. Instead of sheet music, the music was on a roll of paper with holes of different sizes. You didn’t look at it. Your feet would pedal and the roll would go around in the piano. The rolls were left in a cabinet (two little doors in the top) on brackets above the regular keyboard. You could play it as a regular piano too. Somehow, the air would go through the bellows and produce music. They were military songs, since this was 1918 or so. I remember the Army and Navy forever song, Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue. We would sing along to the music since we knew the words. They may have been printed on the right side of the roll.
Girls played with dolls, games with jacks, hopscotch (using chalk on the sidewalk), jump rope and double-dutch with two ropes. Boys played marbles on bare soil and ball in the streets. There wasn’t much traffic, still a lot of horse and buggies.
They gave me a very nice doll when I was 4 or 5, with a wooden body and head. It was my mother’s hair on it. She had beautiful chestnut brown hair. I dropped the doll. I think I smashed the nose. I shouldn’t have had such a fancy doll at that age. My mother had the head replaced with a china head and I have it today. I enjoyed making clothing for the doll. It was jointed in the neck, arms, legs and ankles.
The phones at that time might have five people on a line and you could listen in, but we didn’t have one in our house. My mother had to go next door to make a call.
Our water came from Lake Michigan and was treated, so it was safe for drinking. My mother caught rain in a large bucket to wash her hair because Chicago water had too much chlorine or some chemical in it. The bucket was on a big porch that extended across two apartments on the same floor as ours. Our apartment building had three floors. The first was an English basement, three feet underground. We were on the second floor.
At Christmas, we had a small, real pine tree with candles my father lit and stayed there until completely out. Little metal clips (2 inches at most) held the candle to the tree. The tree was set up in the living room. I remember celebrating Christmas morning.
I was an only child until I was nine. I babysat and walked my baby brother in a buggy.
The iron for ironing clothes was heated on the stove. It was in two parts. The lower, flat part was put on the stove to heat and then you would pop the handle on top to lift it. There were no washing machines, so my mother would wash in two tubs of water (wash and rinse) in the kitchen. It was an all-day process. Special shirts of my dad’s were sent to a laundry.The street in front of our apartment was paved. Many of the apartments were three stories. The first floors were about three feet underground. I was probably about ten when we moved to an apartment with an electric refrigerator (1922 or so).
Only modern homes had bathtubs and running hot water. We were lucky ones. Some country kitchens had a cover over a stairway to the basement for cold storage. A door in the floor that you could lift up.
In stores, cookies were sold from large square containers with Isinglass or plastic doors in front that came down on a hinge. Cookies were sold by the pound. There were many kinds, chocolate, white frosted, lemon cookies, etc. Maybe six different kinds.
12th Birthday Party. These were my friends who lived in the area. My mother didn’t like to entertain in the house. She took us to Lincoln Park and we had a picnic.
I learned to sew and crochet from my mother. I made a lot of my own clothing and my children’s clothing. In grade school, maybe age 13 or 14, we had to make our graduation dresses. It had a flared skirt and one large scallop at the waistline. It was really hard to make. I never liked it but I wore it. It was probably white poplin.
My parents traveled very little. One time, though, my mother wanted to see Niagara Falls. My brother must have been four or five. We had a car, a Jordan, and drove to see Niagara Falls. My mother would not drive, but I learned to drive on that car. I was probably 14 or 15. Only one time I remember driving alone. My father had to go to work and wanted repair work done to the car, so I had to drop him off at the elevated train. I drove to where I had to leave the car, which was not far from my high school. After school I picked up the car.
My mother baked bread from scratch. Yeast, salt, flour and so forth. Normally, she wouldn’t let me do any more in the kitchen except wash dishes or set the table because I was too messy. My mother always had problems making pie crust. I asked if I could try baking a pie crust one day, and it was a success. I was about 15 at the time. Then I became the pie crust maker.
Camp Juniper Knoll (1928 – 1929). A bus would come to pick us up so our parents didn’t have to take us. We would stay for a week or two. We went two summers in a row. We slept in tents. I was 16 or 17 years old. We were told one night to cook our own dinner and it was spaghetti. We made a fire and put on a large dishpan full of water and threw the spaghetti in without boiling the water first. We waited and waited and waited, but it never cooked. We went hungry that night. The counselors didn’t stay with us. They just left us on our own to figure it out. It was a Girl Scout Pioneers camp.
My dad was short and my mother was a little taller than he was. My brother was nine years younger, but is much taller than me now. My father was brought up on a farm in Montpelier, Wisconsin. It has changed names since then. My mother grew up in Kewaunee, Wisconsin. She knitted my dress in this picture. My dad was a printer. He learned to print because he wasn’t big enough to be a farmer. His brothers were big, husky fellows. He learned to print at a newspaper at the Kewaunee Enterprise and became part owner of it. But he wanted to see the world, so he quit that and went to Chicago where he worked for Rand McNally on railroad tickets. They printed a long ticket with all the stops on it. It would be cut off at the city you were going to, and you could mark off all the cities in between.
My brother was in the Navy. He was in the service quite a while and he never talked about it. He is in Wisconsin now. I talk to him on the phone sometimes and we write letters. His wife died a couple of years ago.
Years later, when I was married and had twins, I was in the hospital. When the doctor went to tell Bob about the twins, he said “Your son was a gentleman. He said, ‘Ladies first.’”