A sixty-year mystery solved ...

[Nancy]

DDD they probably were trying to teach us to be martyr's but they never verbalized that. It was all about the russians and communists. I grew up thinking russians hated catholics. They also twisted the story a bit by telling us we would have to watch our parents be shot if we didn't denounce our religion.

Donna how do you remember these things. For years I was terrified because I had contact dermatitis on my hands from soap and was sure I had leprosy. I don't know why the nuns had a fixation on leprosy along with communists. They also believed in corporal punishment and seemed to enjoy inflicting it on us.

Nancy

 

[DDD]

It's amazing that most of us turned out halfway normal, lol. DDD

 

[donna723]

My cousin Judy, the one who helped write and edit the book about our community, was the oldest of four children and they all went to the same Catholic elementary school that their parents had gone to. The youngest sister was a tiny, shy, fragile looking little waif of a girl. By the time she was ready to start school, the three older ones had filled her so full or horror stories that she refused to go to school! I'm sure they embellished quite a bit too. When faced with the prospect of going to school, she screamed and cried and carried on until she threw up! They finally reached a compromise - she reluctantly agreed to go to school but only if her FATHER went with her to protect her! And he DID! He took a week off of work and for the first five days of the school year my 6'5" 300-pound Uncle Bill sat in the corner of the classroom on one of those tiny little chairs to "protect" his youngest daughter from the nuns! We so wished that someone had gotten a picture of that! But after that first week she realized that her siblings had been gassing her up. She decided that she probably could handle going to school on her own and Uncle Bill finally went back to work.

 

[DDD]

Wow! There aren't too many Dad's like that. You have some real winners in your family, Donna. DDD

 

[Star*]

I'm so enjoying reading this thread - not about the fears but just that I'm not alone. Or wasn't crazy afterall. Or I'm NOT crazy afterall.

I remember almost ALL of these things (not living the Catholic things) but hearing about them from family members. I also remember dress line ups. The girls were called out in the hall (I think 1971, 1972 ) and we were told to stand with our hands at our sides to that the principal could check to see that our dress hems reached the middle fingers on our hands with our arms at our sides. I remember our teacher telling us a day ahead too. When I'd tell my Mom (because you outgrow things so quickly) Mom would say "Hunch up your shoulders but not too much so you don't get sent home." I think that was the first time I realized money was tight in our house. lol.

We had bomb raid drills, tornado drills.....men walking on the moon, people coming back from Vietnam....and I can just barely remember the Kent State massacares. I think about those things and much more and realize - we really did not turn out to be a bad generation after all.

 

[Shari]

Very touching story. I, too, bet the brother would love to visit with you...just to "hang on" to that little living portion of his family. So cool.

And I thought I was the only one that was afraid of dying of leprosy! OMG...we are never truly alone! lol

ANd just thinking...but my grandparents were old order German and Mennonite, and children were to never look at adults' faces or in the eye, especially men. Ultimate disrespect. I wonder if the "step on a crack" thing came from previous generations of fear-mongering parents to keep their kids' eyes down?

 

[Hound dog]

My parents lived in Europe during WW 2. Bombs were scary but very little food was the worst. We in the US have no real clue of how to protect ourselves in time of war if we don't learn from the survivors of past wars. My mom kept a basement storage area full of food items and a freezer packed to the seams with frozen food in the event that there was "no food".

I think I got that from my grandma who lived through the great depression with 7 kids trying to support them alone. I always have a stock pile of long lasting food stuffs and my freezer as full as it can get. I keep valuable first aide supplies on hand as well, and cheaper every day items that can be used as must have first aide items. I just keep the food rotated so it doesn't expire and is wasted. But I've done it every since I started keeping house to one degree or another. I don't always have enough cash flow to have a large stock pile, but something is always better than nothing in case of emergency. It probably didn't help that the man who I call dad also lived through the depression as a child. His stories scared me even more than my grandma's because he spoke of going days without food. (grandma was located where she could hunt during the worst of it) His breaking chicken bones open to eat the marrow many decades past the depression......and telling us kids we were wasting food when we refused to do the same made a major impact on me. I always thought omg if it was that bad........I always wanted to be prepared as much as possible.

 

[donna723]

I know I'm one of the older ones here but I've thought about it a lot and I kind of see how our parents got to be that way, over-protective on some things to the point of being silly. My parents were raised by their parents! And my grandparents generation was the one where most families lost one or more children to diseases and disorders that they may not have even fully understood. My father's mother was one of five siblings but then two of them died within the same year. I've been digging in to the geneology thing and when you look at the old hand-written death records from those days, most of the deaths were babies and small children, not old people! It was very common to see huge families, a dozen or more children born, but sometimes only half of them survived to adulthood. I can't even imagine some of the weird, bizarre things my mother must have been told by her mother! They were so anxious to protect us that they thought it was OK to scare the h*ll out of us if that's what it took to keep us safe.

On the one hand, they obsessed about silly stuff like swallowing chewing gum. On the other hand, we were the generation that roamed the neighborhood all day and had almost complete freedom to do whatever we wanted to as long as we showed up for meals and came in when the street lights came on!