Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner

I have said before that my mother worked in a small rubber factory from 3p.m., until 11 p.m., five nights a week. I don’t remember when she got home but it was way after my brother, sister and I had gone to bed. I do remember that when I got up to go to school the next morning, Mom was already up. She would be standing at the stove cooking Oatmeal for me.
These oats were not the instant kind. They did not have freeze-dried peaches, strawberries or brown sugar mixed in with the oats. The round Quaker Oats box held only one kind of oats and that was the "old fashion" kind. Ugh, I didn’t like oatmeal. It was slimy and looked like glue sticking to the small enamel pan in which Mom cooked the oats.

Sometimes, I ate it with brown sugar, cinnamon and a drop or two of milk. Other times I ate it plain with a drop or two of canned Wilson evaporated milk. Double ugh! But Mom cooked it and I ate it.

The best part of Mom having to work the second shift was that she would be home at noon when I came from school for lunch. In 1940, grade schools didn’t have free lunches for students. Most of the students who attended Allen School on Alaska Street in (Old) North Dayton went home for lunch.

The day I liked best was when Mom would be washing clothes down in the basement. She had an old cook stove down there and she would cook a pot of Soup Beans while she washed our clothes. They were usually pinto beans or white beans with a piece of ham or even a ham hock for favoring. By the time I got home at lunch time the beans were ready to eat.

For lunch Mom fixed me a small bowl of beans with a piece of bread and maybe, a glass of milk. And for supper Buddy or my sister heated up the bean soup and we had the beans and the Corn Bread that Mom had made before she went to work. She made the corn bread in an old iron skillet and was it good. She didn’t use sugar or put an egg in the mixture and she always made it with white corn meal. I never did learn how to make it but my sister did. To this day she still makes it in the same iron skillet that Mom did.

That was a day when I loved to eat even if the beans did make me let "bumps." Oh, how my mother would laugh when I called letting gas making bumps.