HARD TIMES AND FEED SACKS MAKE PRETTY SHIRTS-When I was a boy in the late 1940's and early 1950's, the family would go with my dad to buy cow feed. The reason everyone went was to pick out their favorite pattern on the sacks of feed, usually flowers. My mom would then, on her Singer sewing machine , make shirts or whatever, out of the material. When we got home with the feed, we emptied it into a wooden bin in the barn and began the arduous task of getting the thread unraveled. The feed company would make the sacks where the thread would somehow double back. Then you would have to, as my daddy said," hold your mouth right", to get the sack to unravel. When the unraveling was done, that would leave you with a one or one and a half yards of gingham material. In my old age, I must admit I surely did not like wearing those homemade flowery shirts , but it was all we had. In retrospect , I wish I had been as appreciative as Dolly Parton when she expresses so well in her song," My Coat of Many Colors That My Mama Made for Me." I still have a first-grade picture with all my classmates in white shirts and trousers and me wearing a red and white blazer that my mom had made for me. I was a very shy little boy, and was not very happy showing off my mom's colorful needlework.
