RSS Feed
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Bessie Goodman remembers
"I was in the third grade, so I think I was around nine years old," Mrs. Goodman said. "My aunt saved every little scrap. Flour sacks - they came in 24-pound bags. She saved them for me." Mrs. Goodman, who was raised by her daddy, lived with him in a two-room house - a main room and a bedroom. On either side of the fireplace in the main room were small windows. "Daddy had to leave early for work and would take me and my clothes by my aunt's house every morning to get me ready for school," she said. Mrs. Goodman added, her aunt was more like a mother and helped out every way she could. One way was to save the flour sacks so she could turn the little house into a home.
This may have been the first thing she created from the recycled sacks, but it was not the last thing. She sewed shirts for her daddy Goodman remembers and later her husband and son. "I was married in 1933 during the Depression," she said. It was on July 23, 1933. Miss Bessie Webb married Ellis Eugene Goodman. "We saved everything during that time," she added. "I used to make baby dresses for my babies out of flour sacks," she said. "I had so much fun." In addition to the small sacks the flour came in she would also use feed sacks to make bed sheets. It would take four feed sacks to make the sheets. "They were rough and course," said her daughter Earleane Knight. "Before she got a sewing machine Momma would sew by hand but back stitched to make it look like a machine stitch," her daughter said. "She made shirts for her daddy and my daddy after we were born." Her first child, Charles, born in 1934 died a few years ago. She recalls the little clothes she would make for him with the top and bottom sewn together but appeared to be separate. "The little shirt stayed tucked in," she said. Mrs. Goodman also made countless quilts, many from the flour sacks in her younger years, which have now become priceless to her children and their families. Her daughters commented they had no idea how many quilts their mother had made during her lifetime, but probably more than 20 since she turned 90. Charles was the oldest of Mrs. Goodman's children, and the only son. Her other five children, all girls, are: Mary Eugene "Jean" Goodman Brant, Earleane Goodman Knight, Bettie Goodman Sossaman, Mattie Goodman Flynn and Glenda Goodman Phillips. Mrs. Goodman later took her talent for sewing and worked at the two different shirt factories in Thomasville from the time she was 30 until she was 67. The older girls remember many items of clothes their mother had sewn during their childhood, many coming from those empty sacks of flour. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
)
)