Fruit Jar Banking
I was just thinking about the incredible spirit and strength of the women in my family. My grandmother, my mother's mom, was such a tiny little dynamo at less than 5 feet tall. She is responsible for this farm and for our ownership of it. I've detailed the courtship and elopement between her and my grandfather. But here's the scoop on a woman who toiled as a housewife and kept her family afloat.... from home... Minnie Samantha.
[photos are from random Facebook groups]
Minnie was from Indiana, a mommy's girl, she said. She and her new husband moved away here to mid Missouri, Moberly, while he worked in loading on the railroad. She was so homesick that he told her if she could save 1,000 dollars, they would move back to Indiana... on his tiny salary, with their rent and expenses, that seemed impossible. I think he felt sure he would stay in his beloved Missouri... However, after 32 months she presented him with a fruit jar of money, just a little over her quota, and they moved to Terre Haute.
They had my mother there and lived 18 years in the land of the Wabash River. The thing is, my grandfather was not happy delivering ice in the city. His knees were ruined with arthritis, he is said to gave imbibed too much... So again my grandmother worked her financial magic.. one night this little woman, who had marched with the suffragettes and turned 21 the first year women could vote, presented a deal my grandfather couldn't refuse.
If he would promise to stop drinking cold turkey, she said the family could move to Missouri and buy a farm. She produced a suitcase full of fruit jars and odd cash worth several thousand dollars, enough to awaken my mother her senior year in high school and move immediately one cold November night in 1941. Mom said she didn't even tell her friends goodbye.... just packed her things and made the trip with a bowl of goldfish and a huge dog in the back seat of their car. Can you imagine?
Evidently Gramma's banking system was a winner because after a few years passed, the story continued. Gramma and Paw-paw bought a second, connected farm from a man who traveled to get his money from the Chicago area. Gramma had buried ..... you guessed it.... fruit jars of saved and scrimped cash in their dirt floor basement... She spent the night ironing that money and washing it to get the musty smell out of it. They handed over a few thousand freshly crisp dollars in a gunny sack...
I don't know why this all popped into my mind. I sure wish I had inherited that frugal tendency... a jar of musty cash would go well with breakfast, no? I admire that... after all, she's the one who gave me the loans for my cars, my first home built in 1976, for my weddings.... both of them... I usually paid her back at least some of it... I 🤔 think...
We're fine... but just products of a different, more spendy generation...
Well, it's 3:30 a.m. I need to go back to sleep in this house nestled on a farm bought with fruit jar savings...
Comments
Then we had a house fire in the neighborhood. We reviewed our insurance and were told that our company only covered $200 in cash if a home burned down. Yikes.
I opened a series of what my bank calls sub accounts and have 9 different sub savings accounts that anyone in the world can see. No secrets now. And my husband's secret banking system (over 20 coffee cans filled with change under the bed) got cashed in and bought a custom made Amish bedroom set with bed, two dressers and two nightstands.
My grandmother did not believe in women being granted the right to vote, nor did she ever wear a pair of pants or even pantyhose. I may have inherited her custom of hiding money but not her political or social opinions!
Our we-women were remarkable, and I think all the time of their days of wood stoves, of no flush toilets or tampons or hand lotion, out there in the cotton and beans and gardens and in those stove-heated houses that barely cooled enough to sleep before sunrise. Hard as a nut, they said my Mammaw B. was---bitten by a rattlesnake when Daddy was a teen, and she'd buried two little sons to the flu of 1918, gone within less than a week of each other. My REMINISCE button is set on overload these chilly, sunny, orange-tinted days, and you've written so eloquently and earthily of your own heritage, I'm deep in awe and admiration. For all of you.