Family accounts and newspaper reports, with their original qualifications and sources.
Making a home and making do
The dress on the Sears cover
Bridget remembered beginning high school with dresses made from printed feed sacks. Then the spring Sears catalog arrived with a dress on its cover that she could not forget. Its $14.98 price was more than her mother would spend, but that was not the end of the story. On a trip to Moberly, her mother found nearly matching fabric and lace at a store Bridget remembered as Midway. Without a pattern, she cut, fitted, basted and sewed. Several days later Bridget had her own pink-checked version. While her mother worked, Bridget helped with her mother’s chores, carried water for the chickens, and helped wherever she was asked.
Source: Bridget Morrison Roling, handwritten memoir, p. 19.
A journey in dollars and cents
Alongside the travel story, Bridget’s notebook preserves the small expenses that made up a trip: an 80-cent movie, a $1.55 ferry crossing and $2.50 for Crystal Cave. A room in West Plains is entered at $4.08; another stop, the Star Motel, at $5.00. Three subtotals are brought together as $74.39. These are the expenses recorded in the notebook, rather than proof that every cost of the journey was included. A separate page divides a $40 budget into rent of $12.50, food of $10, miscellaneous spending of $2.50 and savings of $15. The page gives no weekly or monthly period, but its four neat columns offer another glimpse of how money was planned.
Source: Bridget Morrison Roling, notebook expense and budget pages; transcribed notebook pp. 4, 6 and 10. The expense pages themselves are undated.
A wedding veil for First Communion
Bridget’s First Communion outfit carried a piece of her mother’s wedding day. Her mother made the white dress and cut her own wedding veil to make a veil for her daughter. A pair of ordered white shoes completed the outfit. Bridget remembered those shoes with particular affection: she wore them until her toes turned under. Looking back, she admitted that she remembered being less concerned with holiness than with pride in her shoes.
Source: Bridget Morrison Roling, handwritten memoir, p. 27. Date not supplied.
Keeping the farm going
While her brothers were away during World War II, Bridget remembered doing the livestock chores with her mother as her father worked in the fields. She brought the cows in from the pasture, and they milked them, fed the hogs, put hay down for the mules, cared for the chickens and gathered eggs. Supper still had to be cooked after the animals were tended. Her recollection gives the family’s wartime story another setting: not only the places where her brothers served, but the daily work that continued at home.
Source: Bridget Morrison Roling, handwritten memoir, p. 28.
Waiting for the snow boots
As a little girl on Poverty Ridge, Bridget watched a day of snowfall and longed to get outside. But first George had to come home from school: she needed his overboots, coat and gloves. She stood with her nose against the window, watching for her brothers. Even after George arrived, there were his chores to finish before it was her turn. By the time she finally went outside, the cold had taken the fun out of it. She remembered it as her first great disappointment.
Source: Bridget Morrison Roling, handwritten memoir, pp. 3–4.