SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING

When I was a kid, a once-a-week bath was considered sufficient. In fact, Pa was known to say, “Too much bathing will weaken you. Saps the strength right out of your muscles.” Whether that was true we never found out, for we never bathed more than once a week. And no matter the season, Saturday night was bath night.

Our bathtub, about thirty inches across and a foot or so deep, was made of silvery galvanized metal. It hung on its nail in the woodshed in all seasons of the year; during the warmer months we bathed right in the woodshed. On Saturday nights in winter, when the evening milking was done and the cows fed and bedded down for the night, Pa unhooked the bathtub from its nail in the woodshed and brought it into the house.

Pa placed the tub in front of the kitchen cookstove’s open oven door, the warmest place in the house on a below-zero evening. Ma had already filled the stove’s reservoir with water, and it was now warm and steaming. Now she filled the tub half full with water from the reservoir.

We each took our turn, first Darrel, then Donald, then me. We peeled off our bib overalls, shirts, and socks and stepped out of long underwear that we hadn’t removed since the previous Saturday night. Into the tub we went, one at a time, with Ma responding to our shouts of “too cold” or “too warm” by adding a dipper or two of cold water from the water pail by the sink or dumping in a shot of warm water from the teakettle that steamed on the back of the stove. (The water in the tub was never replaced; Ma simply added more warm water throughout all three of our turns in the tub.)

Lifebuoy soap appeared next, a big pinkish red cake that we all used to remove the dust and grime from a week of doing chores, going to school, and all the rest that kids did in winter. Lifebuoy soap has personality. It smells of antiseptic; whether you are truly clean or not, you smell clean after you bathe with Lifebuoy soap. And everyone else knows you’ve bathed, as well—the smell carries like the smell of oak smoke carries on the winter wind.

After our baths we hustled off to climb into fresh, clean long underwear, shirts, overalls, and socks and were ready to start off another winter week with clean skin and the smell of Lifebuoy soap lingering for a day or two.

While we boys gathered in the dining room to play a board game or maybe Old Maid, a card game we enjoyed, Ma and Pa took their turns in the tub. When they were finished bathing and dressing, Pa carried the tub of wash water out behind the house and dumped it. He returned the tub to its nail in the woodshed while Ma toweled up the spilled water on the kitchen floor.

Often Ma and Pa would join us for a card game, usually Smear or one of Ma’s favorites, Canasta. Then, when it was time for the Barn Dance program, Pa tuned our Philco radio to WLS, a Chicago radio station that came in well on cold winter nights. We all stopped what we were doing and gathered around the radio to listen to the wonderful singing and storytelling. Even with temperatures well below zero and the wind whipping around our farmhouse, Saturday nights at home were cozy and comfortable.

Once a month or so, however, we ventured out on a frigid Saturday night for a neighborhood party. Everyone usually walked to these gatherings, some as far as two miles, for a chance to play cards, or dance, or just sit around and visit.

One cold Saturday night the Rapp family invited the neighbors to a party in honor of their newly wed daughter and son-in-law. Freshly scrubbed and dressed in clean clothes, we pulled on our winter coats and set out for the Rapp place, about a mile from our farm. The night was quiet save for the snow squeaking beneath our feet as we walked along the road. Moonlight created a variety of shadows on the snow-covered fields that we passed. The air was thick and clean—as clean as our Lifebuoy-scrubbed bodies. It was cold, maybe zero. But by this time in the winter we were used to the cold, and a zero-degree night was pleasant, especially when the wind wasn’t blowing.

As we topped a little hill, we could see the Rapps’ farmhouse ahead, the lighted windows bright spots in the dark night. And then we picked up a faint sound. Polka music. Dancing music. I noticed that both Ma and Pa were smiling when they heard the music, for now we all knew that our little community band had been invited to entertain us.

At the Rapp house, Freddy Rapp, the bride’s brother, invited us in, took our heavy coats, and offered us chairs. The dining room furniture had been pushed aside to provide ample space for dancing. Our neighborhood musicians—Frank Kolka (Czech), who played the button concertina, Pinky Eserhut (German), who strummed the banjo, and Harry Banks (English), who sawed on the fiddle—sat on the far side of the dining room. Harry had lost a finger on his left hand in a haying accident, but it didn’t seem to bother him a whit as he bowed his violin. There were no music stands or other such clutter (Pa told me that none of them could read music), just three farmer-musicians waiting to help us celebrate a little on this cold winter night.

I had heard them play a time or two before for birthday parties held at Chain O’ Lake School, but this was the first time I had seen them at a house party. Frank Kolka tapped his foot on the floor a couple of times, and the three musicians began playing. It was wonderful music, even better than I had heard on the WLS Barn Dance show. Here I could see the musicians as well as hear them: Frank pushing and pulling on his concertina that had come from the old country, his big fingers flying around the buttons; Pinky (his real name was Alvin) plunking on his banjo; the mystery of Harry Banks fingering his violin with one finger missing.

They launched into the “Beer Barrel Polka,” and right away folks were dancing, hopping up and down and moving around the floor to the beat of the music and smiling. These were hard times during the waning years of the Depression, and there often wasn’t much to smile about. I realize now how important those neighborhood parties were for the community of farmers waiting out the long winters, and how much that little band of musicians helped everyone, young and old, put their troubles aside, embrace the fellowship of their neighbors, and have a good time, if but for one Saturday evening.

Bill and Lorraine Miller were the best dancers in the neighborhood—and they didn’t mind letting us all watch them perform. They knew how to polka in double-time, their feet scarcely touching the floor as they bounced around the room. Everyone else made room for them as they whirled around.

The band shifted into an old-time waltz, which brought more people onto the floor, and then they played a schottische: one-two-three hop, one-two-three hop, hop, hop, hop. The room was filled with hopping schottische dancers dancing so vigorously I began to think the floor was going to collapse.

In between dances the men drank beer provided by the bride’s brother, Point Special from Stevens Point, right from the bottle. A few of the women drank beer as well, but they used glasses. During lulls in the dancing, when people were gathering up enough energy to continue, they sat and listened as Frank Kolka played some of the old tunes that his family had brought from Czechoslovakia, haunting tunes that filled the room. The songs conveyed deep meaning and mystery, especially for our Czech neighbors who had family in that European country.

About eleven-thirty the music stopped, and people lined up for an enormous lunch of homemade bread, sausages of several kinds, dill pickles, chocolate cake, sugar cookies, and black coffee. The men who’d had a few beers too many laughed and talked foolish and earned wicked glances from their spouses. But there were no worries of driving with too much to drink, because everyone had walked. Besides, after walking a mile or more in below-zero temperatures, the overimbibing culprit was usually cold sober by the time he arrived home. About the only danger was crawling out of bed the next morning to milk cows with a severe headache.

At our house the next morning it was business as usual. Pa woke me up as he always did, by tapping the stove poker on the stovepipe downstairs so it would rattle in our upstairs bedroom. It was five-thirty and below zero, but the cows must be milked.

When the morning chores were done, and if the Plymouth started, we all climbed into the car and were off to church. There, sitting shoulder to shoulder with our neighbors, many of whom we’d seen dancing the schottische just hours earlier, we could still tell who had bathed the night before. The smell of Lifebuoy soap lingered many hours after our Saturday night scrubbing.