One of the author’s prized possessions is a metal box in which her mother stored clippings from the Western Producer
I have a longstanding love affair with the Western Producer.
The paper started arriving in my family’s mailbox a few years before I was born.
I joined the family in the late 1950s, the last of four children. My parents operated a typical mixed farm. The Holstein dairy cows supplemented our income and, as my mother put it, the weekly cream cheque kept us kids from the brink of starvation and the VLA (Veterans Land Act ) loan off our backs. It was the best life.
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I don’t actually remember when I became aware that the Western Producer was a source of truth in the house — farming truth, cooking truth, gardening truth, weather, commodity prices and many, many more truths. No one questioned the accuracy of anything printed in the Producer.
My mother waited, scissors at hand, for Mrs. Oddie’s columns. Whatever Mrs. O was baking or cooking that week was sure to find its way to our supper table or school lunch.
Thankfully, Mrs. O was a spectacular woman whose recipes produced fantastic food, and they contained ingredients that prairie women actually had on hand.
We did not eat what my parents referred to as hippie food. Where would we have found tofu in the small town stores of the 1960s? The recipes were for good, wholesome fare that fuelled growing farm kids.
Mrs. O also gave advice on sewing, knitting, gardening and using the new electric appliances that were becoming increasingly popular. She provided guidance on a multitude of other attributes and talents that every farm wife was required to have.
Today, one of my most prized possessions is a little metal recipe box that my mother filled with many clippings from Mr. O’s columns or painstakingly copied out in her own handwriting on index cards.
I am not all that materialistic, but if my 60 seconds came around and I had to decide what I wanted out of our house in that short time, it would be family, pets and the red recipe box. It is filled with memories of my childhood, many of them tied to the Western Producer.
There was a certain pecking order attached to the arrival and reading of the paper. My mother went directly to her areas of interest and then passed the paper (minus a few gaping holes) over to my dad. He read it cover to cover, except for what he called the “woman” stuff.
Now Dad was not a male chauvinist by any means. He made breakfast for the family every morning while Mom was busy making our school lunches. He just had little interest in domestic matters.
I kind of wish he had taken a bit of interest. He could have used some of Mrs. O’s cooking advice.
Toast was made on a rack in the oven under the broiler. It was manually turned from side to side by my father. He knew it was time to turn the toast when smoke billowed out of the oven door.
I had no idea until later in life that toast was meant to be evenly browned on both sides, not burned black on one side and pale white on the other.
Porridge was the other staple. Thank goodness for brown sugar and cow’s cream. It helped the hot glue-like substance slip down.
One thing Dad could make was Orange Tang. The spoon stood straight up in it. He believed if you were drinking juice, you should be able to taste it. And taste it we could. Dad would say “it puts hair on your chest.” I am sure my poor sister never drank a drop.
Dad was particularly interested in the articles on new inventions, alterations and modifications to equipment and machinery. Anything related to mechanics was right up his alley.
He was convinced the good Lord gave the farmers in Saskatchewan more hours in the day than the rest of us because many of the best inventions seemed to come out of that province.
After my parents had finished reading and discussing the articles, the Producer was then passed down to the kids.
My older siblings took an interest in anything related to 4-H. There were articles about the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto, Regina’s fair and many others. Imagine showing your project animal on the big stage. To a prairie kid, it would be a dream come true.
My older sister and the neighbour girl secretly studied the personal classifieds. It was the original dating app. SM seeks SF for C&WD, NS ND.
I had no earthly idea what any of that meant, nor were my assigned babysitters about to tell the bratty kid they had been saddled with what the classifieds were all about. They giggled as teenage girls do as they read the personal classifieds out loud. I thought it was the language of love.
Being the youngest, I was the last to get the paper.
At first, I may not have understood a lot of it, but I read it cover to cover. I was a farm kid with limited access to the town library, and I was starved for good reading material.
I loved the pictures that accompanied most articles. There were farm families just like us out there, kids that skated on reed-filled sloughs, hopped on plow horses bareback and milked cows morning and night.
The town school we attended had more townies than farm kids, so it was reassuring to see our life was indeed similar to many other prairie kids.
I believe I will always feel a great affinity to anyone raised on a farm in Manitoba, Saskatchewan or Alberta during the 1960s and 1970s. They would understand what it meant to walk the long mile to the mailbox in hopes the Western Producer had arrived.
Many years have gone by, but the love affair continues, and the Western Producer remains a source of many truths in our house.
Congratulations on 100 years of publishing an amazing paper.
