Home Ec, circa 1970

Today in my never-ending quest to organize various piles of debris in my spare room, I came across a bundle of papers that I picked up from my mom's house. These were things of mine that were left behind in a desk drawer in my old room. I'm sure I've gone through these things any number of times in the more than three decades since I gave up my residence in that room. My two youngest sisters and a niece have also lived in there, and it is impressive that anything at all remained from my high school years in the Blue Room. I just gathered up a pile last time I visited and today I finally began to sort it.

I found a couple of keepsakes from a conference I attended at BYU while I was still in high school, called "Laurel-Life". I think it was only held a few years, and the year I went was the first. I have very few specific memories, but I recall that it was terrific. Thousands of girls from all over the United States and Canada attended and then we were to go home and organize a similar event for a Saturday, in our home stakes. It was a unique opportunity to learn some really powerful leadership skills. I went between my junior and senior years of high school. My mom was our chaperon.

But, the really impressive find was a collection of Home Ec materials. Wow. Booklets entitled:

• Make It With Wool: Pressing, Blocking, Shaping (American Wool Council)
• Let's Clean House (Procter & Gamble)
• The Fine China and Crystal Story (Lenox, Inc.)
• To the Chairman of the (Ironing) Board (Faultless Starch Company)
• Guide to Complete Upholstery Care (Bissell)
• All About Silver (J.A. Wright & Company-Wright's Silver Cream)
• Crystal Notes, A Planning Book for Students (Fostoria Glass Company)
• How to Choose the Right Thread and...
• A Story of Thread (Coats & Clark's )

The parenthetical information is the company who printed and distributed the booklet for my teacher to give to her classes. Absolutely fascinating booklets. They all assume that the students are female, that we will accumulate a dowry of household paraphernalia, that we will marry and run our own home, that it will include fine dishes for entertaining, and that we will sew and care for our own clothing.

These assumptions were all fairly dead-on for the girls with whom I attended Home Ec in our high school. Well, I'm not sure that all of us anticipated "entertaining", but we would be hosting family meals on special occasions and would likely use our special dishes--as did our mothers.

You could be thinking, "In 1970??" Wasn't that the Times They Are A Changin' Era?? Well, yes, and no. In my hometown, we were always about 10 years behind the rest of the world, culturally. Mostly. Until I was 14, my house could only receive one channel on our television, because the broadcast had to overcome the height of the mountains surrounding our valley. Some households in town were connected to a mountaintop relay device through an early form of cable or something. (I'm just remembering technology I didn't understand at the time...) But farm people still relied on an antenna--ours was strung between four really tall lodge-pole pine trunks set out in a pasture (actually, the logs were lashed atop another really tall one to get the antenna high enough to catch the signal.) People didn't live there to be cutting edge. Actually, I doubt many of the folks there really gave a lot of thought to Cutting Edge. Some in high school did, however, and longed to leave and find the rest of the world.

But, Home Ec was, in fact, a very useful class for me. I did grow up, get married, and run a household for many years before I got a job that had a paycheck. Many of the things in the booklets and the class syllabus were old hat to me: I'd been ironing since I was about eight years old. And I KNEW how to clean house, and I got lots of practice. But I didn't learn machine sewing at all until Home Ec in junior high, and I really appreciate my teachers for that skill. I still don't have a set of "fine" china, or silver, but I've never really missed them. My mom taught us the correct way to set the table--I've never been embarrassed at a formal dinner with all the place settings: I knew what to do with all those utensils.

The one thing I did learn in Home Ec, however, was that there were girls my age, in my little, old-fashioned farmy town, who had not been taught, like me, to cook and clean. I was surprised over and over at who didn't have basic cooking skills when we learned things in class. Not that many of them, but there were a few. I'm glad they got to learn in Home Ec, because, no matter how the Times Change, people need to eat, and making it yourself from ingredients is a satisfying and economical skill to have.