I needed to hang a picture on the wall of my old shop down on North Graham. Finally found a small nail, one that would make only a little hole in the plaster, but didn’t have a hammer. As Boots and Doc are so fond of saying on KSTV during Yellow Jacket games, "It’s hammer time!"

While I searched for a hammer I thought of the shoes I was wearing, the ones with "sensible" heels. Once the right shoe was shed and in my hand, the heel made a terrific hammer! Done! Of course as a child of the depression, I had once more "made do". Kids my age are famous for that! We made do or we went without. I remember.........

My best friend and I were about ten years old when our parents dropped us off at the senior play over at the high school. We each had a nickel for admission but nothing to spend at the concession stand. Before we left the house, my mother, knowing what was in store, put some dried apricots from our orchard in two brown paper sacks for our intermission snack. We ate the delicious fruit while others munched popcorn and candy. They thought we had a special treat and were willing to trade for some of what we had.......

It was 1937 and I sat in the second grade row in a two-room school with four grades in one room and three in the other. The hot lunch program had not been thought up yet. Each student brought a lunch to school in a brown paper sack or wrapped up in a newspaper and tied with grocery store string. My dad bought one small loaf of white light bread each Saturday when he went to town for groceries. That bread was MINE. Nobody in the family ate a slice of it because Mother reserved that loaf of light bread to make sandwiches for my school lunches. She made those sandwiches with potted meat and she put in an apple, banana, or orange, and a homemade cookie, fried pie, or cake.

We all took out our lunches when Miss Bess said it was lunch time and we ate those sack lunches at our desks. One day I saw that Jane Flynn had cookies that were NOT homemade. These cookies were two pieces of wonderful looking baked dough with a white cream filling. I coveted those cookies. So when I got home that afternoon, I told my mama about those cookies in Jane’s lunch. She said, "Well, I can make cookies with a creamy filling." When Dad went next time to the M-Store in Chillicothe, he bought a box of Cream of Tarter and a box of Graham Crackers.

I watched in amazement as Mama mixed butter, milk, vanilla and some of the Cream of Tarter into a delicious spread for the Graham Crackers. On Monday at lunch time, I proudly showed off the wonderful cookies my mother had made.

I grew up thinking that whatever went wrong in the world, my parents could fix it. I knew for a certainty that they were the smartest, the hardest working, the most honest folks in the county. If I needed a new dress for the Interscholastic League Choir competition, Mama would sell off a couple of old hens and order the material from Sears Roebuck. She would likely cut an original pattern from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and sew up a pretty dress on her Singer sewing machine that Dad got for her when they were first married.

In those days when there was little cash, my daddy traded a young calf for that machine. When the drummer came by with that beautiful machine in his hack, Dad saw how bad Mama wanted to have it so he offered the heifer calf and the deal was made. Through the years, my mother peddled that machine to craft dresses with matching bloomers out of feed sacks for me. She mended overalls and patched dresses, sewed up quilts, and curtains. She sat in a cane bottom chair at the Singer to mend leather harness, canvass cotton sacks, and whatever else that needed a few stitches. She was brought up to find a way to do the job. Make do with what you have was passed along to us.

My parents and our neighbors worked hard. Everybody expected that in order to succeed you had to work hard , stay with it, and make do with what you had until you could do better.

Making do includes using a stapler to fasten a hem on a torn skirt when you don’t have needle and thread. Making do means wrapping masking tape around a broken baseball bat until you can buy another. Making do is substituting chopped onion for chopped pepper. Making do is stirring up flour and water when there is no paste in the house. Making do is wearing a long skirt over knee highs because all your panty hose have runners.