My Introduction to Woman’s Lib
My mother took off her bra in 1968 and burned it. She never wore a bra again. In my presence, she put tape over her nipples so they wouldn’t protrude through her clothing. She made an X over them using this pink tape with jagged edges. It was the same tape women used to make spit curls on the sides of their faces. They would put a little Dippity Do on a small lock of hair, form it into a curl, and tape it to their faces in front of their ears. When the hair was dry, the tape pulled off the skin quickly without any pain or harm. Thankfully, so, since my mother put it on her nipples.
Dress Shopping
My mother always took me dress shopping with her in Milwaukee. She couldn’t buy a dress without me. She would enter the dressing room and come out with a new dress. “How does this one look, Tony?” she would ask. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I can’t even remember what I told her. I just wanted to go up the escalator and see the toy department after she bought a dress. If she was happy, she might buy me something, only if she was pleased.
It Finally Sinks In
In 1969, I came home from school and asked the woman who gave birth to me (aka Mother) when we would eat supper. She bent down, looked me square in the face, and said, “Where is it written that I have to cook for you?” That’s when I knew she was liberated.
Crackers
Some days after Mother informed me that she would not cook for me anymore, I made myself peanut butter and jelly on saltine crackers. I left everything on the counter in the kitchen since I was planning to make some more later in the evening. It was the only thing I knew how to cook at that time.
Mother came home, saw everything on the counter, and yelled at me for making a mess in the kitchen. When I tried to tell her that I was going to make some more later, she slapped me on the face.
My Mother
This is my mother, the mother I adopted for myself.
Julia taught me how to cook after my liberated “mother” refused to cook for the family. My father assigned cooking as my job. I was seven years old.
Kindergarten
Muskego Elementary School
I went to kindergarten there. Mrs. White was my teacher.
I found it difficult to make friends in school, especially with the boys. Mother was the cause of that.
Listen to Your Mom
“But Mom, they are tights.”
“I know they are tights, Tony, but blue is a boy’s color.”
“Okay, Mom,” I said, but I still wondered why there wasn’t a boy on the package, only two girls.
I was confused in kindergarten. I thought I was a boy, but only the girls wore tights. Mother dressed me in tights at home before I went to kindergarten. Seeing the girls wearing tights, I thought I could be a girl. So, I followed the girls into their bathroom. A couple of girls told the teacher. I have no memory of what happened next. All I know is that they boys wouldn’t play with me.
Pink Tape
Here it is. I found it! This is the 1960s pink tape that Mother used to put over her nipples when not wearing a bra. It sold on eBay for $39. Somewhere, someplace, someone’s nipples are happy.
I shouldn’t assume that. The manufacturer intended the tape to be used on the hair. Perhaps Mother was the only woman who didn’t use it according to instructions.
Curly Top
I learned that in the 1920s, women made spit curls on their foreheads, too. Even Superman had a curl on his forehead.
I can bet The Man of Steel didn’t use the pink nipple tape my mother used.
That’s Italian
Actually, the French Chef wasn’t my first cooking teacher. Chef Boyardee taught me before Julia Child. I remember opening those big cans, which was a little tricky since they were too tall for the electric can opener. I needed to run the opener around the top of the can as it sat on the counter, which was not an easy task.
I heated the ravioli, spaghetti, or beefaroni in a saucepan on the stove exactly as I saw in the TV commercial and in a magazine, although I did not wear a white apron and a chef’s hat.
That’s an Opener
Wow! Chef Boyardee now has pull-tab can tops.
Where were they when I was seven years old and struggled with an electric can opener?
Pass the Soy Sauce
At the age of eight, my cooking took on an international flair when I expanded my culinary repertoire to Chinese food. The tall cans of Chung King food really were two small cans taped together. These two small cans I could open easily with the short electric can opener. Chinese cooking became a breeze.
I poured the Chinese food over chow mein noodles since I hadn’t mastered boiling rice yet.
Boiling water was still in Mother’s domain.
Monster Mash?
“Artificial colors, artificial flavors, too much sugar.” That was Mother’s reply any time I asked her to buy me some cereal, but that excluded almost EVERY cereal in the 1970s. She failed to buy eggs, bacon, or anything else she would be required to cook for us.
Tired of being hungry, I learned how to use the toaster and put butter or jelly on the toast. When finished, I made sure I cleaned up my mess to avoid getting slapped in the face again.
It was a Singer
At the age of eight, Mother sat me down and taught me how to use a sewing machine. When she finished, she said, “Your father has some clothes that need to be mended. Now that’s your job.”
After getting my finger stabbed a few times with the needle, I got the hang of it.
When I left home for college, a Chinese tailor moved to town, and my father brought his business there. A Chinese restaurant also opened, and my father didn’t eat chow mein in a can again. Unfortunately for him, an Olive Garden never came to town, and he still needed Chef Boyardee. By then, microwaves were invented, which prevented his inevitable starvation. He found the microwave with the turn dial timer easy to use.
Although my father was not inclined to operate electrical appliances, he found hunger to be a strong motivator.
Chicken a la Mother
Mother did cook occasionally. This usually after my father’s strong insistence while using vocabulary he learned in the navy and not in Sunday school. Mother would drop a whole chicken in a pot of water without any vegetables or spices, put it on the stove, and turn on the burner. She then sat in the living room and watched TV. From her throne on the couch, she said, “Tony, watch the food and turn off the stove when it is done.”
When we ate, my father picked up a drumstick, and the slimy, unflavored skin and the watery, tasteless meat fell off the bone. After eating Mother’s signature chicken a few times, my father told me to do ALL the cooking from then on and keep Mother out of the kitchen.
Looking back, I think that EXACTLY was her plan.
Foiled Again
Before I got the hang of cooking, I would heat up TV dinners. This was prior to the invention of microwaves. The aluminum trays cooked in the oven for over 45 minutes, or during Gilligan’s Island and half of The Brady Bunch, as I would time it after school. I needed to read the instructions carefully because if I didn’t remove the aluminum foil from the brownies and french fries, they would turn out mushy.
If you are wondering, yes, I cooked for Mother, and yes, she ate what I cooked. The best part about TV dinners was that Mother couldn’t critique my cooking while she ate the food, that is, if I remembered to remove the foil..
The Avocado Dip and Slip
When we moved to Marinette, the house had a new avocado green stove. Mother screamed. She hated the stove only because it was green. The refrigerator was white, and there was no dishwasher. You would think she would complain about having no dishwasher, but that wasn’t the case. She didn’t need one. She already made my father do the dishes.
Mother refused to cook on a green stove and demanded a different color. My father said as long as that one works, he’s not buying a new stove.
The next day my father came home and found the green stove on the basement floor broken in pieces. Mother pushed it down the steps, all by her own power. Surprising since she often claimed she was too tired to cook. A few days later, a new stove was delivered to our house, and it wasn’t avocado green.
The House Salad
Along with the Chef Boyardee canned entre, I also chopped up some lettuce with a knife to make a side salad. Bags of prechopped lettuce were unheard of in 1969. When Mother saw me chopping, she said, “You’re not supposed to chop lettuce with a knife. You’re supposed to tear it with your hands.”
Although Mother was liberated enough not to cook food, she wasn’t too liberated and still could be a food critic.
The Seven Layer Salad (aka 24-Hour Salad) was popular when I began my cooking term as a child, but I never made one. If I couldn’t even make the first layer right, I didn’t want to hear six more layers of Mother’s criticism.
Some Kind of Show
Mother had a bookcase in the kitchen three feet wide and seven feet tall, which contained the hundreds of cookbooks that she collected. With this display, she gave the false impression to visitors that she actually cooked. This book was one from her hoard.
We rarely had visitors, but if we did, Mother would put on a blouse.
Some Have Class
I also watched Graham Kerr The Galloping Gourmet.
He was suave, sophisticated, and British, kind of a James Bond in the kitchen. He influenced me with not just cooking but with style, something that lacked in my home.
When serving the TV dinners in the aluminum trays, I would arrange the table with the salads, some rolls, and those extra dishes in an attractive, pleasing manner. Mother usually grabbed her TV dinner and headed to her throne in the living room. She didn’t want to miss her shows, none of which were Julia Child or The Galloping Gourmet.
The Show Must Go on
Mother owned the top-of-the-line Kitchenaid mixer, which is used by professional chefs. It was awkward, heavy, weighing over 30 pounds, and difficult to operate, but it looked good sitting there on the kitchen counter, mostly unused.
And as you can suspect, it wasn’t avocado green. It was yellow.
Boiling Mad
Before the invention of the microwave oven, there was one way to cook frozen food, boil a bag. These were mostly entries like beef stew or meat with gravy.
Mother should have dropped a couple of these bags in the pot of water instead of the chicken. Then maybe my father wouldn’t have assigned ALL the cooking duties to me.
Is She Nuts?
Mother was a big fan of Euell Gibbons and everything hippie in the 1960s and 1970s. Gibbons advocated eating plants from nature and ate parts of a pine tree on TV.
Here, Gibbons is eating high-bush cranberries with Grape-Nuts cereal. After seeing this commercial on TV, Mother bought Grape-Nuts, the only cereal we were allowed to eat. That wasn’t so terrible, but it was out of step with my peers at the time.
Gibbons also liked to eat cattails, and since we had none on our shoreline along “The Bay” of Green Bay, she drove us someplace where we found cattails and instructed us to pull them up and eat the roots.
Mother also planted high bush cranberry bushes in our yard, with me digging and doing most of the work. In later years when they bore fruit, she never harvested any. She said she would rather leave the berries for the birds.
The Prize is Right?
This is the first contestant, the first game, and the first prizes on the first episode of The New Price is Right in 1972.
This woman won the car and not the avocado green stove.
If Mother had been there and won the stove instead of the car, she would have pushed it off the stage, smashing it to the floor.
Mother and Her Secret
Within these walls lies the secret that my mother kept from me all those years.
A Model Mother
Mother attended Patricia Stevens modeling school downtown in Milwaukee. This was prior to becoming pregnant with me, her firstborn child. Although she wore stylish clothing after my birth, she didn’t return to the modeling school.
A Designing Woman
Mother enjoyed the fashions of Rudi Gernreich, a well-known designer in the 1960s. Here he is standing in the middle, surrounded by several of his designs, which included the costume for Catwoman on the original TV series Batman.Mother enjoyed the fashions of Rudi Gernreich, a well-known designer in the 1960s. Here he is standing in the middle, surrounded by several of his designs, which included the costume for Catwoman on the original TV series Batman.
Mother was obviously influenced by this famous and provocative design by Rudi Gernreich, the monokini.
Here is Rudi Gernreich instructing one of his models before a fashion show. I self-censored the photo because when I posted it on Facebook, the automatic AI (artificial “intelligence”) threatened to delete my page for the use of the N-word, and I don’t mean that racially demeaning word. It was a word beginning with N for the part of the anatomy directly under the pink X in the photo.
If a word is electronically banned by a text filter, sooner or later, THEY will develop a photo filter that will ban anything that looks like a nipple.
This photo was published in Life magazine and distributed across the country in the 1960s. Here we are 60 years later, and Facebook is worried about nipples?
Mother owned this exact same outfit, which is a jumpsuit. There is an old Super-8 movie in a box somewhere of her wearing it while vacuuming the carpet. This was in 1969 when she was only partially liberated. A short time later, she assigned the vacuuming duties to my father. He was happy to take on the job since I was now cooking for the family and didn’t have time to clean.
Mother bought this Rudi Gernreich design at a boutique on the east side of Milwaukee near the Pfister Hotel. She told my father she purchased it at a resale shop.
No Hangups
Mother didn’t stop sewing and hang up the Singer for good when she taught me to sew. She only quit mending for my father. She continued sewing for herself, creating several outfits, all with pants and no skirts and dresses.
This outfit turned heads with its popping colors. It almost glowed in the dark and did glow near black lights when she took me to hippie head shops back in the summers of love in Madison, Wisconsin.
She made this jumpsuit in a 1960s psychedelic paisley print of hot pink, fluorescent orange, and ultra lime green. I’m convinced the wall on Laugh-In inspired the fabric designer.
This photo is old, and it doesn’t illustrate the vibrant colors of Mother’s outfit. She wore it all the time, and it eventually wore out. She then made a second one exactly like it with the same fabric.
Back to Nature
Here is Euell Gibbons picking cattails to eat for breakfast. Although we lived on the shore, cattails never grew on our beach. If my mother knew where to buy some, she would have had me help plant some there. She never thought of bringing some cattail roots home to transplant when we took a field trip to find some. Driving around finding cattails was apparently easier for her than cooking a meal. Instead of bringing some cattail roots home, she told us to eat all of them right there. Being hungry, we did.
That’s Not Really Candy
When we lived in Muskego, I remember looking out the back window and watching my mother sunbathing in a bikini on the dock while drinking a Diet Rite Cola. In the kitchen drawer, she kept Ayds diet candy. She told me not to eat them. They were not candy but medicine for her.
I didn’t eat any, but a few years later, when she refused to cook for us, I wanted to eat some. I was terribly hungry, and according to the packaging, they would have helped.
Back Breaking Work
Here is Mother in our yard planting something. I did most of the digging and pushing the wheelbarrow for her since she suffered from a bad back and was often in pain. In addition to the high-bush cranberries, we planted raspberries, blackberries, and gooseberries. When we were hungry, she told us to go outside and eat the berries and pine trees like Euell Gibbons. Our yard was a buffet of food. As you can see, there were abundant pine trees.
Strangely enough, Mother never complained about a painful back when taking Karate lessons. She eventually earned her red belt, the belt only one away from black.
A Rare Moment
Here is Mother in a rare moment when she smiled. This photo is from when she visited her father, and he took the picture. I don’t know if the arm around me was a show of affection or if it was only staged for the photo. She is wearing another of her fashion creations.
I believe I just earned my learner’s permit for driving, and I drove us the 200 miles to her father’s house. If so, she would be happy enough to touch me. She would never drive herself as she found the expressway in Milwaukee too scary.
On second thought, this photo was taken a couple of years before I started to drive. My aunt was in the picture, but I cropped her out. We took the bus to Kenosha to visit my aunt, and she drove us to my grandfather’s house in Lake Geneva.
It was when I went to the courthouse to gain my permanent driver’s license that I learned Mother’s deep secret.
A Memorable Moment
Mother hung a framed Polaroid photo of me nursing from her breast on the living room wall. She was going to show it to my girlfriend when I brought her “home.” She also wanted to remember daily me suckling her breast. Strangely enough, she didn’t have a photo of my brother nursing. Perhaps it was because he never stopped.
Actually, Mother said I was a good baby and was gentle with her nipples. My younger brother was rough. He clamped down on her nipples and pulled hard. Me treating Mother’s nipples gentle was the only compliment I remember her giving me as a child, and my brother being rough was the only negative thing she said about him his whole life.
The first time my wife saw the inside of my parent’s house and the picture of me nursing was after we were married. We eloped.
Grandpa Visiting Us in Muskego
Mother was the president of the Future Homemakers of America during her senior year in high school. After graduating, she attended Stout State College, majoring in home economics. She only attended one semester. She later married, and I was born. This is my maternal grandfather sitting with me in our backyard in Muskego.
Fortunately for my grandfather, he visited us before Mother became liberated. She actually cooked for him and us some real food, and it wasn’t her signature boiled chicken a la Mother.
My grandfather never visited us after we moved up north a few years later, 200 miles away from his home.
At that point, Mother was fully liberated and totally gave up cooking. I don’t know if my grandfather would have liked foraging for cattails or eating high-bush cranberries in the yard. Our non-avocado green stove had a large enough oven to fit more than four TV dinners if we used two racks. That would have been the meal if he didn’t want to eat the backyard buffet, a la Euel Gibbons.
I am sure Mother would have put the TV dinners in the oven herself instead of me. She wouldn’t risk her father eating a soggy brownie and limp French fries.
If my grandfather tore his shirt while visiting us up north, he would have been out of luck. Mother gave up sewing and mending for anyone except herself, and my father’s Chinese tailor didn’t move into town until after my grandfather died.
It was good for Mother that we took the southbound bus to visit my grandfather instead of him visiting us. She allowed me to drive after I earned my license. That, however, wasn’t good for her. Once I gained my license, her big secret was out.
The Importance of Being in Sync
Chilling outside smoking a Sweet.
Enjoying a beautiful late summer evening while I listen to the Packers beat the Bears.
This reminds me of my father. He always listened to the “Packer Backers” on the radio and turned off the sound on the TV.
My father didn’t enjoy hearing the TV announcers give complimentary remarks to the opposing team, especially if they were winning. This prompted him to expel some of his navy words.
On the Packer Radio Network, the announcers were Packer focused. They viewed everything and expressed every comment from the perspective of the Packers.
Back then, the TV and radio were in sync. That was in the days before the Janet Jackson wardrobe mishap, during the live broadcast of the Super Bowl halftime show.
Now there is a video delay of a few minutes, so if any tantalizing body parts accidentally become exposed, the TV engineers can edit it out.
If Janet had used pink nipple tape like my mother, none of this would have happened. The Packers’ audio and video would still be in perfect sync.
It All Started Here, from the Beginning.
I was breastfed as a baby in the early 1960s. This was highly unusual at the time. Most women used bottles and formula to feed their babies, following the recommendations in the books written by baby doctors of the era. Bottles and nipples needed to be washed and sterilized by boiling. Formula needed to be cooked on the stove and cooled down so the baby’s mouth wouldn’t burn.
My father used to get me for my night feedings. He would take me from my crib and bring me to Mother sleeping in bed. She continued to sleep while I nursed. When I was done, my father brought me back to my crib. Mother slept through the whole thing.
Oh, my God. Mother didn’t even want to cook for me when I was a baby. She didn’t want the trouble of making a bottle of formula for me to drink. It was easier for her, or my father when she slept, to simply give me a breast.
