I knew from experience that castor oil has an after taste, but when I wrote a column some months ago about that vile cure-all, I didn’t fully understand the number of memories I was jogging. Reader mail poured in and it would seem everybody has a castor oil story and every mother had a different chaser trying to disguise the taste, but it seems they never could deal with the after taste. A burp remains a burp.
They say old age is not for sissies and my generation proved that "old" adage. We survived the Great Depression, the Great War and castor oil. From the mail I received, I feel fortunate that my mother only had castor oil in her medicine cabinet. Some poor souls had mothers with dual ammunition including a bottle of cod liver oil, which from the vivid memories of my readers was just as awful tasting.
Jackie Cauble of Roseburg made me feel like an antique survivor. Jackie is an antique dealer specializing in old magazines among other memorabilia of the past.
Would you believe she found a May 1930 issue of The Farm Journal with a cover showing a young boy pouring a generous spoonful of castor oil. The boy is grimacing as he pours and his sad eyed puppy who had a stomach ache from eating forbidden chocolate sadly awaits the dosage. The magazine itself is almost as old as I am.
Interestingly, the artist’s rendition of the castor oil ritual includes a cork stopper for the bottle, proving a point I made in my original column that there was no need for child proof medicine caps. The sight of the castor oil bottle was enough to keep the child out of harm’s way.
Jackie gave me the magazine which had been originally sent to subscriber A.A. Meyer of Oswego, Ore. Of course she thought of me because of the castor oil cover art. What she didn’t know is how much fun I got out of reading the farm news in that 1930 magazine.
The editor of Farm Journal, a magazine that dates back to the 1800s, was then Arthur H. Jenkins who wrote in this edition about the Great Depression which had begun in October 1929 and how fortunate farmers were:
"It seems to me that Our Folks who live on good, productive farms should be pretty well satisfied with themselves right now. Agriculture has troubles, to be sure, and farm incomes do not always come up to the level of ‘a good living and 10%,’ which is the goal. But farming on the whole is ‘getting by’ nicely, and it does not have to contend with the unemployment that caused so many of the cities so much distress last winter. The farm family has a home, it has a job, it has an income. It is in the safest and surest business on earth."
I don’t know how many farmers who lived through those tough times would agree with that Polly Anna statement, but indeed farmers had food on the table — food they produced themselves.
In some respects, the stories reminded me of stories of my day in the sun as a newspaper reporter.
Under a column called Farmers of Tomorrow, there was an item about Edgar Grimes of Harrisburg, Ore. who won first prize in the Farm Journal 4-H Leadership contest in 1928 and Alex Cruickshank of McMinnivlle, Ore. who won the 1927 contest. "Both are now studying agriculture at Oregon State College." the item reported and pictured Edgar shaking hands with Dean Cordley of Oregon State College.
I’d be willing to wager both Grimes and Cruickshank had a dose or two of castor oil to make them healthy enough to become Farmers of Tomorrow.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)