October 1943

Be a Wartime Foster Daddy

AN ARTICLE in this issue, "If Daddy's Gone to War" (page 14), carries a message to men. There is an overtone in it --an overtone revealing a burden that the war has placed on the shoulders of mothers who are trying bravely to be both father and mother to their children while Daddy is away. It makes us realize that the boys in these war-separated families are being their their right to a man's companionship and example.

LATE TIPS ON Wartime Living

Supplies of garden hose and tools will still be short in 1944, so keep what you have in good condition.

Start Your 1944 Garden Now

Do two things: First, spread a one-to four-inch layer of humus over your whole garden plot. Humus is a soil conditioner and helps make food in the soil available to the plants. It can be any kind of rotted or partially rotted green stuff, or strawy manures. Along with this, add any phosphates or other slow-acting plant foods you have. Then spade or plow your ground and leave it rough so winter can mellow it.

Safeguard Your Furniture While It Hibernates

IT'S a lot more fun keeping cozy in a few rooms than shivering in a lot of them. You learned that last winter. You closed one or more rooms if you could spare them from family living, conserving fuel and keeping healthier and more comfortable. This year you may be doing more of it. How should you care for furnishings left in completely closed rooms? Here are helps for housing your furniture happily while it hibernates.

If Daddy's Gone to War

I'VE had letters like these from many of you. Your husband, the children's beloved Daddy, is in the service. You're left alone, with the many problems of managing a home and children, and under war difficulties.

EASY ON YOUR EYES!

TEN-YEAR-OLD Tommy Purvis broke a store window, a big plate-glass one, while playing hooky. He was a perpetual problem child if ever there was one, irritable, rebellious, and stubborn.

Gifts Service People Want

GIFTS for military people? It's "week-before-Christmas" for you now if they're overseas! What would they like most? We asked the Service men who were and are a part of our own Meredith Publishing Company family. And consulted our girls in uniform. We asked:

Group Your Flowers Better

GARDENERS are like cooks and tailors. From identical cloth, one tailor will make you a suit that drapes elegantly, another tailor a suit that looks like an unmade bed. From identical flour and shortening, one cook will make a piecrust that melts in your mouth, another cook a crust that bends your fork.

PREVIEWS

Don't get excited until you see it, but there's a chance you'll buy your week's supply of fresh milk at the grocery one of these days-- in a package of milk cubes. The cubes, now being experimented with, are dry, wrapped, and can be kept several weeks in your refrigerator. Drop a cube in a glass of water and there's your milk-- fresh, whole milk again, without that "condensed" taste of milk from cans.

SEW A Color Song FOR YOUR BEDROOM

NEVER whipped up a curtain or a bedspread in your life? Think nothing of it! If you can follow simple directions and sew a straight seam (by machine or even by hand), you can make these bedroom beauties. Because they're "ensembled," they'll help you weave even furniture odds and ends into a lovely harmony. And because they're joyously colorful, they'll give a lift to your mousiest room and a lilt to your soul!

Make Room for More Rooms

MANY a room is leading a double life these war days-- and a mighty interesting life, to boot! With thousands of war workers seeking quarters and servicemen needing stopover rooms when away from camp, we're being asked to "move over," "double up," and share our homes.

Ginny Simms' Home Hikes Your Spirits

IT'S a joyous little house, all white trimmed in green, that shines out thru giant walnut trees at the end of a winding pathway out in Northridge, California. It's the home of Ginny Simms, a famous young lady indeed, whose enchanting voice you've heard over the air, in motion pictures, and on hundreds of records from zany to classic.

Last-Minute Heat-Savers

See How Planting Revived It

ELEVEN summers ago Dale Warren bought a place down Plymouth way in eastern Massachusetts. Left to its own devices for many years, it had acquired that barren, forlorn appearance common to properties in which there is no personal interest. But the buildings were in good condition.

A Home With Guest Appeal!

SOME houses have it and some don't-- that certain something that makes guests want to come back again and again. It's a quality that you'll want in the home you build when the war's over with the War Savings Bonds you are buying today. There's a home out on Kenilworth Avenue in Oak Park, Illinois, that has this special kind of guest appeal.

Build Top-Health Meals in Spite of Shortages

HOW can you keep your family healthy if shortages land smack in the middle of foods you've always thought of as musts for health? The trick lies in learning which foods equal which, nutritionally, then ringing in the just-as-goods to pinch-hit for scarce old stand-bys. On these handy pages you'll find the facts you need for this important sleight of hand.

KLEENEX!

Baby's First Furniture--YOU CAN MAKE IT

DON'T WORRY if your local stores are all sold out of bassinets, mattresses, bathinettes, and other equipment for the tiny baby. Maternity Center, New York City, has developed baby furniture for the first few months which you, Daddy, can make yourself, and ideas for bedding which you, Mom, can work out with inexpensive materials.

LOOK WHAT YOU CAY DO WITH A Cheese Box

Help for the Help-Less

DEAR SIS: So your perfect treasure has taken up welding! No wonder you feel you've lost your right arm. Hilda was certainly a superior maid.

Keep Your Metals Gleaming

What's Your Score, Foods Gardener?

NOW that the season is over, let's kind of back off and look at our mistakes so we won't make them again next year. Did you plant too much of one thing, not enough of another? Were you eating out of your garden as early a you could have? Did you waste a lot of time cultivating just for looks? Did you get second and third crops out of some rows?

Anti-Freeze Your Garden

WINTER protection for our cars is much simpler than for our gardens. If you're getting a Ford, Buick, Packard, or Chevrolet ready to start off at the very first punch of the starter button, you change oil and grease, tune the motor, and fill up with anti-freeze. The procedure is standard.

Shift-Busy Johnnys Hold "Open House"

IT ALL started when Johnny walked into the dining-room at 6 o'clock one evening, grinning sheepishly as he asked for "ham and" for breakfast, while the family was just putting away the evening meal. Six o'clock wartime might mean dinner to the rest of them, but to Johnny, fresh from a good day's sleep after a hard night's work on his new shift, it was breakfast.

Sternbergia ... the Quick Bloomer

The Man Next Door

Faced by a long separation, the b. w. vows she can wait for her husband a year or two without going to pieces if a Greek girl named Penelope could wait 10 years for Ulysses.

THE DIARY of a Plain Dirt Gardener

Oct. 1 Be it hereby known, in case you missed last month's installment of these unimportant memoirs, that I'm stranded in Room 18 of University Hospital on the campus of our think factory, getting alone just fine, thank you. after a major operation.

KEEP YOUR Paintbrushes Clean

GOOD paintbrushes are getting scarce, so take extra care of those you have now. Imported hog bristle, the best kind, is no longer available, of course, and inferior substitutes are being used in any new ones you can buy.

Plant and Transplant Now

IN MAKING a new planting set out the key plants first. These are the ones that are large, the ones that hide objectionable views, the ones that fill in the corners, or fit in between the windows. These plant positions are fixed, and suitable types must be in certain places.

Refinish Old Picture Frames

"BUT good-looking picture frames are so beastly expensive!" That was my lament, too, before I discovered that rickety, two-for-a-song picture frames could actually be turned into beauties any room would be proud to own! It takes only a few odds and ends of paint, varnish, and patching materials.

You're Elected Paper Warden

Gather Now for Winter Cheer

New Finish--New Floors

WOOD floors, when newly finished, are beautiful to behold-- but every few seasons, unless they're well-treated, they tend to relax to a scratched, grimy state that balks any other decorative gesture in the same room until they're restored to their own youthful bloom.

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Young Mothers' Exchange

Adequate help seems out for the duration. So I'm asking my friends, who wish to make my imminent baby a gift, to give him a morning or afternoon. The idea is that they'll come and bathe and feed him, wash his clothes, make the formula, and tidy the house.

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You Can Help

ON THE shore of Long Island, where I live in the summer, the 16 soldiers assigned to beach patrol were quartered in a damp and dismal room last summer, without diversions of any kind.

It's News to Me!