Entertainment on the Farm

Farm families had very little time for fun and almost never took vacations.  Their chores lasted from
sunrise to sunset.  But after dark the family could gather around the lamp on the kitchen table or in the
parlor to chat, sing, play cards or listen to the phonograph or radio. 

Phonograph players were powered by a hand crank.  Radios ran on batteries and they were expensive,
so listening to the radio was a special event.  Early radios had headphones, so only one person could
listen at a time.  Eventually speakers let the whole family hear their favorite programs.

“We had this old-fashioned Victrola record player.  The records were about six-seven inches long and
they were round (cylinders) and we had to crank it up.  After a while we had the flat records but we still
had to crank it up because we didn’t have electricity.”

Ann Hardie
“We did a lot of singing.  A lot of evenings if you didn’t know what else to do, we’d sit and play our guitars
and sing.”

Delores Goetsch Rusch

“We didn’t have a radio until I went out working and bought one. It was a battery radio. I bought it when I
was 15 or 16 (1930). It was rounded, almost like a dome shape with dials and a big bunch of batteries
that went with it. One of my favorite radio shows was Fibber McGee and Molly. My dad had his favorite
ones he would listen to. It really became a family affair to sit around and listen to the radio.”

Helen Mosser
“I remember my sister she bought the first battery radio and that radio had 3 C batteries, one A battery
and one B battery. It was a Silvertone. That was back in 1933 or ’34. We had to do our school work first
and if we did we had about 15 minutes or at the most half an hour to listen to the radio. Most of it was
“Gangbusters”.

Melvin Klinger
“The radio we had had batteries in it. When the battery would fade out we would sit there with our ears
real close to the radio so we could hear that program.”

Marion Matz