Aprons Tell Tales of Days Gone By

PALO - Some are frilly, some are plain, some can shade or hold off rain.

Some are silly, some dry tears, some can fold or hold back fears.

One by one, Naomi Yates, shows her aprons and knows the dates.

With 80 examples, each unique, she talks about each ones mystique.

"I had a little apron," says Naomi, 88, recalling her time on the farm before she was three. "It was red. And it had little marks that were red that looked like peppermint candy. I loved that apron."

But, one day, Naomi couldn't find it. As she looked around, she discovered that her grandfather had cut two eye holes in the apron and had fashioned it like a bandanna around a horse's head to keep it cool.

"Needless to say I cried," Naomi says. "I cried a lot of tears over that apron."

But, she learned something else that day that has stayed with her for 85 years. Aprons often have more than one use.

As Naomi talks about her aprons, her daughter, Ruth Kibbie, takes them from one of two old suitcases, then folds them up again for safe keeping.

When they reach the bonnet apron, one with snap closures to be folded up into a garden hat, Ruth, 64, graciously models it.

"Some of these," Ruth laughs, "you can tell had to belong to small women like mother. They wouldn't fit me."

Most of Naomi's aprons come from the family. The one Ruth wore earlier in the day was made by the mother of Howard Yates, her father who married Naomi in 1942. Another was made from grocery string saved from packages of meat and peanut butter. Still another was worn by Howard during World War II when he was a cook in the Navy.

"He never cooked before or after," Ruth chuckles.

"He couldn't even fry an egg," Ruth smiles.

But Howard became the love of Naomi's eye. The first house they rented in Palo cost $6 a month plus $1 for the garage. They eventually farmed in the Palo area and he didn't retired until he was 75. Naomi continued to collect her aprons.

She wears one of her favorites, a black border print apron that had been her grandmother Maude Little's apron. She shows one made from a bleached flour sack made by her other grandmother, Elizabeth "Mate" Moubry.

"Her husband called her Mate instead of wife," Naomi says. "Everybody called her Mate."

In those days, particularly on the farm, aprons were a necessity. They kept a limited wardrobe clean, could be pulled up to carry corncobs for the heating stove or to gather eggs from the chicken house. They could be as plain as a burlap sack or fancy cross-stitch works of art. Some had pockets for kitchen utensils or stashing the nails, marbles and precious rocks removed from pants pockets before doing the wash.

When Naomi would talk about her aprons to kids at Seminole Valley Farm west of Cedar Rapids, she'd ask if their mothers wore aprons.

"Not many raised their hands," she says. "But their fathers wore aprons. Probably to barbecue."

Times have certainly changed. But, in the good old days, nothing comforted a child more than grandma and her apron.

"I'd sit on grandma's lap and she'd cover me up with her apron," Naomi recalls with a gleam in her eye. "I got a fascination with aprons."