More Sack Lunches: "Cornbread for Whitebread"

From the journel of Ernest Robert Tigner, my grandfather, father of my mother Pearl Marie

"Dad was ninteen or twenty years old. He was downtown (Topeka Kansas) one day seeing what was going on, and a Salvation Army band was playing on the street corner. Dad got interested in the speaker.... Eventually my dad converted to the Salvation Army and he took off preaching in Kansas. One night in the audience was a beautiful young lady sitting there listening to him preach. After the services he met her, shook hands with her and passed the time of day. The next day this young woman was back...To make a long story short the young lady was my mother...Corn was a big crop at the time, since they could not raise much wheat around there, so the diet at my mother,s home was mostly connbread. Whitebread was a luxury when they could get the flower to make it.

All the kids in school packed their lunches, and cornbread was the staple item in their lunchpails. One day a new family moved in which was quite well-to-do. Lo and behold, the new girl, when she went to get her lunch, had sandwiches made out of white bread.

She looked over and saw my mother and the other girls eating cornbread, and she asked, "what is that?" And they told her. She traded bread with them, and the white bread was very delicious. They had quite a time trading cornbread for whitebread."