Geneva Alice Lively [4119]

  General Notes:

Mom was a good seamstress and she made all of our clothes. Sometime around 1946 or 1947, right after the war, Mom ordered a quarter or a half of a parachute from a government surplus magazine. She said it only cost a couple of dollars. She took the parachute and made dresses for Juanita, Jerri and Carolee. Juanita wore hers for her graduation in 1949. Jerri's had a ruffle around the top and bottom and it had red and white checks on the outside edge of the ruffle. Carolee's had little V shaped inserts around the knee area that had ruffles and on the ruffles there was gold embroidery thread. This is according to Carolee's memory. Juanita said her's was a real pretty two piece suit (skirt and jacket with a flared peplum on the back). Howard said that Mom took the good part of the girls feed sack dresses after they were worn out and made boxer shorts for the boys. After the boxer shorts wore out she used the good parts to make quilt pieces. She also used the leftover dress parts for quilts. What wasn't used for clothes and quilts was used to make rag rugs (made by Grandma Almeda Cadle because she had a loom to weave the rugs on). What wasn't suitable to use for that, was used to make rag curlers for the girls hair. The girls also used the metal strips from the tops of bags of coffee to curl their hair. They said it gave a firmer curl than the rags did. Mae and Melvin said that on the enclosed back porch at Leef's house, they had a salon chair that they used to give perms with. Mae got a perm for graduation, but was not supposed to tell anyone she got it there. It was the type of chair that used electricity going to rods on the end of a wire and the hair was rolled and electricity was turned on, which made the hair curl.

Information given to Donna Cadle Witt by Geneva Lively Cadle on 3/15/01:

Everyone in the country had bedbugs and once you got them, you could not get rid of them. All you could do was try to control them. She said that from the time she could remember, they always had bed bugs. They used to take a large turkey feather and dip it in kerosene and go along the cracks in the walls as well as the corners in the mattresses to try to get rid of them, but they would always come back. Finally, someone had told Mom that if she got rid of the bats in the attic, it might help with the bedbug problem. Mom and the boys took a big ladder and put it to the outside window to the attic and Mom climbed up on it and she filled a "potato bug sprayer" full of spray and sprayed the attic full of bug spray and killed the bats, hoping that would keep the bats from carrying in bugs. Whether it was the bats carrying in the bedbugs or not, after she sprayed the bats, and killed out the bedbugs that were already in the house, she never had any more problems with bedbugs!!!!!!

Mom said when she and Aunt Opal were young girls, Grandma Lively cut out material for each of them to make a dress and Mom took deeper seams in her pretty blue dress and it ended up too small and she had to trade and take Aunt Opal's tan one instead. Mom said she always felt the "urge" to sew from the first time she can remember and sewed from the time she began to make doll clothes until she finally had to quit sewing about a year or so ago. She made everything from dolls to sheets, quilts, coats, underwear and formal gowns.

Geneva married Cecil Clark Cadle [21656] [MRIN: 7280], son of William Cadle [21657] and Almeda Richmond [21658], on 2 Dec 1927 in Ironton, Ohio. (Cecil Clark Cadle [21656] was born on 24 May 1902 in Raleigh County, West Virginia and died on 20 Dec 1988 in Youngstown, Ohio.)