Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories.
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Sometime in the spring of 2022, all of the TV news shows were talking about the shortage of baby formula in the United States. They said there were only a few producers of the formula in the country, and the largest producer had experienced a production problem. Thus the shortage.
As time went on, the situation only got worse, and then there were stories about flying jet planes full of baby formula to the US from Germany. There were a lot of American babies who were lactose intolerant, and they desperately needed the baby formula. I followed the news reports daily, for I was faced with a feeding problem myself when I was born in 1932.
I was born at home in our house on West Fifth Street. Our family doctor, P. D. Longbrake, brought me into the world. There was also a lady who provided nursing care for new mothers and their babies. Her last name was Daily, but I don’t recall her first name.
On the very first day, she took care of my mother’s needs and then went to the kitchen to prepare for my feeding. She got a bottle of milk from our icebox. This was long before milk was homogenized, so she shook it well, and warmed it on our kitchen stove. Then she gave the bottle to my mother to feed me.
I must have been hungry, for according to Nurse Daily, I wolfed the milk down quickly. It pleased my mother to see that her newborn son had such a good appetite. But unfortunately, I wasn’t able to keep it down. The nurse suggested that I be fed with smaller, more frequent feedings. Over the next few days they experimented with the size and frequency of the feedings, but nothing seemed to work.
Dr. Longbrake recommended that we switch from cow’s milk to goat’s milk. He told my dad about a local farmer who raised goats, and my dad made a quick trip to that farm. He came back with several bottles of goat’s milk, and Nurse Daily immediately prepared it for me.
I got my first taste of goat’s milk that morning, and I seemed to like it just as much as the cow’s milk. But It produced the same problems as the cow’s milk. My parents were worried. Instead of gaining weight, I was losing weight.
Then Dr. Longbrake came up with a solution that surprised everyone. He told the nurse to take a quart of cow’s milk from the ice box and set it on the kitchen table to bring it to room temperature. He told her to leave it there until the milk soured. Then she should heat it, and feed it to me. That’s right, he told her to feed me sour milk. That sounded wacky, but by golly it worked.
I drank nothing but sour milk for the first year or two of my life. I suppose that might explain some of the odd quirks I have today.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at williamboyd514@gmail.com