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THE COLBORNE EXPRESS, COLBORNE, ONT. JAN. 19, 1956 TABLE TALKS dat^ Andrews: Like to try some Swedish dishes? The following recipes are for a few favorites in the land of Sweden, all having the advantage of being simple to prepare, yet really tasty. I hope you'll like them as much as my family did. SWEDISH PANCAKES 2 eggs 1 cup flour 2 cups milk 1 teaspoon salt Beat the eggs well, add flour, milk and salt. Beat again. Let stand two hours before using. Cook on hot greased griddle, using one tablespoon of batter for each cake and turning them Only once. Serve with syrup or cranberry sauce. COFFEE CAKE 1 cup sugar Vi cup butter 2 eggs separated % cup sweet milk cups flour teaspoon baking powder teaspoon salt Cream sugar and butter and add the beaten yolks. Sift flour ■with baking powder and salt and add alternately with the milk. Last, fold in the stiffly beaten whites and mix gently. Put into a pan and pour melted butter On top. Sprinkle witih sugar and cinnamon and a few chopped nuts. Bake 45 minutes at 350°. Thinly sliced apples may be pressed into the cake before spynkling with the sugarand cinnamon. FRUIT SOUP V% pound prunes 1 cup seeded raisins ' pound dried apricots 3 apples, diced 1 lemon, sliced LOSING HIS "SIGHT" - "Fay", a seeing-eye dog, takes her master out for the last time. Fay, herself, is going blind. She's been guiding Indiana State Sen. Tom Hasbrook, blinded in World War 11, for 12 years. Now she's retiring, and Hashbrook must train a new "eye" dog. 1 orange, sliced 1 cup sugar 1 stick cinnamon tablespoons tapioca Soak dried foods, tapioca, sugar, cinnamon, orange, and lemon in water to cover, overnight. In the morning add apples, more water and cook until "ruit is soft. It is equally delicious served hot or cold. RICE PUDDING 4 tablespoons rice Vi cup sugar 1 quart milk, heated Salt to taste 1 stick cinnamon Pour hot milk into a buttered baking dish. Add other ingredients and stir well. Place in a slow oven and bake 3 to 4 hours. Stir in the brown top that forms, several times during the baking. This makes the pudding delicious. Let brown the last half hour. Serve warm or cold with cream. POTATO FLOUR CAKE Separate 8 eggs Beat whites stiff and add 2 cups sugar 8 tablespoons potato flour sifted witih 2 teaspoons baking powder Fold in well-beaten egg yolks last. Mix lightly and bake 10 to 15 minutes in a 350° oven. Cover and fill with whipped cream. Fresh peaches, cut fine, may be placed between the layers or any other fruit you fancy. Makes 2 layers. Found His Penny Should you ever meet genial Tom Perry he'll probably tell you the strenge-but-true story of his war penny. It begins when Tom was sheltering from German artillery fire in the cellar of a deserted farm house near Pecq, just over the French border in Belgium. He chanced to put his" hand jn his pocket and found it contained just One penny, a King George V 1914 penny. Acting on impulse, he put it in a chink in the cellar wall. Along came the 1918 Armistice, he was demobbed and returned home to a job in a Warwickshire office. Then one day he thought of that penny and was suddenly curious to know whether it was still where he had placed it. Years passed, but Tom didn't forget the penny. He went for a holiday on the Continent in 1954 and spent quite a lot of time and money trying to locate that old farmhouse. He failed, but decided to have another go in 1955. Back on the Continent he tramped many more miles in a further search for the farmhouse. Then he suddenly noticed a familiar landmark, and ten minutes later he had found the farmhouse. It wasn't difficult to persuade the friendly but surprised farmer to let him visit the cellar. There, sure enough, Tom found the penny exactly where he had left it. Said Tom, now fifty-seven: "The farmer listened goggle-eyed when I told him the story. Then we celebrated, with homebrewed beer." BIRD-FEEDING HOBBY PAYS OFF - C. R. Likins, almost 75 years old, retired in 1950 as an aircraft inspector and has since parlayed his hobby into a new business -- building "scientific" bird feeders. He's shown above inspecting some of his colorful "restaurants" in his workshop. In action now from Canada to Texas, Likin's feeders consist of citrus, tomato juice, pickle and lard cans for containers and cut-up coat hangers for "working parts." Metal "cone" awnings protect Jsirds from the rain. His feeders hold from a pint to as much as 50 pounds of food. He says birds he feeds eat up to 40 pounds of food a week. THEY PROMISE 1956 WILL BE LOVELY-Whether you pick the sweet dream at left or the queen of sophistication at right, 1956 is going to be lovely to watch -- on calendars, that is. They're typical beauties of Shaw»-Barton calendar manufacturers, who are responsible for 3 great share of the 125 million calendars distributed by businessmen throughout the nation this year. What Pioneer Looked Like ? Sod _ Houses use"" to In reading descriptions of life of the prairies in the days of the pioneers we often find "sod houses" mentioned. But very few of us have any idea of what these houses really were--how they were built and what they were like to live in. So the following report from The Christian Science Minitor should give us a better idea of how many Canadians of an earlier generation "made do with what they had." Twice on a trip across Kansas a tourist may see examples now of how thousands and thousands of pioneers in Canada and the United States lived before wooden dwellings became common on the treeless prairies. Until railroads and other transportation brought lumber within his reach, the homesteader and his family frequently lived in a "sod house." In the northwest corner of Kansas, about 50 miles from the Colorado boundary and a little nearer the Nebraska line, a group of residents have constructed a full-size sod house* illustrate that, type of dwell It has proved to tourist attraction. Driving from the east, a traveller will get his first introduction to the sod house at Topeka, the state capital, where the Kansas State Historical Society has prepared in its museum an exhibit of the interior of a sod house of the 1880's as one of a series of "period rooms." That the museum, considering the weight on its floors, has not undertaken a full reproduction of the sod house is underi standable when it is noted that the walls and roof of the house in Coltjy contain an estimated 89 tons of earth besides the lumber in door and window frames and roof poles. Sod houses were made by breaking long strips of soil with a spade or sod plow and cutting it into bricks two or three feet long, about one foot thick. In these the earth was held together by the thickly matted roots of the prairie grass. The blocks were laid with staggered joints, sod side down, and cracks were filled with clay. The roof was sheathed with brush, prairie grass, and a layer of sod and clay. In the case of the exhibit at Topeka the inside walls are papered with old newspapers, following a widespread practice which, as Miss Joan Foth, assistant director of the museum, remarks, "represented a somewhat futile effort to keep the dirt and mud from seeping into the house." The newspapers used for this wall covering are all from the historical society's extensive collection of papers of the 1870's and '80's. The Colby house interior is just a bit more fancy in that it has a plastered wall. The plaster was applied directly to the sod without any lath after the excess grass was singed off with a torch. The window and door frames and rafters were fastened to the sod by long, hand-whittled wooden nails. This sod house, an authentic restoration of a typical pioneer house, was built on the fairgrounds at Colby in 1953. It replaced a smaller one built there 20 years earlier by actual homesteaders as a headquarters for their reunions during county fairs. Under the homestead law the minimum requirement in order to establish ownership of land was a dwelling 12 feet square with a door and window. The Topeka exhibit room measures 16 by 12 and the house at Colby is somewhat larger. It stands entirely above ground, whereas some "soddies" were of a semi-dugout type. Again attempting to be true ot history, both-the Topeka and the Colby examples are filled with a great amount of paraphernalia. - ~ .. . £ "Since a family ate, slept and lived in this one room," says Miss Foth, "it is ■ fairly cluttered." ^^r^p* The historical society's room includes a table of rough, unfinished walnut once used in a Kansas pioneer home, chairs that were brought west in a covered wagon, a buffalo hide for a floor rug, blanket rolls, wash-stand, candles and oil lamps, and kitchen utensils made by hand. The Colby house likewise contains a cast iron cookstove, fuel box, wash board, crank-type churn, butter molds, kraut cutter, old guns, powder horns, ox shoes, a rocking chair, an organ, and a soapstone griddle that required no grease to fry pancakes. Although a sod house lacked many of the refinements of later frame dwellings, old-timers recall that it had a number of advantages and was not as uncomfortable as some may suppose. x Its walls represented a highly effective type of insulation, so that it was cool in summer and relatively warm in winter. The earth floor made housekeeping difficult, but when a terrifying prairie fire swept over the country it was a refuge that would- If is thought that more than a million sod-built houses on dotted the western plains frc Canada to Mexico, but so far Mr. Kear knows, only 11 Of the remain. Such a house cou'.z built in a few days if all we well, but unless carefully tend it might not last more than fi or 10 years. Sitting at home, having a c j evening, were two spinster s ters. Suddenly one looked from the paper she was read: and commented: "There's article here telling of the de; of a woman's third iXLi'za She has had all of therr. c mated." "Isn't that life for you?" s; the other. "Some of us ca even get one husband, wh others have husbands to bur PLAYS A BEAUTY - Using descriptions supplied by Homer in "The Iliad," Warner Brothers has selected Rossana Podesfa to portray "the most beautiful woman in the world." The Italian actress will star in "Helen of Troy." She is currently doubling with Alan Ladd in "Santiago". Grand Salute To Theatre's First Lady New York -- (NEA) -- When Helen Hayes first heard some talk that theater people were going to honor her for her 50 years of acting, she was shocked. "I couldn't believe it," she says. "It just didn't seem like 50 years. I don't keep a diary or records or a scrapbook, and I'd never kept track of the years. It made me feel old." In fact, her husband, playwright Charles MacArthur, at first opposed the plans for a "Command Performance" of theater people to highlight the anniversary celebration. He thought it would make Helen Hayes "feel decrepit." "But I don't feel decrepit," she says, with the laugh that has charmed theater audiences since 1905. And she doesn't look decrepit. She looks pretty much like what she is -- a' charming 55-year-old wife and mother, who just happens tc be one of the finest actresses the American stage has produced. She started acting as a child in her native Washington, D.C. Then she was seen by Lewis Fields, one of New York's leading producers of that era. And by the time she was a teenager, she was a star She managed to make the transition from adolescence to maturity painlessly, and for the last two decades has been almost universally recognized as the First Lady of the Stage. Looking back on her half-century of acting, Helen Hayes thinks she's had a pretty full and exciting career. •'I have no unfulfilled ambitions," she says. "I've done about everything I wanted to -- more than I dreamed I would do. I've had a few cracks at Shakespeare, with varying results. I've made movies, and won an Oscar. I have no regrets." Miss Hayes, as you might expect from a woman who doesn't keep scrapbooks, says, "i never look back over my shoulder -- I prefer to look ahead." And, from that vantage point, she thinks the theater is in healthy shape at the moment. "Of course it has dwindled in quantity," she says, "but the quality is better than it was. My contemporaries -- people like Lynn Fontainne and Katharine Cornell and Judith Anderson -- we used to wonder when young actresses would come along and elbow us out of the way, as we-elbowed the older stars out. For years, there was no one. "But look now -- fine actresses like Julie Harris and that young Susan Strassberg and young actors like Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. And fine playwrights like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and Robert Anderson. The theater is very strong today " And there's television. She thinks it's wonderful--and particularly good as a training ground for young performers. "It's much harder to get started in the theater today, because there is less theater. And there used to be stock companies, too. But now television gives a young actor a chance to try different kinds of parts. The only trouble is TV always wants new faces -- outside «of Maria Riva and Eva Marie Saint, they haven't dveloped any stars. An actor can be washed up on TV at 25." Helen Hayes' career has been a newsy one, in a non-scandalous sort of way. She was closely involved with the actors' strike that established Actors' Equity as a potent theatrical force. And there was the famous "Act of God" baby, her daughter, whose birth she maintained was an."Act of God" and therefore she should be released from an existing run-of-play contract. Years-later, there was the tragic death of this child from polio. But mostly it's her talent that's made her famous. Over the years, she's run the histrionic gamut from comedy to tragedy, playedvparts as varied as Pollyanna and Cleopatra, ap- peared with leading men like John Drew, William Gillette, Alfred Lunt, Sidney Blackmer, Philip Merivale, Maurice Evans, and, in the movies, Ronald Col-man, Clark Gable, Ramor. No-varro, Robert Montgomery and Gary Cooper. Probably her best-known characterizations were in J'Dear Brutus," "Bab" (her first starring part), "To "the Ladies," "She Stoops to Ccnquer," Maggie in "What Every Woman Knows," "Mary of Scotland," "Victoria Regina," "Harriet" and her recent appearance in "The Skin of Our Teeth" in Paris and New York and on television. When Barry Hyams, the press agent for "The Skin ol Our Teeth," unearthed the fact that her 50th theatrical birthda; was nearing and the plans tor the celebration were proposed, Helen Hayes says she wasn't sure what her reaction would be. "I would vacillate," she says, "between wanting- tc do something great on Broadway to show my appreciation, and a desire to go somewhere and rest." She's decided to resi. But her idea of rest is four weeks in Florida, during which she'll spend.one week aoting in "The Glass Menagerie" in Miami. Then she'll come back to on a new • play -- "Cock-a-Doodle Daisy," written by her husband and Anita Loos. After 50 years, there's no reason to expect she'll quit now. SALUTE TO HER CAREER: Alone on the bare stage of the Helen Hayes Theatre in New York, actress Helen Hayes reeds words of congratulations after theatre was named in her hcrfor.