Grandma's notes to self

I've going through the trunks lately, finding all kinds of family mementos, and a lot of it is just the mementos of someone like my maternal grandmother. She kept spiral notebooks and endless pieces of paper to remind her of things (my mother did the same thing). Grandma (and my mother took after her in this respect too) was pretty much a sucker for every advertisement that came along whether it was pitched by a TV commercial, snake-oil salesman, a televangelist, the Farmer's Almanac or the Sears and Roebuck Catalog. Here's a cure for sores that apparently didn't work well enough to become popular.

Cure sores
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Octagan soap
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Mix with sugar

Ask Etheline about them water pills of what she ordered for me so posed to be cheaper if I can get them as I need them is trouble
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700 Club. Pray for my legs & the big crick in my neck. Channel 3 I think.
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Help in night call if need help 5493351
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My sores on my legs is called stasis-Deratitis

Stasis *dermatitis* is what she meant, of course. She always had some really interesting spelling. My favorites were in a letter where she wrote about translers and santa peas (tarantulas and centipedes), but she was from rural Oklahoma and "translers" was how she pronounced it.

Etheline was her niece who had a sister named Ivaline (their brother was named Otha but went also by his middle name so he was always called Otha Wayne), but the two girls went by the nicknames "Ecky" and "Toad", respectively. Etheline is the name of a Celtic Mythological figure [more info], a daughter of a demon who gave birth to a demon-slayer, but I'm really not sure if her parents knew that. They probably just liked the name.

I addition to falling for ads and snake oil, she fell for the TV preachers. There were notes everywhere throughout her spiral notebooks about the 700 Club and the various things that they could help her with (having a more direct connection to God I guess). Grandpa was no better, he would send money to Billy Graham. For him it was more about having his name on the right roster than getting a special healing for his donation.

80
15
60 yr sence I was babtized
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Sweet milk [and some quantities]
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I want my neck crick healed
I want the leg trouble & artharitest Be healed
& my arthulitism
700 club channel 3
Harrisburg Ill.,
my trouble on legs, knees down to stasis deratitis

She called it sweet milk to distinguish it from buttermilk (also called "clabbered milk"), which had to be on the table at every meal for Grandpa. Once, when he found his buttermilk missing from the table set for a meal, he kicked the table over, food, dishes and all. Sometimes that good old Southern Baptist provided his own brand of fire and brimstone hell.