Daily Excerpt: Forget the Goal, The Journey Counts (Stites) - Absorbing the 20s (3)

Excerpt from Forget the Goal, the Journey Counts (Stites) Absorbing the ‘20s! (3) Now, in 1932, about the best medicine around was the herb echinacea. The few pharmaceutical companies were more ethical then. They hadn’t yet figured out that they could stir up almost any chemical, say it would cure whatever, and people would buy it. In those days, we used a lot of petroleum jelly, caster oil, mercurochrome, and iodine and had every torn-up hand or foot wrapped up with the phrase, “Be a man.” We always liked mercurochrome because it didn’t sting, whereas iodine did, although everything healed when we used iodine. Also, our cuts and breaks healed mainly because we ate a lot of vegetables and fruit because they were cheap and because we rarely ate red meat, which was expensive. We hardly ate any candy or sweet stuff at all because “It is a waste of hard-earned money” (Dad). We didn’t get sick much because food wasn’t grown with chemicals. We didn’t know any...