And although he never buttered his own biscuits or poured his own coffee, he gave us the spark we needed to get up at 3 in the morning, pile into a 1935 Chevy and two Tin Lizzies and, loaded with eggs, milk, coffee, ham, green onions, bell peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, roastin' ears, laid-out biscuit dough, graham-crackers-for-the-kids, and sugar-tit-for-the-baby, lard, butter, grapes, yellow cake, beer, ice, worms, poles, string, buckets, skillets, tablecloths, plates, U.S. Steel Company forks, and try to get to Turkeyfoot Lake before the fish woke up.
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Sugar tit is a folk name for a baby pacifier, or dummy, that was once commonly made and used in North America and Britain. It was made by placing a spoonful of sugar, or honey, in a small patch of clean cloth, then gathering the cloth around the sugar and twisting it to form a bulb. The bulb was then secured by twine or a rubber band. The baby's saliva would slowly dissolve the sugar in the bulb.
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In use the exposed outfolded fabric could give the appearance of a flower in the baby's mouth. David Ransel quotes a Russian study by Dr. N. E. Kushev while discussing a similar home-made cloth-and-food pacifier called a soska; there, the term "flower" as used colloquially by mothers, refers to a bloom of mold in the child's mouth caused by decay of the contents. David Ransel "Village Mothers: three generations of change in Russia and Tataria", 28-29 As early as 1802 a German physician, Christian Struve, described the sugar tit as "one of the most revolting customs".
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