"Memories of a Boy from West Crick"
As written by Ken Ostrum
Foreword
I recently read an article, that indicated one of the best things
a person can leave their children and grandchildren, in perpetuity, is a
record of their life, especially the younger years, before their children were
a part of their lives. Thousands of stories
are passed down by family members over the years but no matter how many stories
are heard, only a few are actually retained by the younger generations and those
stories certainly will change with each telling. Younger people, with all the modern
technologies, have no concept as to what it was like to grow up several
generations before their own births.
As a case in point for recording memories, I saw an article that
said: “Back in 1937, the Folklore
Commission of Ireland began a project to collect folklore by asking the
children of
While researching family history, I often wished there were more
personally written records from my ancestors.
It would be nice to know some of the details of their everyday
life. Most of the stories I have in my
family records, relate to adult years of the relatives and are usually written
by other people. There is no way of
knowing exactly how accurate the family stories are and in fact, evens the
anecdotes I write herein, about my own life, are subject to the fallacies of
human memory retention. Separating fact
from what I perceive to be the truth can be difficult. Taking all this into
consideration, I still feel there is a justifiable reason for writing these
memories.
By the way, you may see odd words throughout these writings such
as “evens”. (“Evens” was one of my
colloquialisms I thought was normal vocabulary). “Crick” is used instead of “Creek”
because that is how we pronounce it, evens today. There may be other words as
well so if you see something wrong, it isn’t a mistake, it’s because that’s how
we lived in those days.
Yeah, right!
A Brief Ostrum Family History
The small town of
In 1838 he purchased a farm of two acres, in the town of Summit, NY from Byrum Palmer, his father-in-law. (Photo shows the site of the farm in the 1990’s)
Garrit and Dorcas raised a family of 12 plus three
boys who died young. Garrit died of
cholera in 1854 at the age of 51 after returning from a visit to his son,
Daniel, in
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| Byron Ostrum |
In 1849, their oldest son, Byron, my Great Grandfather,
at the ripe old age of 20, left home to make his way to
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| Sam and Alzina |
Byron’s first son, Samuel, my Grandfather,
married Alzina Garrison in 1879 and also moved to
When Samuel moved to
Ten years later, Byron and Amelia, with their five
sons, Samuel, George, Isaac, Raymond, and James came to join Neuman in
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| Byron Ostrum farm Bryan Hill, 2006 |
Fred Ostrum
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Fred Ostrum |
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Fred Ostrum - Age 23 |
Fred (Dad) lived on Grandpa Sam’s farm until he was 31 years old. He went to work at about the age of 12, driving teams of horses for the next 15 years for lumbermen in the area. He also worked at out-of-town lumbering sites.
Mom and Dad’s First Home
So, Mom and Dad, with their two children, rented a place of their own at the Climax, near what is now The Buttonwood Motel on
From 1925-1927, Dad took a job managing
Warner’s farm in North Creek. The family
lived there for about a year and a half then returned to their home on West
Crick.
Later, Dad brought home wagonloads of
wood that had been dynamite boxes and with the help of family, friends, and
neighbors, they built a large addition onto the home. New rooms included a parlor, a small bedroom
downstairs, plus three bedrooms and a hall upstairs.
Mom the Carpenter
Mom always said if she had been a boy,
she would have been a carpenter. Over
the years, she reworked a lot of the rooms by adding or changing
partitions. She rebuilt the kitchen
cabinets, knocked a hole in the wall and installed shadowbox type shelves
between the kitchen and dining room. She
added on a freezer room where part of the side porch had been. She also added a sun porch with four large
windows. This room became their favorite
place to sit.
Of course, Mom would inveigle others
into helping her with her construction ideas.
Dad said he was never sure where things would be when he came home from
work. In the late 40’s, at the age of 82, we caught Mom out on the roof,
tarring some shingles.
Mom and Dad added an apartment on the
second floor above the kitchen and dining room;
Brother Bob and his wife, Ruth, plus children, Sandy and Violet May,
lived there until 1950 when they moved to Martinsville, Indiana. Bob and Ruth were welcome company for me because
all the rest of my siblings had married and left to make their homes in other
places.
I have a couple of stories that
happened during Bob and Ruth’s stay. I
was young, 14, and naïve in 1946 prior to when Violet May was born. One day I
came past the door of the apartment and saw Ruth ironing. I noticed she had a new pretty dress on. Trying to be a nice polite brother-in-law, I told
her I thought the dress looked very nice on her. She said, “Thanks, this is a maternity dress
I pulled out of storage.” I went on down
the stairs and suddenly had a thought. I
came back up and said, “Ruth, I didn’t know you went to college.” When she got through laughing, she explained,
“I said it is a maternity dress, not a fraternity dress.” I didn’t evens know what a maternity dress
was. Those were the days of darkness for me. I’m still in the dark on a lot of
those things.
Another event occurred when Violet was
an infant. I was down in the living room
and heard a loud thump upstairs and heard Ruth hollering for help. I was the
only one there so I ran up to the apartment, opened their door and asked if she
was OK. She shouted from their front
room, “Don’t you dare come in here.”
Turns out she was rocking the baby and went over backwards onto the
floor, was stuck between the chair and the wall, her nightgown above her waist
(she later told me) and she couldn’t pull it down. She still insisted I couldn’t come in until
finally she worked into a position where she could get “decent” and told me to
come in to get Violet so she could get up.
The Cellar
In the late 30’s, Dad and the older
boys dug out a large area under the West Crick home. It was meant to be a basement but we always
referred to it as “The Cellar”. I can
just remember Dad sending the boys down into the cellar to shovel out the dirt
and clay he had loosened up. On several
occasions, when I went down in the cellar, I would see Mel sitting in the
wheelbarrow, reading.
Dad could handle a pick and shovel with
the best of them but in addition, his experience with dynamite allowed him to
place just enough charge to loosen the clay without disturbing things upstairs
---- usually! He would loosen the clay
in the evening with a small blast, leaving the boys to load the wheelbarrow and
take it outside while he was at work the next day.
An indoor set of stairs was built to
get to the cellar from the bath room off the living room. It was a great day in about 1938 when that
small room was converted to an indoor bathroom to replace the outhouse. There was evens a “secret” opening from the
downstairs back bedroom through a clothes closet, into the new bathroom.
The cellar was used to store potatoes, apples, onions and lots of hand-canned items. Mom would can tomatoes, beans, peas, beets, peaches, jams and jellies, venison, and chicken.
Pork was kept in a salt brine barrel before refrigeration was available. After the pork was used up, at least one time, Dad rigged a piece of greased wood that tipped when a rodent
Our Times – 1930’s – 1940’s
“It was the best of Times, it was the worst of Times; It was the age of
War, it was the age of Foolishness; It was the Season of Darkness, it was the Season
of Light; We had Everything before us, we had Nothing before us; It was the Winter
of Despair, it was the Spring of Hope. –
A rip-off of Charles Dickens’s first line in -
A Tail of Two Cities.
In Emporium, as well as many other
places in the
In the midst of all these troubling
times, another child was born to Fred and Violet Ostrum . . . . . Me.
Here is an excerpt from my
autobiography, “The First Seventeen Years Are The Hardest”. I wrote this in
1949 for an English Class project. I got an “A” of course.
“The First Seventeen Years Are The Hardest”
Mom made some of our clothes but mostly
I wore hand-me-downs from my brothers. I
actually looked forward to growing into some of the neat stuff my brothers
had. At my young age, I thought they
were swell. That was strange because I didn’t evens think about what I
wore. I was too busy playing to worry
about what clothes I put on. I would
wear whatever Mom gave me for school. I
started in knickers but they were out of style
before I entered second grade.Me in 1941
Me in my flyers helmet
I had a favorite flyer’s helmet with wool flaps I would wear most of the time. Clothes and toys were used over and over. The saying was, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” That’s exactly what we tried to do; only it seemed normal because everyone else was doing it.
A Dad’s Work is Never Done
Dad was a steady worker at home. For any projects around the outside of the
house there was never any question but he would do it himself or with help he
would get from his children, friends and relatives. He built his own barns, built the stone
walls, fell trees, cut the wood for wood stoves, did all plowing, cultivating,
a never ending list of projects. He cut
stone to install huge pieces for the many steps leading up to the house. Dad - Cutting Stone
Through all of this, Dad was a farmer as well, keeping stock, such as chickens, horses, pigs, goats, and cows, and raising the usual corn, beans, tomatoes, peas, potatoes (lots of potatoes) and other daily foods. As I have said, we never went hungry.
Paying jobs of any kind were scarce
during the depression but Dad somehow found a way to get one. Work for him changed many times over the
years. Fred with WPA
He was a lumberman, driving teams of horses from the time he was 11 or 12 years old, worked at local dynamite plants, a railroader, a forester, a look-out on the fire tower on Bryan Hill, a member of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), delivered mail, drove bread truck, worked on the highway with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), worked at Cameron Manufacturing for a period of time.
Finally, during WWII, he worked at
Sylvania Electric. His last job there
was cleaning filament machines from which he retired in 1958 at the age of
75. The powder he breathed during
cleaning probably added to an early death evens though he was 82 when he died
in 1964.Fred's retirement from Sylvania
Every one in our family, in-laws and
out-laws, worked at
Hobos During the Depression and After
“A hobo is a person who travels to find
work.
A
tramp is a person who travels and won’t work.
A
bum is a person who won’t travel or work.”
We had all types of these come through West
Crick. The main road ran right in front
of our house at that time. Now it is called the “
We didn’t usually know any details
about an individual’s reasons for traveling around and begging. I’m sure it wasn’t always just because he
didn’t have a job. No matter how young
these guys were, as a kid, I looked on them as “older” people but then again,
at my age, anyone over eighteen seemed “old”. Reading about these people in
later years, it turns out more than one quarter million teenagers also were
living on the road in America in the Thirties; many criss-crossing the country
by illegally hopping freight trains. These guys would show up mostly during the
summer. They left the trains before they
got into town, to evade rail police, and walked up and down the roads, stopping
at any likely place to get a meal. They
often marked homes with an “X” or other identifying means, to tell others where
the good places were. I know we had a
chalked “X” at the bottom of our steps on several occasions, since Mom was a
soft touch. Sometimes they were given a
meal and sent on their way, other times they would do a job and receive a meal
as payment.
Life As A Child at Home
Although in my early years my brothers and sisters were still at home, I was too young to remember them as playmates, except for Sam. I remember fighting with my brothers (maybe I should say, “Arguing”). Never anything serious except once when one of my friends and I got into a stone throwing episode with Sam and Keith. I threw one stone that reached Sam just as he turned to look at me and struck him right in the middle of the forehead. That scared the heck out of me because of all the blood, and did not sit well with Mom, either. I knew I was in trouble when she fixed him up but it ended with all of us in trouble because all three of us were throwing stones. That was a real “no-no.”
My sisters, Rose and Glady, were patsies. As the youngest, I could do no wrong as far as they were concerned, evens on the occasions of their marriages. It was early 1937 when Rose told me she was going to marry Burt Griffith and move away. I was only five but I guess I didn’t like the idea because when Burt came to visit right after that, he walked up the steps to the porch. I was standing at the top of the steps and hit him on the head with a ball-peen hammer. I told him, “Leave my sister alone!” Then when Glady and Jim Miller and I were sitting on the front steps in April of 1941, Jim gave Glady a diamond ring. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant but Glady said, “It means we are getting married and I’m going to go live with Jim”. I hollered at both of them, “I hope he has to go in the war!” And he did, too.
On the other hand, my brothers didn’t always look at me the way my sisters did. They knew I had my sisters wrapped around my little finger. Still, I realize now I was spoiled by all of them, being I was the youngest.
Playmates
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George Horning |
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| Dick Umbenhauer |
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| Bob Rosetti |
“Now back in my day” -----as the saying goes, “things weren’t the same as they are now.” In my day, we rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rang the bell, or sometimes,
just walked in and talked to anyone there.
That’s just what we did as playmates.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how
to deal with it all. Very little was
organized by anyone but us kids.
Playmates in my immediate area included Bob Rosette and his younger brother, Joe; Keith Pye, Bill Ackman, Jim Hornung, along with his twin brothers, Barney and Ed.
There was George Horning, Bob, Jack and Dick Umbenhauer; John and Joe the Blinzler twins; Gene Towner; Charlie (Joe) Nellis and the other Nellis kids, plus others I’m sure I have missed.
I ran into one of the Nellis boys,
literally. It may have been Jim. He was
younger than I and when I was riding my bike on the road he jumped in front of
me to make me stop but I couldn’t stop in time.
My front fender hit him in the head and he bled like a “stuck pig.” He
ended up at the doctor’s but recovered.
On the female playmate side, the
Morrison girls lived next door. Joan was
near my age, Betty was a little older but they both were early playmates.Joe, Marlene, Bob, Esther, Eva
Esther and
Marlene Rosette, Bob’s sisters were other ones who joined the crowd. We played House, just for something to do, in
an old converted chicken coop made into a playhouse at the Morrison’s. I have to admit, those times taught me the basic
differences between the sexes, physical and mental.
Speaking of Morrisons, I remember Roy
Morrison, their father, was the first
dead person I had ever seen. He died, and
was lying on their couch where they hadn’t covered him up before I went
in. Kinda creepy.
Grandpa Clarence Morrison
Grandpa Clarence Morrison made his home
in another converted chicken coop behind the Morrison home.
He was fun to talk to. Grandpa’s favorite saying was, “Someday these hills will come tumbling down and the world will be flattened by God’s wrath and everyone left will be destroyed.”
Fun, Games and Other Stupid Happenings
At a young age, I would go into our dug-out cellar to play all by myself. There was enough dirt above the stone foundation to allow me to play with small metal cars and trucks. I built roads and dirt garages, coal mines, dirt dumping areas, plus any other thing I could think of. I could entertain myself for hours.
Sam was only four years older than I but he started working at Straub’s Chicken farm at a very young age around eleven or twelve, so I was home alone with Mom a lot of the time.
One of the best places to play was at “The Car”. This was the name the family gave to the area west of our home that was the family trash deposit for years before being covered with dirt dug out of our cellar.
After it was completely filled in, Dad and my brothers used it as a turn-around and parked their cars there. Eventually, a couple of old car skeletons were permanently parked there.
One of the old cars, Melvin had refitted with a gravity-fed, five-gallon gas tank and made other changes to use it as a tractor. For a long time it just sat there and wouldn’t run. But then Dad fixed it and put it to good use as a tractor.
Another skeleton car was great for us kids to use for “Cops and Robbers”. This one was a four-door touring type car very much like gangsters would use. Several of the neighborhood kids and I could play “Cops and Robbers” for a long time with nothing more than that old car, homemade machine guns, and our imaginations.
After war was declared it became our “War tank” until scrap metal was needed for the War effort.
We also played “Cowboys
and Indians”. We would set a
50-gallon drum on a wheelbarrow turned upside down, put a broom in the bunghole
for the head of the horse, a piece of rope for a tail and an old blanket for a
saddle. Belts with pistols in their
holsters, homemade bows with arrows, and maybe a tomahawk and hunting
knives, plus head feathers made from rooster tail feathers, would be enough to
keep us occupied for hours. Pretend horse drawn by me
for granddaughter's school project.
Normally getting everything together was as much fun as playing the games and probably took us longer than the games themselves.
We played “Hopscotch”, “Mother May I”, “Ring around the Rosie”, “Stoplight”, “
We had no organized sports then. Neighborhood kids on West Crick would get together to play various types of baseball games. We had one game where we had a pitcher and a batter. All the rest of the guys played in the field. Whoever caught the ball had to roll it in from where they caught it, to try to hit the bat that the batter had laid down at the plate. If you hit the bat you became the batter and the previous batter became the pitcher. Of course we also played regular baseball when we could get enough kids together. There was always something we could find to do in our spare time as young people. If I ever said to mom, “There’s nothing to do”, she would always reply, “You can mildew.” Great help!
Another favorite game for the neighborhood gang was “Kick the Can”. Someone would be designated as “It”. Everyone else would hide, then try to sneak in and kick the can before getting caught by the one who was “It”. Normally this was a night game. If there was a chance the one who was “it” couldn’t catch anyone then he could always give up and holler, “All ye, all ye, outs in free.”
“Red Rover”
could get pretty physical, sometimes. In
this game two sides lined up holding hands.
Then someone from one of the teams would holler, “Red Rover, Red Rover,
send Kenny (or whoever) right over. I
would leave my team and try to break through the other team. If I succeeded then some one from that team
had to go back to my team with me. If I
didn’t break through then I had to join the team.
“King of the Hill” was also quite physical as one person stood on high ground and the others tried to knock him off.
Summers meant garden chores and other
work around the house.
Gardening was a part of our lives. Dad would plow one or sometimes two areas
near our house and another large area two miles up West Crick on the flat below
the house Gladys and Jim built some years later. The land belonged to Uncle Clint and Aunt
Belle Ostrum. The gardens at our home
had stones, which had to be removed every year. I swore the stones replenished
themselves over the winter. Dad built a
stone boat, which was a wooden platform with two pieces of 4’ or 6’ tree trunks
as runners. We harnessed our horse to
the boat, loaded it with stones and skid the boat to an area where we could
pile the stones somewhere out of the way.
Mom, Dad, and any kids home at the time
would cultivate the crops with a hand cultivator that looked like a miniature
plow, or we would hoe them by hand.
Generally we grew our own corn, peas, beans, tomatoes, carrots, beets,
lettuce and cabbage and other things we needed to provide our food.
Potatoes were grown on Aunt Belle’s flat. Picking up the potatoes was a major job. It had to be done by hand. Of course, any sort of gardening was a job I didn’t like. The other kids didn’t seem to mind and they all enjoyed it the rest of their lives. I was the different one. Maybe I was too lazy for that kind of hobby.. Dad did the plowing using our horse but sometimes asked the Hornungs to do it with a team to save time. I rode our horse up to Aunt Belle’s field while Dad drove the pickup. Then we started using the tractor Mel built from an old car. I remember once, soon after we started using the tractor, we were at the potato field when a train was coming up the valley. Dad hollered to Sam to go keep the horse calm in case the train whistled. Sam was halfway there before he realized we had the tractor and Dad was pulling a joke on him. We went back to using a horse after the tractor became unmanageable, that is, it wouldn’t run anymore.
We found out how much work she did when she was laid up with a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis and we had to take over her work.
I don’t remember what everyone else did but I learned how to do the washing and wringing out of clothes. I hung them on the line and ironed those that needed it. I evens ran the mangle, which was a steam type drum for doing flat things, such as sheets and pillow cases. It was designed to iron shirts, too but Mom wanted me to do those with a hand electric iron.
Fortunately, many prayers resulted in Mom recovering from the arthritis after quite a few months. What a relief!
Our Farm Animals
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| The first Chicken House |
Summer Meant Haying
We helped Uncle Jim Ostrum hay and pick
up potatoes on his farm on Whittemore Hill.
We picked apples in the huge Hielmann orchard across the road and Dad
was allowed to keep some to store in our cellar over winter for our own
use. We did some work for others who
were Dad’s or other family friends.
We could have just watched the haying
being done by Hornungs on the flat in front of our house, but somehow Dad knew
when it was time to send us down to help them load the hay wagons. We didn’t
get paid for our work, either.
Now haying was an art at that time, none
of the fancy machines they use today to complete a field in a few hours. Someone from the Hornung gang would mow the
hay using a horse-drawn mower. Timing
was of the essence because you wanted to mow the hay, let it lay for a period
of time to dry, and then gather it in. Sunshine and fair days were hoped for to
assure a dry crop. Stowing damp hay in
the barn could lead to spontaneous combustion and a disaster. If damp weather dictated, the field of hay
was turned with pitchforks until it was dry enough and safe to form haycocks to
await the hayrack and the trip to the barn.
Today, hay is gathered into bound
bales, and loaded onto a truck. The hay
is then stacked in piles in a storage area.
In those more primitive times, a hay rake got everything going after the
mowed hay was dry. The rake driver sat on a contraption with perhaps fifty
curved steel tines; holding the lines in one hand and the lever handle in the
other, he would rake hay until an acceptable amount was gathered and then he
tripped the lever to leave the start of a windrow. Long windrows were formed
and then formed into haycocks to await the hayrack, a long, specially built
wagon pulled by a large team of horses.
A crew of four to six men (or in our case, men and boys) equipped with
pitchforks would be ready to go; two or three men on the ground pitched the hay
onto the wagon as it traveled from haycock to haycock. The teamster and a
helper positioned the hay on the wagon to insure a full load. I was rather slight for pitching hay up to
the wagon so I would usually be the one to climb on board to help position the
hay on the wagon. That meant a lot of
moving hay around but mostly I had fun jumping all over the load to make it
compact.
When the wagon was loaded to capacity,
we headed for the barn.
Near Disaster in the Haymow
With hay in the mow, playing in Hornung’s haymow was a great way to end a day after helping them load hay. Sometimes we climbed up into the rafters to jump into the hay. It seemed innocent enough.
We never thought about the fact we might land
on the rafter supports hidden by the hay.
We could have broken bones or evens broken our backs if we should happen
to hit one.
Then I had a narrow escape.
To set the scene: We are playing a game of hide-and-seek at the
haymow.
The Hornung family is at lunch break
after we loaded the hay wagon from the fields. The helpers are bored and need a
game of Hide-and-Seek to occupy our time. After a while, I’m looking for a
better place to hide from the guys.
Suddenly the figurative lamp bulb went off in my head. “I know”, I thought to my stupid self; “I’ll
hide in the wagon full of hay.” Dumb
idea! It would have been a good place
except for the fact that just as I got into position in the wagon; the Hornungs
picked that very time to return from lunch to unload the wagon. They don’t have
a clue I’m hiding in there and I don’t know they’re back. When they dropped the
huge 100 lb hayfork from a height of about 20 feet, it missed me by
inches. It really scared me; actually it
scared the heck out of me. I was out of that wagon in a flash! Max and George Hornung’s faces turned pale
--- then they got mad! They chased me
half way home and I didn’t come back for quite a long time.
Summers Meant going Swimming
Most of the time, we went to Straub’s chicken farm to swim. This was before the State changed the course of West Crick.
Originally, before the new Route 120 was put in, West Crick ran on the North side of the railroad tracks and right through Straub’s farm. Straub had a very nice pool area in the Crick that was very deep.
At least it was well over my head when I was six or seven years old. They used the pond to clean their chicken cages.
We were there one day, before
I knew how to swim and as I was wading, I accidentally stepped off the shallow edge into the deeper part. Straub’s Chicken Farm - 1950
Down I went. I remember hollering, “HELP” under water.
Glady was with us and saw me struggling. She jumped in and was able to pull me out
before I drowned.
In later years we swam at the
Mom had a seashell sitting by the
door at all times. When she blew the
seashell we had to go home. If we didn’t
hear it, then we were further away than was allowed.
There were no excuses.
Thinking about the swimming hole, I mentioned to an old friend, recently that I also got a little education there the day she was sunbathing in a bikini.
When she got up, she forgot she had
unfastened her top and it dropped off. I was still pretty young at the time but
it made an impression on me, nonetheless.
Summer Meant Playing at the Neighbors.
As kids, we would get together at each other’s homes, although most of the time I went to someone else’s home because they were “better off” than me, I thought.
I liked to go to Keith Pye’s because he had a huge collection of comic
books stored in a small room behind their garage and he had more board games
and other playthings than any kid on the Crick
We could play Monopoly or Checkers plus lots of other games at his
home.
Summers Meant the Woods
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| Bob Rosette |
Another time we climbed up a rather good size tree and started loosening the bark with knives and stripping it off. We did that all the way down the trunk. Later, one of the Hornungs was asking Dad about the dead tree behind our house (on their property). Turns out they were planning on cutting that tree for some use on the farm but we had killed the tree and made it useless. Dad was clueless, as far as I know.
Bob wasn’t the only one I managed to do dumb things with but we had our fair share. One of the more stupid things a couple of us attempted but fortunately it failed, was the time we set a shotgun shell in a hole in the base of a tree. I don’t remember who I was with that day. We intended to hit the firing button on the base of the shell and make it explode up through the hollow tree trunk. Fortunately we couldn’t find a way to do it. It would have been disastrous if we had. With no barrel to enclose the shell, it would have exploded in our faces.
Which reminds me of another stupid trick when we were a little older. We found out we could take a piece of two or three inch diameter metal pipe, put a pipe cap on one end, drill a small touchhole near the cap, add a little carbide as a light explosive and put a cork in the open end. When we held a light to the touchhole, the carbide ignited and would blow the cork a huge distance.
Our fertile minds advanced our carbide gun experience into making a bomb. We took the powder out of a number of shotgun shells and put the powder in a two-inch pipe with a cap on both ends. We put a fuse we found in Dad’s dynamite supplies (which was a forbidden area) inserted it in the touchhole, placed the whole thing in the middle of the road, lit the fuse and ran to hide in the ditch. Again we were lucky because, first of all no cars came by at that time and secondly, the fuse burned down, the powder went “swoosh” and nothing happened.
When Bob Rosette and I were a little older, I went down to his house to see what he was up to. He hollered to me from behind his Dad’s motorcycle in the shed. His Dad had told him never to play on the motorcycle when he wasn’t around because it was a Harley Indian Chief and very heavy. Naturally, Bob had to sit on it.
Halloween
Halloween always meant a time for all of the kids to get together. We didn’t do much dressing up unless we were going to a Halloween party.
We played practical jokes and tried to scare people.
We notched grooves on the edges of a thread spool, wrapped string around it and held it up to a window as we pulled the string. It made a loud rattling noise on the window, supposedly to scare people inside. Then we ran like heck.
We did this at the Farrell residence on a downstairs window. As we were running away, Billie Farrell, an older person, came out and fired his pistol in the air.
Needless to say that was enough of that trick on them. Another trick was to place a garbage can on the porch, tie a string to the doorknob and knock on the door. When they opened the door it tipped the garbage can over and spilled garbage on the porch.
I was not a part of the trick when my
brothers set a buckboard (a four-wheeled carriage) on someone’s garage roof. It took a lot of work but was worth it when
the people found it there and had to get it back down.
Another favorite was tipping over outhouses but I never did that, either. That was destructive and there would have been heck to pay with Dad.
Smoking and Drinking
George Horning was a little younger
than I and lived just west of our house but we found time to get into trouble
once in a while. We got together to play
one day but ended up smoking cigarettes. Me on left,
George Horning Rt.
This went on for a couple weeks. Somehow it was reported to my mother, who didn’t punish me but made me promise I wouldn’t smoke anymore until I was eighteen and then if I wanted to, I could smoke.
I never did.
I never drank any kind of alcohol, either. Most of my friends thought it was because of my mother or my Christian beliefs but that is not the reason.
I was always quite shy and worried about what people would think of me in different situations. I saw how people acted when they drank too much. I never wanted to be caught looking like that.
Since I didn’t know
how much would be too much, I decided to not drink any and it became a goal of
mine to never drink any alcohol at all. I
have succeeded to this day except once.
I was at a reunion of Mary Jane’s
family and they had two kinds of punch.
I asked which one was spiked and her uncle pointed it out to me so I
drank a couple glasses out of the other one.
Turns out he was feeding me a line and Mary Jane found out about
it. She told me so I quit drinking any
of it.
Winter Activities
Wintertime brought other types of
fun. The flat in Hornung’s field across
the old
Winter activities proved to be
dangerous on one occasion. Bob Rosette and I were exploring a pond near West
Crick. The pond had been frozen with
heavy thick ice but some of it had melted and cracked off during a thawing
period. On this morning a large frozen
chunk of ice was partially thawed but had hardened enough over the last few
days to become quite solid again. Part
of it was hanging out over the pond leaving a large hole in the center of the
pond. It looked safe enough because it
was very thick.
As Bob and I moved around on it, I moved out to the edge to see if I could spot anything in the water. Suddenly, the large chunk under me broke off and I plunged into the cold, deep water. Fortunately I came back up where ice had melted away instead of under the ice. Bob was laughing hysterically, yet trying to help. He tried to coax me to shore but my clothes were so heavy I couldn’t stay on top of the water; I kept going under. Somehow I found a way to kick back up and hold my head above water. Bob stopped laughing and finally found a branch big enough to hold out to me and pulled me to the bank. Turns out he said he was laughing because I went under water with a knitted cap on my head and when I came up it was still there. I still think he was sort of hysterical. We walked back to my house so I could change clothes. I told Mom I fell in the crick. She had told me distinctly not to play on any of the ponds because they were thawing out. . . . Parents are such know-it-alls.
My skiing was done on wooden barrel staves because we couldn’t afford real skis. Barrel staves are the curved pieces of wood banded together to make barrels. We skied on short slopes or sometimes we went up Seaver’s Hollow, back of Hornung’s, and then skied down a half-mile or more. We also used sleds whenever and wherever we could. My Dad’s toboggan/sled he had made for pulling fire wood was great except there was no way to steer except by using body weight to lean in the direction you wanted to go. One person would lie down on the sled, someone would kneel between their legs and away they’d go. The problem one time was, the guy kneeling with me didn’t lean the right way on a sharp curve and we flew off the road and landed on a ledge over the bank, then down a hill filled with brush and trees. No major damage except the wind was knocked out of me.
I can’t believe that on one of our sled riding days I was talked into sticking my tongue onto the runner of the sled. Not good! Simon Hornung poured warm water on it to get me loose.
Butchering
Thanksgiving was butchering day. It began early. A 55-gallon drum was set up at an angle with
a platform built on a level with the lower edge of the drum. The drum was filled with water and a fire
built under it to heat the water. When
it was time to shoot the pig, Mom would turn up the radio and sing loud enough
to drown out the sound of the .22 rifle shot and any squealing that might take
place. After dressing the pig, it was
pushed in and out of the boiling water to soften the bristles so they could be
more easily scraped off using knives and special tools. Then they would pull the
carcass up on the limb of a tree. Or they would use the big engine tripod Mel
and Bob built to change engines in cars.
Dad would complete the butchering process while the carcass was
hanging. Mom always said we used
everything from the pig except the squeal. The usual bacon, pork chops, hams,
and other cuts of meat were a given but Mom also made scrapple, sausage, pigs
feet and other items. The tail was cut
so the fatty flesh end could be used for greasing the griddle.
Favorite Meals
Any day could be a day to kill a
chicken but Saturday was the usual day to prepare the chicken for Sunday
dinner. Mom was the one to kill the
chicken. She did a better job than Dad. She laid its head on a stump, neck stretched
out, stroked it to keep it calm and then, chop! and it was done. She would throw the chicken off to the side
to flop around and bleed out. She was
also the one who had to pluck it and cook it unless Rose or Glady was around to
help.
Winter Chores and Such
Keeping the fires going in the winter
required all of us. Taking out the ashes,
adding coal, banking for the night, stoking in the morning, were all normal
chores. Dad made a special toboggan/sled
to bring wood from the woodpile to the porch.
I’m glad the other boys did most of the ‘haulin’. I just tossed wood on the sled if I
could. By the time I was old enough to
pull the sled, we had moved on to only coal stoves.
Winter Mornings
The first thing in the morning when I
rolled out of bed from under a mountain of blankets, there was that ever-present
shocking reminder that the coal furnace didn’t start belching fire with a flick
of a thermostat, nor did it often burn and produce comforting heat throughout
the night. At night, Dad would bank the furnace, that is, add coal to
keep the furnace burning slowly through the night. On school mornings, if Dad
had not stoked the furnace before leaving for work, it was often my job to do
so. “Stoking” meant shaking down the coal ashes and then stir up the
embers. If I was lucky there might have
been a small hot coal left over from the large chunk that Dad put in the night
before. Getting the fire going was no easy task, nor a quick one.
Upstairs the family huddled around the register eagerly awaiting the first
burst of heat from below.
Our house, like many of its era, had
more than ample wintry drafts. Windows, exterior doors, thin,
un-insulated walls, were insufficient barriers to the winter chill compared to
the homes of today. Since there was no blower on the furnace there was no
way to force the warm air around the house or up to the second floor. So the
gravity system seemed to take forever for the house to warm up. Mom eventually
cut a foot square hole and added a grate in the parlor room ceiling to allow
some heat to rise into the upstairs. But it had little practical effect
in warming the bedrooms.
One morning I poked the coals to get to
the hot embers underneath and waited for the embers to break into flames, as
they usually did. On this morning it
just smoked for a while but didn’t catch fire right away. I opened the door again to look in, to see
what I needed to do, when it exploded in my face. My beautiful wave on the front of my hair
caught fire (probably from all that alcohol in the Vitalis I put on it) my
eyebrows were burned off and all of the front part of my hair was singed. Luckily I had very little actual skin burn
but going to school with a red face and smelly, singed hair was embarrassing.
During the time we had coal stoves and after the coal furnace was put in, shoveling coal for the furnace was a major job and we all took turns. The coal was dumped, a ton or two at a time, in the driveway behind the house. Dad had a metal chute made to run from the driveway to the coal bin window, about 10 or 12 feet long. We then shoveled the pile of coal into the chute that led to the coal bin in the cellar. Ashes were removed from the furnace, spread on either the garden area for fertilizer or the long driveway to provide traction. The driveway ran from the from the West Crick road up around to the back of the house.
Cutting Ice
1941 – 1945 “It was the best of times” - In My Innocence of Youth
Japan Attacks Pearl Harbor !!
Horrible, we knew it was. Yet for me, as a kid, “It was the best of
times”. At least that’s how I looked at
it through my youthful eyes. The attack
came December 7, 1941, two months shy of my 10th birthday, January
26, 1942. The war didn’t mean that much
to me then but within a couple years it became very clear as to how it would
affect my life.
Life would change, as I knew it. Between 1942 and 1945 all four of my brothers
left for the service. Again, in my innocence, I thought that was great,
too. I was very proud of them. Using Dad as a role model, we had always been
very patriotic. This was something they
had to do for their country. The boys
wrote home about their experiences and I was proud as a peacock. I had no concept of the dangers involved for
all of them. No one in my immediate family
had died during my lifetime so it was inconceivable something would happen to
one of my brothers.
In school and out I would draw horrible
caricatures of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Tojo Hidecki, then write
stories about how they were “gonna get theirs.”
I had not one doubt about the outcome of the war. “
For us kids, WWII filled most of our
waking thoughts because it prompted a lot of ideas for games. Waging “Kid’s War” was a great fascination
for us. We made wooden guns, wore made-up
uniforms, chose sides, threw fake hand grenades, took prisoners, and fought
through the rough terrain of the woods behind our house to win battles. We built snow forts in the winter to wage
vigorous battles with snowballs. I evens
built a “tank” at our house.
The War Effort at Home
 |
| A typical scrap Drive |
The Emporium Movie Theatre sponsored scrap drives by offering tickets to those who brought in a required number of pounds of scrap.
Walking the railroad tracks was a good
way to find rail spikes and discarded metal plates to turn in. I found more scrap than was required so they
gave me a free ticket. The movie was
standing room only for every night the film showed.
Adults were caught up in the rationing
programs for shoes, gas, and various foods such as sugar, coffee, and meats of
all kinds. Meatless Tuesday came to be
the norm and Protestants joined Catholics in not eating meat on Fridays, which
had been a Catholic tradition for many years.
The regulation was changed later by the Pope to allow Catholics to eat
meat on Friday. Victory gardens were promoted for all families but we already
grew most of our own food so not much changed for us on that front.
My brothers were in the service so I
had to become a serviceman, too. I
joined the Boy Scouts. As a Boy Scout, I
helped in the collection of newspapers and magazines. We rode in big trucks. People had their
newspapers bundled and ready and then we picked them up at their homes.
For other scrap material we collected
items we used at home. We saved tinfoil from
discarded cigarette and chewing gum or candy wrappers. We squeezed empty metal toothpaste tubes in
the crack of a door to remove all the paste so the tubes could be recycled. Remember,
there were no plastic items at that time.
Nylon stockings had just replaced silk
hose to become fashionable. These were collected to make parachutes. Women
painted their legs to look like they were wearing nylons. They evens painted a dark stripe up the back
of the leg to make it look like the seam of the nylons.
School kids went out to gather Pussy
Willow (Milk Weed) pods. We spent hours
picking the pods and putting them in burlap bags. Then they were collected and sent somewhere
to a central point. The filling in the
pods was used to make life jackets. They
seemed to work as well as Kapok from the Kapok trees, which we didn’t have any
of since they grow only in tropical countries.
People were asked to save tinfoil, tin,
rubber bands, and string among other items.
Oleo/margarine replaced butter (Mom would churn butter for us). The oleo was imitation butter so it was not
allowed to be sold as the same color of butter. Oleo came with a yellow
coloring disk that had to be mixed in, to make it look like butter.
Packaged cigarettes were hard to buy
and were more expensive than “roll your own”.
So I helped my brothers, when they were home, by rolling cigarettes for
them, using a little machine. I put thin,
special paper in the rollers, added tobacco from a pouch and pulled the rollers
across each other to form a cigarette.
Then I licked it to seal the paper.
Anyone could save money for War Stamps
that were traded in for a War Bond.
After buying $16.75 worth of stamps we traded them in for a War
Bond. After ten years the bond would be
worth $25.
Wartime Songs
Then, there were the wartime songs. Some made fun of the Axis powers and their leaders. Some told great stories about the American forces and tried to encourage the “boys” who were fighting. Some were sentimental songs about when the war was over and things returned to normal.
I loved to sing some of the wartime songs evens before I thought about singing as something I really liked to do.
Songs like Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition; Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer; Der Fuehrer’s Face; or Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.
However, we boys weren’t gonna sing those “mushy” songs, No sir-ee!
We weren’t gonna sing songs like, I’ll Be Seeing You, Sentimental Journey, or Now is the Hour When We Must Say Goodbye. Come to think of it, I did play the recording for that song when Mel was telling his sweetheart goodbye, as he was leaving for overseas.
I thought it was romantic but Mel and his girl at the time thought it was very sad and it made them cry. I was really proud of myself for that.
Kids
can be so inconsiderate! Yes, for us
kids, “It was the best of times.”
1941 - 1945 “It was the worst of times” – For the Adults
I’m sure Mom’s take on the War news was
a lot different than mine. Mom was an
excellent history student and knew geography well enough to know where the
place was they were reporting on. (I
often wondered what they reported about before there was this major War). Edward R. Murrow reported from
During the early days of World War II, images of the war had to be created in the minds of radio listeners and newspaper readers by writers and reporters such as H.P. Kaltenborn, Eric Sevaried, and Lowell Thomas, who described the action in dramatic detail.
War news did not come nearly as spontaneously as it does now. We didn’t have TV to gather in front of, to see and hear all the disturbing news of the day.
Instead, everyone gathered in groups anywhere there was a radio. In the cities, crowds gathered on the street and listened to the current broadcasts of war conditions that may have happened hours or days before. Reporters dared not mention where units were or which ones were being shipped out for places overseas.
News of battles might be delayed by days, sometimes weeks. We would get news and pictures as part of our movie going. "Movietone News" included shorts before all the main features and would show movies and pictures from the fighting areas.
One thing I realize now about those news
clips and the movies, they always showed
Yes, we
now know
Many listened to Walter Winchell for
news and he did give war news but he was mainly a gossip columnist. He always started his news program with the
sound of a ticker tape clicking and quickly spoken words;
“Good evening
Mr. and Mrs.
Mom wrote letters regularly to the
boys, wrote poems of encouragement, always told them she was praying for them
and sent packages of goodies. She became
so engrossed with what could happen and worried so much she decided to go to
work at
Because
She continued
to work for the duration of the war.
Modernization
In later years, while I was still in
grade school, Dad converted the coal furnace to gas. He bought a conversion unit somewhere and did
the work himself. In those days you
never hired someone to do a job you could do yourself.
One night, when I was probably 4 or 5, came an event that is still impressed on my mind. Before going to bed, I asked Mom to take me to the outhouse but Mom said, “You’re a big boy now, you can go by yourself.”
I didn’t want to go alone, but I did.
On the way back I was coming down the stone steps when a rat or two ran across in front of me. I sat down on the top step and started yelling as loud as I could, till Mom came out to save my life.
I hated rats then and I continued to hate them. When I was a teenager I used to shoot them in the rock wall behind the house.
I also used to go to the community dump at Keystone Hollow just above the old airport to shoot rats.
Several of us
would go there at night, strap a flashlight to a 22-caliber rifle and shoot
them.
To continue my indoor plumbing subject - - -
The family used coal oil lamps for reading and close work.
In the middle thirties, Rex Waddington, Sr. wired the house with a few lights and outlets.
Years later, when I
was working at
He said, “You know Kenny, I still remember wiring your parent’s house. It’s not a big house but I remember the unorthodox way part of the house was built. I remember what I had to do to string the cable. So I know what would be involved in rewiring and I have to tell you, I wouldn’t touch rewiring that house with a ten-foot pole!”
About
1940, Mel had bought fluorescent lights from the
Grade School
I attended Plank Road Hollow School seven out of eight grade school years. I rode to school in a school bus that picked me up in front of the house when I was in first grade. Later I walked to Morrison’s, almost next door, and still later I got the bus at Hornung’s, a quarter mile down the road.
No kindergarten classes were available in those days so I started in first grade the September after I turned six in 1938.
My first teacher was Miss Miskowitz who also had a sister teaching in the borough. I remember her as someone I liked evens though she pulled my hair one day because I couldn’t learn to make a small “g”. I was devastated to think I was being punished. All she did was tug on my hair to get my attention.
In Second grade I had Rhea (Miller) Baughman as a teacher. She was very nice and a good teacher. I knew her and talked with her in later years. She lived until 2004 when she was in her nineties.
Third Grade was held in the same room as Fourth Grade. If you kept up good grades you were put in the row next to the Fourth Grade. I was lucky enough to be in that row and did some of the same studies as Fourth Grade.
It was in Third Grade I started having trouble reading the blackboard. I had no idea why so I didn’t say anything to anyone.
During recess one winter, I got hit in the middle of my eyes with an ice ball.
I went to the teacher and told her my eyes were so blurry I couldn’t see much.
At the teacher’s request, I had to sit with my eyes closed until I went home.
A few days later I told the teacher I couldn’t see the blackboard very well. I thought the ice ball incident might have had something to do with it. The teacher said I could sit in a front seat.
That made me cry because I was embarrassed to sit up there. I thought something made me different from the other kids.
A little later we had an eye check by a nurse who told my parents I needed to see the eye doctor, something was wrong with my vision.
Mom
took me to Dr. Impress on
He fitted me with glasses, ordered them and a couple weeks later we went down to get them.
I remember to this day, the thrill when I
stepped out of the office and could see things on
It was absolutely thrilling.
I have never been sorry I wore glasses; they saved injuries to my eyes several times.
It was also in Third Grade I had my first episode with a “girl friend”.
Sixth Grade was at
I returned to Plank Road Hollow for Seventh and Eighth Grades. During those years a few memories stick out. A couple memories had to do with teasing girls. Girls almost always wore dresses in those days. I believe it was Martha Black but she didn’t remember it, so I wonder if it was maybe Lila Platt, or Ramona Mumford, or Shirley Fisher or Verna Wilson or . . .? There were just so many . . . I’ll stay with Martha. I was teasing and chasing her during recess. I reached out to pull the bow on her belt that was tied on the back of her dress. And when I did, it tore the dress. Again embarrassing!
But I wasn’t thinking “embarrassment”
when she went to the teacher to get her dress fixed, I was thinking, “Scared.” I was standing there as the teacher was
pinning the torn dress when the principal, Mr. E.C. Smith, happened to come
by. Mr. Smith said to Martha, “How did
this happen?” Now I knew I was in
trouble! I was scared because I knew I
was going to get the rubber hose that was Mr. Smith’s method of
punishment. He used a four-foot piece of
rubber hose, bent in two, and used it to whip the student several times. People said it stung really badly and I figured
I was about to find out. Martha made me
feel a whole lot better when she told him, “My belt was untied and it got stuck
in the door when I went through it.”
Whew! What a relief! I already
liked her but this made her a real friend.
A second embarrassing moment happened
as a class was starting. We had
individual seats with an arm rest and storage on the shelf under the sear. I was leaning over to get books out from under
my seat. Lila Platt came between the two
seats just as I sat up. My head came up
under her dress and she screamed. My
face turned red as a beet!
In Eighth Grade we were at recess when
Harry Britton put snow down my neck. I
chased after him but he ran into the school and up the stairs to the second
floor landing. I kept a snowball in my
glove and went up to where he was talking to other kids. He never saw me till I pulled the back of his
shirt out and slammed the snow down his neck.
Now Harry was a lot bigger than I, not as tall but he weighed 30 pounds
more than my 120, or so. Just as I
completed my snowball retaliation, he swung around and clobbered me in the
head. I rolled down the steps to the
next landing, unhurt. Mr. Smith chose
this time to walk out onto the upper landing, just in time to see Harry hit
me. He didn’t ask any questions, just
took Harry in and gave him the rubber hose.
Church in My Younger Years
It wasn’t until later, in 1948, when I
was listening to an Evangelist in our church that God spoke to me, I went
forward and was later baptized. Church then became what I wanted to do, not
just go because Mom said so. I do
remember when I was a teenager, Dad usually going on Sunday evenings, more so
than in the morning. Rose and Glady were
very “into” all sorts of church activities when they were younger; slacked off
when they were raising their families, and then became active again.
Boy Scouts
I usually had to walk the two miles to
meetings at the church but when it came time for Merit badges, my two mile walk
was an ideal time to practice the Scout Pace mile. The object was to walk 50 steps then trot 50
steps to travel one mile in twelve minutes.
In addition to meeting at the church we
had a lot of activities in outdoor settings.
We camped out overnight or had daytime activities at
We went to a weeklong campout near
Kane. There we took part in activities
to work on merit badges. My group worked
on building a small bridge by using rope to tie pieces of wood together. Bill
Nordberg was one of the fellas in my cottage.
We were inside one evening and Bill was
playing mumbly-peg with a hunting knife.
He said he could throw it and make it stick anywhere he wanted. To demonstrate, he threw the knife at the
door, where it stuck alright, just as the door opened and one of the
scoutmasters came in. If he had opened
the door a second sooner, the fun time would have had disaster written all over
it.
When we went to Ole’ Bull State Park
for a weekend or maybe longer, a couple of us sneaked into Gus Zito’s tent
after he was asleep and stole his pants. We took them to the flagpole a quarter
mile away and ran them up the pole. The
next morning he couldn’t find them until someone pointed to them flying in the
breeze. Someone started singing to a
marching tune, “Oh Gus Zito’s pants are hanging from the flagpole, from the
flagpole at Ole’ Bull”. Later that day I
stepped on a huge blacksnake, which was crossing the path near the
commissary. Scared the “bejeebers” out of
me but I still managed to eat, anyway. Yeah, Scouting was a lot of fun. I stayed with it until I became a Star Scout
and then joined the Explorer Scout organization when I was about 16. I left that program after a year or so, when
I graduated from High School and went to work.
These are my stories, not my brothers’ or sisters’ so I can only speak to what happened to me. I don’t remember their punishments because as long as it wasn’t me, I didn’t care.
Dad’s punishment for outright disobedience was his razor strop, a three-foot long leather belt he used to sharpen his straight razor. That sure would sting when it landed on my rear.
Fortunately, I only remember getting the strop from Dad once, and I don’t remember what that was for. Mom tried to intervene to carry out the punishment herself. She felt Dad could be too heavy-handed the way his mother had been.
Mom’s physical punishment for me was with a lilac switch. Which was reserved for the most serious transgressions such as the day she saw me shooting at a Robin with my B-B gun.
I tried to make her understand I shouldn’t be punished because I didn’t hit it.
Didn’t work!
Her punishment MO (method of operation) was usually the same: She would say to the one to be punished, “Go get me a lilac switch”. Now I know that sounds cruel, to have to pick out a switch for your own punishment but actually it was a blessing in disguise.
This way you could pick out a switch that was not real small because that would sting like heck. Too large would be dangerous and could damage something so she would make us go back to get another one.
The ones in between would smart but were tolerable. I was a good kid so I didn’t get those very often.
She would never run out of switches because our home was called “Lilac Farm”. We had bushes near the barn, at the top of the long steps coming up from the highway as well as other places on the property.
The punishment I hated the worst was
Mom’s lectures. She had a way of making
me feel very guilty with the words she used and I couldn’t wait till it was
over. It must have helped because I
tried not to do anything she would have to lecture me about.
Medical Care
Medical care was needed when an incident occurred right after one of the times we were playing at Hornung’s haymow.
We heard a large crash up the road near the Morrison curve. It turned out to be a bad car wreck.
All of us kids were running up the road to see what happened. Uncle Ed McCormick had removed his mailbox from the horizontal support of the mailbox post.
The support jutted out right at forehead level for me. I never saw it! My head hit the bar and I was knocked down and backwards onto the pavement and was out cold.
When I came to, Glady was kneeling over me, crying. She had on an apron covered with my blood.
My injury was still numb so when she pulled me to my feet and began walking me through the field to our house, I kept saying, “I’m OK”. What are you crying about?”
We got home and Mom bandaged me up. No doctor, no shots, a simple bandage was all. Then the pain started. I still have the scar plus the bump on the back of my head.
I had another injury when I disobeyed my mother, then lied about it.
We had a rotting stone boat leaning up against an old unused outhouse near “The Car”. I was told not to play on it. So of course, when I was playing on it, the bottom broke out, my leg went through and I cut the front of my thigh on the jagged wood. It left the flesh torn wide open, about six inches long.
Mom asked how it happened so I told her I fell in the sharp gravel near The Car.
I know she didn’t believe me but I was cut so badly she didn’t push it.
You ask, “How many stitches did it take?”
None, as we know them today. She pulled it together, sewed a couple spots with a needle and thread and bandaged it with some kind of ointment. That was it.
No doctor, no tetanus shot, no nothing. An ad from 1934 told mothers that it is a “Mother’s Duty to Guard Her Children’s Health.” They were advertising milk but the saying was very true for those days when it came to most sicknesses or injuries. Mom was the do-all person.
I did have to go to the doctor once in a while.
Another time it was again Bob Rosette’s fault. At least, I thought so.
We were playing near some Poison Ivy. I told him I wanted to move away from the ivy because I knew my Dad and I were allergic to it.
(Mom could roll around in it without any problem).
Anyway, Bob said it was all in my head. He took a leaf and rubbed it on his cheek and dared me to do the same.
So, of course, I had to do it, too. You guessed it! In a matter of hours, my face swelled up and I had a horrible case of Poison Ivy.
Bob got nothing. Mom said she would make a bread and milk paste to put on it but one of my sisters or someone insisted I go to the doctor for proper care.
I had to go to Dr. Hackett who gave Mom Calamine Lotion to put on it. He also told Mom to wrap my head in milk and bread compresses for two weeks and tie gloves on me so I couldn’t scratch the spots, just like she was going to do in the first place.
About three weeks later
I went to the doctor for a checkup. Bob Rosette
was there with a broken arm that he got when he fell out of a tree. I told him, “Good for ya’, I’m glad you broke
your arm!” He didn’t know what I was
talking about.
Radio and Entertainment
“Well,” I said, “we had radio, and radio allowed us to use our imaginations much more than you have to with television.”
I told them about a few of the programs I
liked to listen to. Radio shows such as The Shadow, with the running
quote, “The Shadow knows”; Inner Sanctum Mysteries, which
opened with the sound of a creaking door; Mr.
District Attorney with its famous opening that I memorized then, and
remember to this day. “And it shall
be my duty as District Attorney, not only to prosecute to the to the limit of
the law all crimes perpetrated within this county but to defend with equal
vigor the rights and privileges of all its citizens.”
I listened to great western
programs. I could do my homework (which
was something I did as little as possible) on Sunday night while listening to Gene Autry, at his Melody Ranch
with his opening song, “I’m Back in
the Saddle Again”; Jack
Armstrong had an action program where he was known as “Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy.” The
Green Hornet with his sidekick, Kato added to the action programs.
The whole family listened to just plain
good comedy with Fibber McGee and
Molly, Burns and Allen, The Great Guildersleeve, Our Miss Brooks, Edgar Bergen
and Charlie McCarthy, Henry Aldrich with the opening call by his mother,
“Henry! Henry Aldrich!” Then he would answer in a squeaky voice, “Coming Mother.”
Mom and I would listen to The Breakfast Club in the
morning with Don McNeil. This program
was fun for listening since the audience as well as those listening at home
were supposed to march around the breakfast table. But did they?
We did, sometimes. Imagination
and radio worked great together.
Movies were another means of
entertainment. Due to a lack of money
and the fact the theater was two miles away I don’t remember going to many
movies until after I was 9 or 10. Serial
movies were very common. There would be
an episode each Saturday so if we could find the 15 cents required we could
watch them as you would a Soap Opera on TV.
The ones I remember are only a few of the total, such as: Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, The Green
Hornet, Batman and Robin, Zorro, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and The Lone Ranger.
Going to see regular movies was always
a favorite of mine. I loved movies and
still do. Back in the 40’s it depended
on whether or not I could get the money to go.
Being the youngest I could usually talk one of my siblings into giving
me the money. One problem was walking
home after films like Frankenstein’s Monster or Werewolf. I was trotting home one night when a deer
jumped off the bank and landed on the road right in front of me. I made it on home in record time that
night.
When I was much older and an adult, I
took the test for a Pennsylvania Projectionist license and showed movies at the
local Emporium Theatre for several years.
Thanksgiving and Christmas
Just as it is today, Thanksgiving and
Christmas were the favorite holidays of the year. Thanksgiving was the feast day. The whole family gathered together to fill up
the dining room. Some of the kids would
sit at an extra table. We usually had
chicken instead of turkey because we raised our own chickens for many
years. The war years showed a slowdown
on the family members who got together but they tried to carry on as normally
as possible.
Christmas in my young years was very
special. Dad loved to do some decorating
outside. Inside remained mostly
undecorated until after the young ones, like me, were in bed. The next morning it was a new world in our
house. First of all, the parlor was the place for the Christmas tree. It was
set up Christmas Eve. The parlor was
normally off limits all year except for entertaining guests and special
occasions. Christmas morning decorations abounded, the tree was up and trimmed,
presents were under the tree. Unlike
today, there were usually only two or three presents, at the most, for each
person.
When I was born in 1932, The Great
Depression was in full swing. The
average annual income was about $1500 and I’m sure Dad wasn’t making that
much. Since I was the youngest, more was
available for me by the time I reached an age where I could appreciate what I
was given. My brothers and sisters didn’t
have that luxury. In addition, I got
more gifts at this time than was available to the others in the years past
because Mom and Dad weren’t the only ones buying gifts. My brothers and sisters, who had jobs or were
married, also chipped in. Large gifts
were not the norm. A pair of ice skates
comes to mind. As soon as I could, I
headed for the frozen flat to find a pond we could clear off. A new coat or a hat or a pair of new gloves,
were great to get. Clothing was a
welcome gift but toys or games were wanted the most. One year the gift of a
tricycle allowed me to ride all over the porch evens in winter. Another year I
received a sled that I could steer.
Absolutely unbelievable! Mom and Dad
made sure we were as happy as could be for that favorite time of year despite
their meager means. The war years found
everyone gone, except Sam and me, and then in 1944, he enlisted at age 17 and
was off to the Navy.
Travel and Visitation
Sundays were usually the day we visited
relatives. We had Aunt Frances and Uncle
Jack Roof in Ridgway, 30 miles away.
Uncle Lee and Aunt Maude Barr lived in Kersey. Aunt Ellie Geschwender and several Barr
families lived in
One time we made the trip in the pickup
truck. Some of us rode in back. Aunt Myrtle was going along but because of
her and Mom’s size they couldn’t fit together in the cab. Dad put a chair in the bed of the truck for
Aunt Myrtle. (Just like the Beverly Hillbillies) When we came down a dirt road
heading for the Roofs, the brakes didn’t hold and we went faster than we should
have right out onto the main highway.
Aunt Myrtle was laughing and screaming at the same time. “That was a real ‘hoot’’, she laughed. Uncle Lee and Aunt Maude lived on a regular, working
farm at Kersey so that was a great place to visit. Later they lived in a smaller home with
double staircases so we could run up one end of the house and come down the
other end.
Trips to visit relatives in
Relatives came from all over, including
Going for a ride on Sundays was a
common way to have a good time. On one
ride when I was quite young and when we had an older ‘30’s car, we came to a
steep hill on a dirt road. There were
several people in the car and it wouldn’t go up the hill. It looked like we would have to push it up or
turn around and go back but Dad turned the car around and backed up the hill. Dad knew the car had a lower gear ratio in
reverse, which gave it more power. When
we rode up to Whittemore Hill we always had to stop part way up, at a spring,
and put water in the radiator.
The great change in a student’s life that we
all looked forward to. Well, maybe not all. This was the time former Eighth Graders from
all over the county were bussed to the
We moved into Ninth Grade (Freshmen Year) and suddenly all these strangers were part of our class.
A lot of them were from “
There were about 120 students in my Freshman Year; of those, 77 would go on to graduate.
Although everything was new, I sort of enjoyed the change evens though I was very bashful and didn’t mix in too well. I knew I was bashful and constantly tried to make friends among those I didn’t know but in general, my closer friends were the ones I had in Eighth Grade and before, from Plank Road.
I didn’t have a lot of trouble with classes, evens though I hated doing homework. I would try to get it done during Homeroom or Study Halls that I might have. I had to do some at home but I did as little as possible.
We had been well prepared
at
I had no problem with History because I liked it.
Geography (spelled “Grant Ellis’s Old Grandfather Rode A Pig Home
Yesterday”) was no problem, I enjoyed the stories of other countries and the
map studies. WWII had gotten me
interested in the world maps.
It was a different story with Mathematics. Math was a totally different world for me. Ninth Grade Algebra was tough but I had a good friend, Bob Taggart, who had no trouble and he would help as much as he could. I had trouble with math all the way through High School.
Civics, with Amy C. Baker as the teacher, was not usually a problem. I started out with good grades but she had me in a Study Hall half way through the year and asked who some of my relatives were.
When
I mentioned my brother, Sam, she said she remembered him as being very
disrespectful of her. That was the end
of my good grades. I finished with a “C”
average for the year in Civics.
I had settled on an Academic Course because I had dreams of College evens though that was not to be.
I took three years of Latin, a “Dead
Language”. Those classes taught me a lot about words in the English
language.
We put on a play one year, all spoken in Latin. That was tough but enjoyable.
Miss Olive Livingston was our teacher. We seemed to have a special bond. She tried to get me to go to college and evens set up a trip to Indiana University of Pennsylvania to see if I could work something out.
Earl Moore and I made the
trip but money was not available for me through my family. I made a half-hearted attempt to find other
financial sources but I didn’t pursue it very well. Working and making money was more attractive
to me.
I joined some clubs in High School. I liked music so I joined the Band, playing drums, especially the Bass Drum.
I liked singing but I was too bashful to join Chorus. I should have done that because I know I would have enjoyed it. I remember one music teacher, Mrs. Hazel Merkle, had us sitting in two-student seats. I was with Bob Taggart as usual.
The class was singing songs. Bob and I were singing with gusto. She was looking for someone to sing a solo in chorus. Suddenly, I noticed she was listening to voices in my area and she started moving along the aisles toward us, saying, “I think I hear someone over here.”
The closer she got, the softer I sang.
When she got near Bob and me I was not singing very loud and she finally decided she had heard Bob’s voice, so she picked him for the part.
I always knew in my heart of hearts it had
been me but I wasn’t about to get up in front of a group to sing a solo. Yet I
was dying to do it. How weird is that? That all changed later.
I sang to my hearts content when I was
milking the cow. I don’t know if it
helped to make her give more milk but she seemed contented. “Contented cow”, get it? For years I told people that was where I
learned to sing.
I was on the Yearbook staff as Literary Editor, and on the Library Staff.
I
joined the cast of the Junior play, “Home Sweet Homicide”. Now that was a real surprise to me because I
was “scared to death” to be in front of people and I had to speak with a lisp
at that. I still remember, “Yeth Mom, I’m coming”.
My last year in High School, I joined the Basketball Team. Because of chores at home, I was not able to take part in sports until my senior year. I was too light for football and Dad wouldn’t let me play anyway.
I loved basketball and used to practice at the old West Crick schoolhouse prior to it being torn down. Bob Taggart, Bud Kinsler and I used to play in that old school house a lot. The school was near where my sister, Glady, eventually built her home.
I knew one year wouldn’t be enough to get me much playtime but mainly I wanted to attend the practices. I had a lot of fun practicing and I did play in a couple games. I evens ended up scoring two points for the year. I can still hear the fans chanting, “We want Ostrum! We want Ostrum!” That’s because we were so far ahead in a game, anyone could play and we couldn’t lose.
In another game, or maybe it was the same game, I and others fed Kenny Rakestraw to help him break the individual scoring record, and he did it. Any way I looked at it, Basketball, in my senior year, was a lot of fun!
Somewhere along the line I started noticing girls. I hope the reader isn’t too shocked to realize I was normal.
Now I had girls as playmates when I was younger and I had found out then there was a difference between boys and girls but this was different.
I used any method I could to get attention from them but it didn’t seem to work very well. I did get a lot of attention when I took the Cheerleaders or Band Front members to practice, in the back of my ’34 Ford pickup.
I had the impression, riding in the truck was what turned them on, not me, but I didn’t care.
I had a few
movie “dates” in my Junior year but it wasn’t until my Senior year I started
dating more often. They weren’t “dates”
but I remember taking walks with Joanne Bergdahl that didn’t go anywhere.
I spent a lot of time visiting Grace
Coppersmith at her home which was also the local funeral home. We would sit in the room at a table and talk
or look at magazines or whatever, surrounded by caskets. I didn’t mind that but one night as we were
sitting on the porch, I mistakenly asked her who had died and was in the viewing
room. She said it was some guy who got
caught in a buzz saw in the lumber mill and had been cut almost in half, top to
bottom. I left early.
To show how shy I was, or how dumb, I’m not sure which, Grace and I were standing in the vestibule as I was getting ready to go home. Our faces were very close for quite a long time but I just couldn’t bring myself to give her a kiss.
I thought about how dumb that was all the way home. Of course, she may not have been looking at it the same way I was. One never knows about women!
A thrill for me came when I picked Ann up one night to go roller skating for the first time. I had skated lots of times before but this was a first with her.
All girls at that time usually wore blue jeans with rolled up pantlegs and “Saddle Shoes” as casual dress. When they wanted to dress up more they wore dresses, or a blouse and skirt, including “Poodle Skirts”.
That night Ann came out of the
house in a short skating skirt, it came several inches above her knees. I was really impressed (somehow that’s not
the right word) and I was happy to swing her around the skating rink. She was a
GOOD skater.
Ann and I also went to movies. She had asthma and would often have to use her “pipe” when she started getting short of breath. They didn’t use atomizers at that time but a pipe-shaped unit with some means of providing a mist for her to breathe. She would just say, “I have to smoke my pipe now”.
Ann told me recently (she now
lives as a widow in
Ann and I dated for several months. Ann
was a beautiful girl a couple years younger than I and I thought it strange she
would evens go out with a skinny, funny-looking guy like me. We went to the same church, attended youth
meetings and other activities, and in general had a great time together. I was
proud to be seen with her.
The Meeting That Changed My Life
It was about this time an event took
place that changed my life as I knew it.
I had spent all my 18 years at the
Mary Jane was baptized and raised in
the
Days after the meeting, I was hoping to
get some kind of response so I started making what I thought were clever
remarks around her. They must not have impressed her because she paid no
attention to me that I was aware of.
One of these
“clever” remarks came one day at the church. Mary Jane was standing on the
stairs and said something to Donna Andrews who was directly behind me. Just to be clever and try to get her
attention, I said,” What did you say to me?” Well, that got her attention. Did it ever! She said, “I wasn’t talking to you, I was
talking to Donna”. Of course, I had to
come back with, “Why were you looking at me then, if you were talking to Donna?” I said it in a sort of mocking style. That was a mistake because then she was
furious with me for saying what I did. It
was like I was making fun of her and she hated that (and always did). But as days went on I looked for any excuse
to talk to or be with her.
Mary Jane and
Ann Harmon, were going to walk home after a youth meeting one night and I
offered them a ride in my famous 1934 Ford pickup truck. They went into a deep discussion by
themselves. I didn’t know it at the time
(Mary Jane told me about it years later) but they were trying to decide who was
NOT going to sit next to me. Ann didn’t
want to because we had just broken up to become friends only. Mary Jane didn’t want to because she didn’t
like me. (So she said) Finally it was resolved, Ann sat next to me and I took
them both home, oblivious to what had gone on between them. I usually was oblivious to things like that. All
I knew was, I was proud as a Peacock to have two of the most beautiful girls in
Emporium in the cab of my little truck.
The Travelcade
Then in April
of 1950 there was a Youth Travelcade in
I volunteered . . . . No . . . I jumped at the chance to be with her evens though Mary Jane had her license before I did and could easily have driven. Luckily, her mother didn’t want her to. I remember on the way back from the Travelcade, she was sitting in the middle of the three of us in the front seat, which put her right next to me. There were some construction areas where signs read “Soft shoulders”. I was so witty, I came out with, “I have soft shoulders, too”. She seemed to find that funny and we both kept making similar remark about it as kids tend to do. Half way home she was so tired, her head fell over onto my shoulder and I was in Heaven. That drive was the beginning of our life together.
We were inseparable from then on, much to the
chagrin of my family who thought I was too young to be going steady. Did we do that then?
After that, it was constant togetherness. We went to the prom, we sat together in church, we went to meetings together, we talked at the house, we sat on the front porch swing for hours, and we went for drives with her parents on Sunday afternoons. Any excuse at all and I was there.
Then it Became Serious
We had planned to drive to Lock Haven but when we got to Renovo we were so tired we decided to stay overnight there. The only place we could find was the YMCA Hotel. Problem was, we didn’t bring our Marriage License with us so they wouldn’t let us stay. Imagine!
Sylvania
My first job
at
I was a stem cutter. The stems were welded on a multi head Stem Unit and the final product came down a conveyor. I would pick up the stem, insert it into the jig on my machine and press a pedal to cut the wires and bend them according to the type of stem it was.
They were put in boxes and we
cut hundreds of them every hour. I would
go to my Mother and Dad’s home when I got out of work, sleep until afternoon,
do things that had to be done and be back at Kinley’s about 8 or 9 O’clock.
Sometimes I didn’t get to sleep as much as I should.
That showed up one night at work as I was cutting stems and got quite sleepy. I fought it off and was able to keep up production.
Boob Cohick, the Supervisor came by to ask if everything was all right.
I said, “Sure”. He asked if I was sleepy and I lied and said, “No, I’m fine.”
He then informed me they had to throw out 6400 stems that weren’t cut correctly. They had burrs and some were put in the jig in a cockeyed position. Others had broken edges on the glass.
I got a warning slip for possible dismissal that time so I didn’t let it happen again.
From Stem, I bid on a higher paying job in the Units Department. This is where the stem was mated with its glass envelope, using a multiple headed machine that created a vacuum and sealed the parts together.
The tube was
then plugged into a large conveyor for aging, removed from the conveyor and
tested in several ways.
I gradually learned to do all the jobs from beginning to end and I was made a Utility operator with more pay.
That meant if anyone was absent I could fill in for them, no matter what their job was.
Some testing was done in automatic test equipment, other testing was done on tables with several types of test equipment and the tube was passed through several people on the table.
Working between some of the women operators
was a real challenge. I was young and
most of them were a little older. They
would tell stories that were very embarrassing for me. People on other tables would know when they
were telling dirty stories because I would light up like a red light.
I became well experienced at all the jobs on the machine except for the Fire Setter’s job. This job was equivalent to a supervisor’s position.
In September, Simon Hornung, the Department Foreman, called me in and offered the Fire Setter position to me. Of course, I said yes. I went to Kinley’s for lunch and broke the good news to Mary Jane but as I went through the door. She handed me an envelope from the Draft Board.
I had been drafted for Military
Service. The Korean War had been going
on for over two years and they needed more men.
I was twenty years old, married but had no children so there was no
getting out of it. I wouldn’t have tried
anyway.
SERVICE NUMBER:US52226467
BRANCH: ARMY
INDUCTED:
RECEPTION CENTER: Fort George G Meade, MD for 6 days
TRAINING: Ft
Eight weeks Combat Engineer Training. Then
Specialist (Electrician) School, Feb - Mar 1953
DUTYASSIGNMENT: 2nd Army Area, KMAG 8038 AU (
April, 1953 - Sept, 1954
DECORATIONS:
Good Conduct Medal;
ROK Presidential Unit Citation; Korean Service Medal w/2 Bronze Service Stars;
Commendation Ribbon w/Medal Pendant;
National Defense Service Medal
SEPARATED: Fort George G Meade, MD - 24 Sept, 1954
DISCHARGE RANK: CPL; MUSTERING OUT PAY: $300.
TRANSFERRED TO:
Military Training
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