I will be 63 on June 20, 2002. Time has flown by so very fast. I think my first clear memory was when my brother Charles was born. I was three years old in June of 1942. Charlie was born July 7 of that year. Charlie was born at mom’s cousin Florence’s in an old un-painted house on the Oak Hill road a few miles from Moravia, NY where we lived on School Street at the time. I can clearly remember sitting outside most of the day watching the chimney on the back of the house, over the kitchen, waiting for the stork to bring Charlie to that chimney and drop him down it. Needless to say I missed it, he arrived and I never did see that bird.

We lived in Moravia for about three years after that. Dad worked on the Lehigh Valley Railroad during that time. He worked on the bridge repair gang. The railroad ran from Jersey City, NJ to Buffalo, NY. He would leave on the train, which ran through Moravia, on Sunday or Monday and wouldn’t return until Friday or Saturday. He probably had a dangerous job; they would string a scaffold under the bridges and clean and paint or do other maintenance that was needed. I can remember him telling stories about the bridges being hundreds of feet above the bottom of the gullies or streams. I don’t remember how many men were on the gang, but I remember sitting for hours listening to him tell stories about the people he worked with and the many towns along the way. Dad had a knack for telling about his life experiences and making it interesting. I guess back then people didn’t have TV, so they were better at conversation. I can remember the thrill of seeing him come home after being gone all week. We always did something the day he was home, go to grandpa Whipple’s farm or visit some of the other relatives on his or mom’s side of the family. In Moravia we had running water and a bathroom, a luxury we would lose for 10 years after we left Moravia. Sometimes Charlie and I would get into the bathtub with dad when he finally got to take a bath after not having that luxury during the week. They lived on the crew car all week, there weren’t many luxuries there. A story dad told many times when he would come home was about this girl that lived along the railroad tracks. She didn’t have any arms, she must have been born that way. Anyway just about every time when they would go rolling past on the train she would run out and throw stones at them using her feet.

My recollection of life when I was about 4 years old seemed good. The only problem I remember was opening the cellar door and seeing water nearly ready to run into the kitchen. Those were the days before the flood prevention system had been built and the creek over-ran the banks and flooded the village. Our lawn was graded up about 2 or 3 feet above the street, the street looked like a river, scary for little kids. The Walt Wager family lived across the street; Walt was the meat cutter at the Moravia IGA. Walt was a good guy; he would always give us a raw hot dog to eat when we went there with dad on Saturday. I remember another storekeeper, Smiling Don Spaulding, proprietor of the 5 & 10 cent store. No one could remember ever seeing Don when he didn’t have a big smile. Talk about a small world, we found out years later after we moved to Nunda NY in 1974 that Don had lived and owned a store in Nunda. We also found out that Dr. Robinson, our family doctor when we were small, was from Nunda. Dr. Robinson’s father was a doctor there. Dr. Robinson was Mom’s doctor when our sister Patty was born. Back to the Wager family, they had a son Hockey, a couple years older than me. Hockey was wild to say the least. He was a good-looking kid, blond hair, blue eyes and tall for his age. He was popular with many young girls in the neighborhood. He was always in trouble with Walt. He had a treehouse in their yard and would skin up where his dad couldn’t get to him when he got into trouble. Walt would sometimes get up there by grabbing a plank that stuck out, so Hockey sawed most of the way through it and when Walt grabbed it to pull himself up the plank broke and down he went.

Dad and Mom rented the Moravia house. We had the downstairs. There was an elderly lady upstairs in a small apartment. She had a love for stale fried cakes. She would get all the outdated fried cakes she could come by and let them get stale and hard. She would dunk them in her coffee. She was always giving us kids fried cakes. I liked them. To this day I like a hard plain fried cake.

I remember a Christmas in Moravia (probably the last one we spent there). Dad came home from his railroad job on Christmas Eve. Mom had no way to get a Christmas tree, she never drove a car. I don’t think anyone had trees for sale in town. Moravia is located in a valley with steep wooded hills on the east and west sides. The road on the west hill was called Long Hill Road. Dad and I drove up that road until he spotted an evergreen with a good top so we hopped out of the car and cut the top out of the tree. We had a tree for Christmas. Looking back it wasn’t exactly the thing to do, but we wouldn’t have had a tree otherwise. Charlie and I wanted to stay up to see Santa Claus so the folks let us sleep on the couch. Naturally we fell asleep. Back then the house was heated with coal stoves so it got really cold by morning when the stove burned out. When we woke up Chuck was so excited to see the presents under the tree that he jumped up from beneath the covers and started jumping up and down on the couch. By the time Mom and Dad got there he was so cold that he was shaking. Dad got a kick out of that and often told about it for the rest of his life. I think back remembering that although dad and mom didn’t have much, they did everything they could for us. One of my greatest regrets was that I never really sat down with either of them and told them how much I really loved them. Unlike today, the word love was hardly ever used back then. I think it was known by the way you treated someone. Family was important to mom and dad. One of dad’s favorite people was his uncle Walt and Aunt Hattie. They were very old and lived in a very old house near Aurora, New York. We would visit them several times a year especially around Christmas time. Aunt Hattie used to make all kinds of cookies and had a big plate of them to send home with us. Thinking back they probably barely got along financially, I doubt they had social security back then and probably no pension. I think uncle Walt worked for the town of Ledyard for years.

Some other things I remember about Moravia was the milk man delivering milk in glass bottles. We didn’t have refrigeration yet so we bought ice from a guy who delivered it with an old Model A Ford truck. We used to run out and get the chips that flew when the ice man split a small chunk from the large block he carried on the truck.

Grandpa Whipple, mom’s dad, owned a farm of about 100+ acres 5 miles west of Moravia, NY near Stuart’s Corners. We would usually go up there on weekends and dad would help grandpa with the farm work. Fall was butchering time and dad was known for his knowledge of that craft. Grandpa had a huge cast iron kettle, it must have been at least 5 feet across and 4 feet deep. They would build a wood platform even with the top of the kettle, build a huge wood fire under the kettle, fill it with water, and bring the water to a boil. They would hang the pigs by their hind feet, and stick them by taking a butcher knife, sharpened on both sides, and cutting their throats. They would let them hang and bleed out. Then they would drag them over to the wooden platform, hoist them up on it then dunk the pigs in the boiling water. When they pulled them out they would scrape the hair off, leaving a nice clean white pig to hang up for a couple of days to cure out. I still have dad’s butchering tool box with his tools. After the pigs had hung for a few days they would cut them up. They didn’t have refrigeration so they had to cure or can the meat. The hams and bacon were cured by putting them in big clay crocks, covering them with a mixture of salt and various smoking mixtures. They stored the crocks in the upstairs hall of the old farmhouse, there must have been six or eight of them, each one was probably 25 to 30 gallons in size. When they needed ham or bacon they would dig them out of the brine and slice off what they needed. There wasn’t any better meat than that.

Our lives changed in 1944 or 45. Grandpa Whipple came down with pneumonia and didn’t have anyone to do the chores. Grandpa had 25 or 30 cows that had to be milked twice a day. Dad took some time off from work to go up and do the chores until grandpa got back on his feet. Grandpa died a few weeks later from the pneumonia and his diabetic condition, mom and dad had to make a decision, quit a good job on the railroad and stay on the farm or sell the farm and go back to the railroad. The farm was left to mom and her two sisters and two brothers. They decided to stay on the farm so dad quit his job and we moved up to Stuart’s Corners. I think it turned out to be a mistake, because there wasn’t enough income to split up five ways and dad worked so hard for so many years it took a toll on his health. A good thing that came from it all was Charlie and I learning how to work, a lesson that stayed with us the rest of our working years.

These five or six years spent on the farm is why I decided to write this account. It was the tail end of the horse powered equipment. I have been involved with that method of farming as well as the modern gasoline era. Looking back I had experiences that few people today have had. When we moved there most of the farming was being done with horses. Grandpa had an old F20 Farmall tractor with a narrow front end and steel wheels all around, it was mostly used for running belts on equipment that required that kind of power. It was dangerous to use in the field because if the front wheels hit a stone it would spin the steering wheel so fast that it could break your hand or fingers. Dad broke his thumb on it.

We grew hay, oats, wheat, corn and a big garden. Harvesting hay in June was not a fun time for any of us. Our cousin Harold (Bud) Gunn was about five years older than I and worked for us most of the time we had the farm. Harvesting hay was a lot of hard, hot work. It was first cut with a horse drawn mower, raked when dry with a horse-drawn rake, then loaded onto a wagon pulled by horses with a hay loader hooked behind it. My job in the field, Charlie wasn’t old enough to help much, was to drive the horses who straddled the row of hay while the hay loader pulled the loose hay up on the wagon while dad and Bud loaded it. The problem was that as the wagon filled up, I had to keep climbing the ladder like front rack on the wagon and eventually got covered up with hay when I couldn’t climb any higher. The first cutting hay was so heavy that I had to fight the horses to go slow enough that dad and Bud could mow away the hay and not get covered up. The combination of the reins cutting into my hands and the heat from being covered with prodding hay was agonizing for a 10 or 12 year old boy. After the load was on the wagon we went back to the barn where we had to unload the loose hay. Dad and Bud were up in the mow to spread the hay around. Mom and I were on the wagon where we set the grapple fork filled with hay up to the peak of the barn then down the track until dad would holler (trip). Mom or I would yank on the rope that was tied to the grapple fork and the hay would hopefully drop near where they wanted it. Then Mom and I would pull the fork back to the wagon and set it again and do it all over again. Pulling the fork back was no easy task because we also had to pull the one inch rope back that the horse had pulled out 75 or 100 feet when pulling the hay up into the mow (ouch, more wear and tear on our hands). Dad always spread a half pail full of white salt on the grapple fork load of hay to keep it from getting hot and causing a fire.

Harvesting oats and barley and winter wheat in July and August was a whole different process, it was a farm community affair. Ernie Stevens owned a threshing machine and went from farm to farm to thresh the grain. All the farmers and their help and their teams and wagons followed until all the grain belonging to the group was harvested. Before that happened the grain had to be cut with a grain binder which was drawn by a team of horses. The binder had a five foot cycle bar that cut the grain stalks off about six inches from the ground, leaving about 24 inches of straw and grain kernels that were taken by two four foot wide canvas belts up to the gather to be tied and knotted into a bundle, about eight inches across. The binder then kicked the bundle out on the ground to be handled the following way: We never knew when the threshing machine would arrive nor what the weather was going to be until that time so the bundles had to be gathered up with a fork and taken to a spot where a shock was constructed. We stood these bundles upright and formed a base about five or six feet across. To seal the weather out as much as possible we laid bundles about two feet high across the top. The shocks were 25 to 50 feet apart and looked like little buildings.

The day the threshing machine came was a great day for everyone. Some farmers came with teams and wagons, some came to construct the straw stack, some came to bag the grain and the wives all came and put on a lunch time feast that has never been equaled in the eyes of us who participated. The shocks of grain were pitched on the wagons and taken back to the threshing machine. It was set up in the front yard in front of one of the barns, in our case. Ernie Stevens had a big John Deer tractor that he pulled the thresher with and used to power the threshing machine by belt. The wagons filled with the shocks were pulled up alongside the thresher, the bundles were pitched into one end of the thresher, traveled through the thresher separating the grain from the straw. The grain was transported down into bags to be taken over to the barn with the granary and dumped into the bins. The straw was blown out the back end of the thresher and forked into a big straw stack to be used later to bed the cattle during the winter months. When we got ready to use the straw it was packed down so hard that we had to cut strips with a straw saw. It was about five feet long and had a serrated blade. We then pitched it on a wagon and took it to the barn and off-loaded to bed the cows.

Filling the silo with corn ensilage in the fall was another interesting time. We usually skipped school for a couple of days for this happening. The process was similar to the grain gathering. The corn was cut four to six inches from the ground with a corn binder (different from the grain binder). The bundles which were about a foot across were kicked off onto the ground. Then they were stacked upright into a shock and left until the silo was to be filled. Moisture wasn’t a concern with corn because it was high moisture (green) when put into the silo. The neighbors with their teams and wagons would come and draw the bundles from the field to the silo, fork them onto the ensilage cutter chopping up the corn and blowing it up into the silo. The men working in the silo packed it down as it gradually filled up. The women again put on dinners fit for a king.

I was six years old and helping clean up around the ensilage cutter at the John Baildon farm when the man running the machine plugged it up. He had me reach in and pull the corn out while he turned the belt. He turned the belt while my fingers were in it and I lost the ends of two fingers at the first knuckle. Dad said he had been drinking and shouldn’t have been working around that machine. He had a good dairy and to make amends he always promised me a nice heifer. He never gave us a thing for his poor judgment, mom and dad even paid for the doctor costs.

Grandpa Whipple was a saver, he never got rid of any of his old horse drawn tools. The small field out behind the chicken houses was a gold mine for Charlie and I. We also had an old horse named Jerry. Jerry was too old to do anything but draw the hay up into the mow so dad let us use him for our activities. We took old buggies and wagons apart to make wagons for Jerry to draw things for us.

We moved to Stuart’s Corners about the time I was ready to start school. There wasn’t any kindergarten so I started in the first grade at the Stuart’s Corners one room schoolhouse. Grades 1-6 attended here. 7th-12th grades rode the bus to the central school at Genoa, NY. We had one teacher, Rose Knapp, a wonderful and caring person. I don’t know how old she was, but she must have been over 60 when I started school. She never drove so she caught a school bus from her house on the West hill above Locke, in the morning and ride it back at night. There were never many students attending, Leatrice and Beatrice Stevens (twins), Melvin Myers (our close friend and neighbor), Marcia Leonard, a very heavy girl who had to be transported by her parents because she lived out of the district. Marcia was supposed to go to the central school in Genoa, but the kids teased her so much about her weight that she was miserable and didn’t want to attend, so her parents brought her to us. She was one of my best friends all through high school and a wonderful and intelligent person. They wouldn’t let her attend college in Auburn, NY (one of the reasons why I never liked that city), because she was so much over-weight. Unfortunately she died in her early twenties from heart problems. Looking at the population today a high percentage of young girls are as big as Marcia was simply because of their poor eating habits, she was not that way because of poor eating habits. Others who attended school at Stuart’s Corners were Ruthie Baildon, Ronnie Stevens, the Geiger kids, and others but never more than eight or ten at a time. We had very hard winters during the forties and fifties, sometimes Mrs. Knapp couldn’t get to school or once she got there she couldn’t get home. She stayed overnight at the school. We had a coal stove in the center of the one big room, on cold days we would all pull our chairs up to the stove to keep warm and she would teach all of us there in a group. I’m not sure how good the education we received was but we were like one big family.

In back of the school was a long hill sloping to the west, the winter wind would beat the snow so hard you could slide down it on a sled. We would go out during lunch period and slide down the hill. Marcia Leonard couldn’t get back up the hill. We had to pull her up on the sled taking so long we would be late. Mrs. Knapp had to put a stop to that. The town put up snow fence along the road in the field next to the school. Snow would pile up eight and ten feet high behind that fence. It was so hard we used to build forts and tunnels in it, have snowball fights, we had a ball.

During a bad storm Mrs. Knapp had to walk partway home, froze a toe, got gangrene, and lost her toe. She couldn’t teach for quite a while so Mrs. Leonard, Marcia’s mother, made a long substation for her. She was a nice lady, but not quite as motherly as Mrs. Knapp.

Mel Myers, mentioned earlier, was a couple of years older than I and lived a few hundred feet down the hill west of us. Mel was a good friend, and would do anything for anyone, his only problem was he never thought very far ahead and was always in trouble, especially with his parents. It would take several pages to cover all the experiences we had with Mel. Art Myers, Mel’s father was the town of Venice road supervisor and a good hard-working person, but he couldn’t control Mel. Art had a vehicle called a doodle bug. It was an old truck chassis that had the frame shortened and the cab cut off. It had dual back wheels and could be used like a tractor. It still had the gearing of a truck, so it would go like a scared cat. Well, Mel loved to get hold of that vehicle when his dad wasn’t around and raise hell with it. One time when Art was working, Mel got the lock off the barn door and got the doodle bug out. He came up and got me and we built a ramp about two feet high in the driveway. He proceeded to drive up over the ramp at a high speed, traveling on two wheels for a short distance before it came back down. That was fine until Art came driving up the road and saw what was going on. Mel took off and couldn’t be found for a couple of days. Years later I was at a square dance with Mel. He had his usual pint of whiskey that he liked to finish off before the evening was over (I didn’t touch the stuff back then, even though he always wanted me to). On the way home we were flying down the road and came to a T, naturally he couldn’t stop so we kept going through a fence and plowed into a stock tank full of water. It was like hitting a ten foot wave, water came in both side windows. Fortunately we got the car out of there, fixed the fence and left. Another experience happened a few years later. Mel was dating Marjorie, one of Teddy’s friends. It was in the winter, there was lots of snow and we had dropped Marjorie off (Mel didn’t take her to the house because her father didn’t like him one bit). Then he tried to go through the snow bank in front of the barn and got stuck. He didn’t dare go to the house to ask for help, so he went to the barn and found a tractor that would start. It had a bucket with manure forks on it. He couldn’t find a chain to tow it so he came up behind the car, dropped the bucket down and put the forks under the rear to push the car. It was dark so he couldn’t see what he was doing, he put one of the fork tines through the gas tank. About then Marjorie’s father came out and it really hit the fan. Mel had to call his father to come and get us, you can imagine how that went over.