Harold’s Memories

EARLY MEMORIES

*note from the granddaughter : These are my grandfather’s memories, as he has written them.

Although I was born on a farm west of Linden, Michigan, 1 January 1926, we didn’t live there long enough for me to have any memories of it. The house was pointed out to me when I was old enough to be able to implant a picture of it in my memory.   My older brother, Charles, was born in that house on 17 December 1924.  My brother, Earl, was born in the same house on 15 February 1927.  The family moved to a house one mile west of Fenton, Michigan, on Silver Lake Road before any of the other children could be born.  I think the house we moved to was new.  It was built of cinder blocks, something seldom seen anymore.  Cinder blocks are lighter than concrete blocks and have a much rougher texture.  It was a small, one story house.  I think it was either bluish gray or sea foam green.  It was small, probably around 1,000 to 1,200 square feet.  That house was removed after World War II when US Route 23 was relocated to go right through the farm.  The on ramp from Silver Lake Road to southbound US 23 now covers the spot where the house once stood.  The rear of the farm is now covered by a large “Home Depot” store.  My brother Floyd was the first to be born in the new house.  It was on August 20, 1929.  Next came Victor on 14 November 1931.  When Floyd was little, he couldn’t pronounce Victor, so he called him Dictor.  Later, we all changed that to Dickey.  When we became teenagers, we started to call him Vic.  A brother, George, lived only a few days.  Although the Garnsey-Guernsey Genealogy lists him as being born in 1928, I believe he was born in 1933.  At least I remember a funeral in the living room of the cinder block house when Floyd and Vic were toddlers.  Vic entertained the relatives who were seated in a semi-circle facing a casket.  Although all were trying to act somber, it was all they could do to keep from laughing out loud.  A few days earlier, our dog, Brownie, had fallen through an open grate in the floor onto the top of the furnace and had to be rescued.  At the funeral Vic bounced out onto the middle of the floor and, pointing at the grate, proclaimed, “Doggie fall down in furnace, go boom!”  I think there were some titters.  They drove George’s body to Chesaning, Michigan for burial near the graves of Grandma and Grandpa Guernsey.  Barbara was the last Guernsey baby born in the cinder block house.  That was on 20 June 1934.  Dad’s oldest full brother, our Uncle Herman, lived with us.  He was a wonderful person.  If he is not in heaven, nobody else stands a chance of going there.  He was like a wise doting grandfather to us.  When I discovered that other kids didn’t have an Uncle Herman, I felt sorry for them as if they were deprived of their third parent.  Among other things, he made toys for us and taught us how to make some toys such as tractors made with a thread spool, a rubber band, a stick and a small block of paraffin wax.  I remember one time, after he made a kite, we flew it during a snow fall that completely hid the kite from view while it was in the sky.

Mom’s Uncle Pete Thorpe spent some time with us too.  He was a tall thin man who had a dignified manner.  I can’t remember if he stayed with us or commuted, but he came to help Uncle Herman build a school bus.  For some reason, Dad dedicated an acre of land out of our 40 acre farm on which to build a one or two room school house.  We went to school in that school and in Fenton.  But for the school on our farm, we had to have a bus to round up enough children to justify its existence.  The school board, of which Dad was the Director, authorized the bus and bought a truck chassis on which to build the bus body.  Uncle Pete and Uncle Herman were very good at that sort of thing and built the bus.  After we returned from Florida and lived north of Byron, Uncle Pete helped us rebuild an underground cistern for holding water for our livestock.  Part of that project involved lining it with bricks.  We kids helped, but Uncle Pete, although a good man, once scolded Charlie for laying bricks from a sitting position.  Somehow, that seemed improper to Uncle Pete.  

Back to the school bus—-Uncle Herman drove it and one irate parent, a man named Latimer, came out to the bus the morning after his child was bypassed.  Uncle Herman had waited many minutes for the kid to show up before we had to move on.  Mister Latimer blamed Uncle Herman instead of his kid.  He told Uncle Herman to come out of the bus and, when he did, Mr. Latimer hit Uncle Herman in the mouth.  Uncle Herman merely took his handkerchief out of his pocket, wiped the blood from his mouth and got back on the bus to finish his route.

I can’t remember very much about attending school in either of the schools in and near Fenton.  I do remember two things about my first day of school.  The big fuss people made of my lunch box when I got on the bus and getting yanked back by the teacher when I mistakenly headed for the girl’s toilet at recess.  I remember a Punch and Judy puppet show and a magic show.  The magic show frightened me when the magician fired a loud pistol at a rabbit, turning it into a bird.  I also remember a day when some people took another kid and me into the empty gymnasium and handed us a basketball and started taking notes on their clipboards.  They were probably graduate students of sociology.

Grandma and Grandpa Smithingell, Mom’s parents, lived across the road from the cinder block house until Grandma died. Grandpa then took turns living with his daughters.  Grandpa was very English in looks and demeanor.  He had a shock of white hair and bushy eyebrows.  During his waking hours he walked with a cane and often sat in a chair on the lawn with the cane across his lap.  Charlie liked to tease him and, although it was probably a game with him, Grandpa would act real gruff with Charlie.  At some point, Grandpa, with his gruff voice, would shout, “Oh—Fido!” to which Charlie would tease, “Calling your dog again, huh Grandpa?”  Grandpa would then swing the crooked end of his cane at Charlie as if to try to catch him.  Another memory of Grandpa involved a bad dream.  Prior to the night of the dream, we kids were playing with a neighbor boy around some box cars on a siding across the road from our house.  The boy told us that he was told it was dangerous to play around the tracks.  He had been told that a man had been shot in the belly by a tramp.  Well, that night, I was dreaming of playing around the box cars when Grandpa, who walked in his sleep, and didn’t use a cane when he walked in his sleep, but still went through the motions of using his cane, walked by my bed and his knuckle hit me in the middle of my belly.  I dreamed I had been shot.  The dream was so realistic that it is vivid to me to this day.

I remember visiting the home of the boy with whom we played on the tracks.  He was an only child and his father had a good job selling electrical appliances, so I was fascinated with the things they had in their home, including a bathroom, a refrigerator and a vacuum cleaner.  On hot days I would daydream that if a person had a refrigerator, he could park himself in front of it with the door open and be cool for hours.   

We loved to go into the town of Fenton.  It was very nice.  An outstanding memory I have of Fenton is of two old tramp-like guys who were always in town.  One of them was named Herb Dutton.  I can’t remember the name of the other.  One of them had a snare drum and the other had a base drum. All day long they would march up and down the sidewalks playing their drums.  Thurup-da-dup, thurup-da-dup, thurupa-da-duppa, thurup-da-dup.  We might have known where they slept at night, but I don’t remember.  Maybe in someone’s barn.  Maybe in an old shack somewhere.  Their only visible means of support was from change given to them by passers-by.  After one of them died, the other kept up the ritual of drumming his way back and forth through town.  

The D & C Store was a five and ten cent store similar to Woolworth’s.  Earl, Charlie and I were left in the car in front of the D & C Store when a man who thought we were cute, went into the store and came out with a bag of candy and handed it to us.  We had been warned to never take any candy given to us by strangers so we refused to eat it.  It baffled the guy.  A more scary incident happened when a younger man came by when we were left in the car in front of the same store.  He thought it would be real funny if he frightened us, so he pulled out his knife opened it up and said he was going to cut off our ears.  We thought he really was going to do it when he leaned through the window waving his knife at us.  He must have left when he saw somebody come our way.   

A more pleasant memory was of the “Scotch Highlanders”, a group that came to town one evening each week to entertain.  The merchants sponsored them once each week for the purpose of attracting customers to town.  They performed from the platform of a flatbed truck parked in the middle of Main Street.  They had bagpipes, drums and other instruments.  I was impressed with a base drummer who had a flexible drum stick attached to each wrist and would strike the drum from every direction.  He could even hit the left side of his drum with his right hand from around his back and the right side of the drum with his left hand in the same fashion.  Floyd and Vic were toddlers at the time and one night, while we were intently watching the performance, one of them disappeared.  We thought he had been kidnapped.  We panicked and had the whole crowd looking for him.  It turned out that he had gotten tired, gone to a green 1928 Chevy like ours and had gone to sleep.

The D & C Store had a black baby doll, although Fenton had no black people at that time. Vic wanted it badly.  After visits to the store over several weeks, the folks finally broke down and bought it for him.  He carried it around tucked under his arm until it had completely dissolved. 

We were warned to avoid strangers.  One day, when we three older kids were walking home from Sunday school in Fenton, a car pulled up beside us with 3 women in it.  They offered us a ride, which we refused.  They were insistent about it so we climbed up on the ditch bank as far from them as we could and kept on walking.  They finally left us, but when we got home they were there.  We found out they were older cousins.  Everybody had a good laugh at our expense.

We learned about skunks when we lived in the cinder block house.  One day Brownie, our dog that was given to us by Aunt Maude, was barking his fool head off at some bushes out behind the house.  We kids ran to see what Brownie was so excited about.  It was the first skunk we had ever encountered.  Brownie got squirted and we got squirted.  Mom put a laundry tub of water outside, had us pull off all of our clothes and washed us and soaked our clothes.

One day we found a cluster of baby garter snakes.  They were entertaining for about an hour, but they weren’t nearly as exciting as the encounter with the skunk.  Same as when we found a garter snake in the process of swallowing a frog.

I don’t remember if we were still at the cinderblock house, or if we had moved on, but one of the babies got folded into an old imitation leather davenport that could be opened into a bed.  We were frantic trying to remember where we had misplaced the baby.  Finally, after several minutes, Mom remembered folding the davenport up and realized the baby must be in there.  As far as I know, the baby was OK when we recovered it. We didn’t go to the doctor very often.  One time they took me because my breath smelled so bad it was hard to be near me.  The doctor examined me and said I had beans growing in my sinuses.  I must have stuffed them in my nose and they stayed there until they sprouted.  Mom had a lot of folk cures.  When we were coming down with colds, she would chop up onions and put them in one of the little cloth bags that salt used to come in.  She would then hang the bag on the warming oven, which was above the cooking surface on those old wood-burning ranges.  She placed a bowl under the bag and would catch the drippings until she had about a cup of “onion syrup.”  She would give us each a teaspoonful of the syrup, which tasted sweet.  I later learned that the reason it worked was because onions are very rich in vitamin C.  If we stepped on a rusty nail, she would make a poultice of ground up flaxseed, put it on the wound and wrap a piece of cloth around the foot.  We never got tetanus.  When we lived in Byron, a little girl got tetanus, which we called lockjaw, and died.  Mom’s remedies worked.

We raised berries and vegetables on the farm, most of which we sold at a “roadside stand.”  Dad and Uncle Herman planted fruit trees, but they take longer to produce and I don’t think we had a marketable crop of apples or peaches by the time we sold the farm and moved to Florida.  When the berries and vegetables were ready for harvest, Dad would go into Fenton and hire a bunch of teenagers to pick them.  We sold the produce at a roadside stand in front of the house.  Mom was quite ethical about the business.  She insisted that we not put the largest berries on the top of the containers like many of the less ethical produce sellers would do.  She considered that cheating.  I don’t think Dad utilized us kids enough.  Still, we seemed to get by for a family of 3 adults and 5 kids, at that time.  Of course, Dad and Uncle Herman would get temporary jobs from time to time.  For one thing, Dad was musical.  He played the piano, violin and harmonica.  He would play the piano for old time dances in and around Fenton.  The standard pay for playing for a dance was $5 per night and all the beer one could drink.  That was good pay in those days.  Dad really wasn’t a drinker, but I think he felt he had to take advantage of the perks that went with the job, so he did drink at the dance halls while he was playing.  He taught Mom how to play “the chords” on the piano so she could accompany him while he played the fiddle.  He had a rack, which rested on his shoulders and held a harmonica so he could play the piano and harmonica at the same time.  If he woke up with a hangover, Mom would sober him up with dill pickles.  Since prohibition didn’t go out until 1933 and we left for Florida in late 1934, that routine didn’t last too long.

Dad liked to sing.  Some of the songs he would sing, or play, or both, were:

                Whispering

                Georgette  (I’ve never heard this one any other place than our home.)

                Goodbye My Lady Love  (Mom sang with him on this one.)

                South of the Border – Down Mexico Way

                Midnight Fire Alarm

                Too Much Mustard

                Under The Bamboo Tree

                Abba Dabba Dabba

                Ten Little Fingers (A new father wrote this one.)

                 Rock Me to Sleep In My Old Kentucky Home

                 Oceana Roll

                 Row Row Row

                 He Had to Get Under  (To fix his automobile.)

                 Let The Rest of The World Go By

There were others, of course, but it is hard to think of them all at once.  He liked to play ragtime tunes and I liked to listen to them.  Dad playing ragtime music and circus bands playing circus music were my favorites.  Many circus tunes in those days were ragtime, and that was great.   A neighbor couple had an orchard with several varieties of apples.  They were both deaf.  Dad gave Chuck, Earl and me a note one time and sent us to get some apples.  It was an awkward experience.  The man would hand us different types of apples and motion for us to taste them so that he could determine which kind to send home with us.  Somehow or other, we came home with suitable apples.

Later, when we lived in Byron, Dad would drive us to Mr. Hyde’s orchard in Fenton to buy apples.  We always bought them by the bushel.  Most of the apples that the commercial orchards sold were picked, but we bought mostly windfalls for a fraction of what picked apples would cost.  I can’t remember the prices, but Mr. Hyde probably gave us special deals of 25 cents or 50 cents a bushel.  

Aunt Maude’s husband, Burt Garrison, worked in one of the General Motors plants in Flint and, even though real jobs were very hard to get in those days, Uncle Bert was able to talk his foreman into getting Dad into a job at his plant.  Dad worked for a short time, maybe weeks or maybe just days, but the night shift bothered him so much, he quit.  Dad had been spoiled by his mother, my mother, Uncle Herman and Aunt Maude.  When he was growing up, his mother had his brothers and sisters sacrifice so that Dad could have piano lessons.  But Dad was charming and a lot of fun.  Vic might have inherited his charm from Dad. Actually, Dad did work in Ford’s Model T factory in Highland Park, Michigan before he got married.  Dad, Aunt Maude and Uncle Herman all worked there at the same time.  They were all single at that time. I don’t know where they lived during that period.  I would guess they lived in rented rooms at a boarding house.

During prohibition, Aunt Maude Garrison made beer and Uncle Bert was caught selling it once and had to go to jail.  As well as I can remember, he stayed in jail only a few days. Mom once told Betsy, “Maude made darned good whiskey, too!” Maybe it was the whiskey rather than the beer that Uncle Bert was caught selling.

Probably my most wonderful memory of our days in the cinder block house was the day the circus trains went by.  The Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus traveled by train.  Actually, several trains, following one after another.  Most of the cars were twice as long as normal train cars and they were very colorful.  The ornate circus wagons were mounted on flat cars so one could see them in all their glory.  When the first train went by, we stopped in the middle of the work we were doing in the hay field and Dad rushed to the piano to play and sing, “Oh, You Circus Day!” Other than Dad playing and singing it, I have never heard it except on two recordings I was able to find.  It went:

                                    Oh my little honey, pin a rose on me,

                                  For I am just as happy as a bumble bee.

                                  Got to see that big parade.

                                  Got to hear that old calliope played.

                                  Can’t you hear the band a-comin’ up the street?

                                  Gotta get back and get a ticket for a big box seat.

                                  Let’s go!  Let’s go!  Oh ain’t that circus grand?

           Chorus:           Let’s go!  Let’s go!  We’ve got to see that show!

                                  Ohhh you circus day, you come around but once a year.

                                  Ohhh my honey, ain’t you glad you’re here?  

                                  See that great big funny clown.  

                                  See those acrobats tumbling around.

                                  Look out!!—for that big grizzly bear. He’s a fright. He’ll bite.

                                  See those monkeys all dressed up in pants.

                                  See them do the hootchy-kootchy dance. (Here, Dad would   

                                  insert a few bars of hootchy-kootchy music.)       

                                   All the sideshows, will investigate.

                                   All the monkeys, they will pesterate.

                                   Ohhhh —  you circus day!!

We got up real early the next morning to go to Flint to watch them unload and put the circus together.  It was a magnificent experience.  I wish everybody could, at some time in his or her life, watch them put up a major circus tent.  It’s really hard to describe.  They laid out a humongous stretch of canvas and set some very tall poles, which were like the masts of sailing vessels, at holes in the canvas.  The poles had pulleys attached to the tops from which ropes came down to the ground and under the canvas.  Then they had crews of very athletic men drive large tent stakes around the perimeter.  There would be about 5 or 6 men around each stake with sledge hammers.  They would strike the stakes one after another in a rhythm that would sound like a machine gun.  Some of the ropes that were laid under the canvas would be tied to the stakes.  Other ropes that were also laid under the canvas were hitched to teams of horses (about 6 horses to a team) and to elephants with leather harnesses.  They were completely around the perimeter of the canvas, facing away from the canvas.  The magic moment came when a signal was given and all of the teams and elephants would move out from the canvas, which rose to become a large circus tent.  The horses and elephants were used the rest of the  morning to move wagons and other stuff.  We watched one horse fall dead in its harness.  They just dragged it away in a routine manner as if it was an everyday occurrence and replaced it with another horse.  That was the only sad note I can remember from that day.

Dad was very enthusiastic about circuses.  More so than anybody else I have ever met.  To understand the enthusiasm, one should read a book, “Gus The Great!”  It is out of print, but I have a copy if anyone should want to borrow it.   Some of that enthusiasm rubbed off on us kids.  We went to circuses whenever we could afford it.  And sometimes when we couldn’t afford it. We went to Flint one time without money when the afternoon performance of the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus was scheduled.  We might have been living in Byron at the time.  As we were watching the flurry of activity in preparation for the show, a roustabout (circus worker) approached us and asked if we kids would like to earn tickets for the evening show.  We said, “Sure!!!!!”  We were to go around under the bleachers, pick up pop bottles and put them in crates during the afternoon performance.  In those days, they served pop in bottles instead of the paper cups they use today.  We probably would have done it even if we weren’t promised tickets because it put us in the tent where we could hear the exciting music of the circus band, still one of my favorite types of music. He said he couldn’t give a ticket to Dad because they didn’t use adults to pick up bottles, but he would get Dad in if he met the man at a certain place at a specific time.  There was a bit of risk in the job because we had to dodge the falling bottles while picking up others.  But, for a couple of hours we were part of the circus, and the danger was not great enough for us to give up show business.  The roustabout was true to his word and we attended the evening performance.  It was like going to the circus twice without having to pay for either performance!  

One time two circuses came to Flint on the very same day.  One was the Cole Brothers/Clyde Beaty Circus and the other was the Haggenback & Wallace Circus.  The next day, arguments went on all day as to which was the best.  But, since nobody saw both, how could they make a comparison?  We saw the Cole Brothers/Clyde Beaty show and it was clearly the best. 

   We saw some smaller circuses too, some of which Mom would disdainfully call, “Dog & Pony Shows.”  A small circus came to Durand when we didn’t have any money, but we went over to Durand anyway.  We didn’t have the opportunity to earn our way into it, so we sat on some boxes next to the tent so we could listen to the circus band.  It was no dog and pony show because it had an excellent band.  Trapeze performances were always done to waltzes in those days (some are still done to waltzes) and, in my mind, I can still hear the excellent trumpet player play a waltz called, “My Wonderful One.”  I haven’t heard that tune played for many years.  I might try to find a recording of it someday.  It is a waltz referred to as a hesitation waltz, ideal for a trapeze performance. 

We kids would sometimes play circus for days following a circus.  We would put Brownie and cats and any other animal we could catch in crates pretending the crates were cages and haul them around in our wagon.  We would swing on the rigging in the barn that was there for stacking hay.  

While we are talking about circuses, I want to mention some that took place since I’ve been an adult.  One was in 1945 while I was an enlisted man in the Air Force, stationed at a place called Knobnoster, Missouri.  The Ringling Brothers Circus came to Kansas City about 50 miles away.  Of course, when I heard about it, I just had to get a pass so I could go.  Pregnant Betsy was with me at the time and we didn’t have quite enough money for round trip train tickets plus tickets to the circus, so we hitch hiked to the circus and rode back on the train.  Our longest ride to Kansas City was in the cab of a milk truck.  Because I was a serviceman in uniform, they gave us seats in the front row facing the center ring at the circus.  One of the dancing girls, doing the job she was hired to do, looked straight at me and smiled.  Betsy got mad, or pretended to get mad, and glowered  back.  When our granddaughters were about 2 ½ and 5, the last of the big tent circuses, the Cole Brothers Circus, came to Lexington.  Our nephew, Marc Cox, was visiting us at the time and I took the three of them to the circus. It was a dreary, rainy, foggy day and the tent was in terrible condition with gaping holes in the top.  Since the crowd was sparse, they gave just about all of us what would normally have been reserved seats to keep us away from the rain coming through the gaping holes in the roof of the tent.  We sat next to the band.  When they set up the apparatus for the trapeze act, we were directly under the platform from which the performers operated.  I had never seen a trapeze performance from that angle before and was amazed at the speed at which it took place.  At one point, little 2 ½ year old Angie, who refused to talk very much at that age, kept pounding me on the arm.  When I tried to find out what she wanted, she pointed to the end of the tent.  I couldn’t see anything but fog down there for a while, but then I made out elephants that were the same color as the fog waiting to make their entrance.  I think Angie was the first person in the whole audience to spot them.  It would have made a dramatic photograph.  As miserable as the tent and the weather were, it was a memorable circus.   Years later, when Elizabeth was a pretty teenager, I took her to the Ringling Brothers Circus at Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky.  Since we were seated several minutes before the show was to begin, clowns were mingling through the audience, entertaining us.  One came up to Elizabeth and me and loudly asked, “Who is this lovely young lady?”  I said, “This is my granddaughter.” He panned around to the audience with that skeptical look clowns can put on and shouted, “That’s a likely story!!”  Of course everybody roared.

Dad took us to the Michigan State fair one time and, although I can’t remember much of what we saw or did while at the fair, I can remember our grand entry.  There were so many of us that Dad didn’t want to go to the expense of buying individual tickets, so he approached the gate people, pointed at us, and asked, “How much for the whole bunch?”  They got their heads together in a little conference and came up with a price which was a fraction of what the actual admission price would have been and waved us through without tickets.  He might have pulled that trick at a circus or two also.  Earl tells me he did it at a circus.  The incident at the fair was the one I could remember.  

SUNDAYS AT BYRON:  (This is out of sequence, but I typed it first and don’t know how to reposition it with Microsoft Word and don’t want to type it all over again.)

We mostly followed a routine on Sundays.  We got up at a time not much different than on weekdays. After breakfast, we took our weekly baths.  We did not have bathrooms in those old farm houses.  No running water.  A galvanized laundry wash tub was placed in the middle of the living room floor and water was heated in kettles and/or a ‘double boiler’ on the wood burning kitchen range and brought to the tub.  We each had a set of Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.  How the folks were able to provide them for such a large family with such meager resources is still a mystery.  Uncle Herman, who had already been to the formal church service, returned to take us to Sunday school.  Chuck was always the last to be ready and we would have to wait on him.  Sometimes we would drive a few yards down the road and he would have to run to catch up.  We kids seldom attended the formal church services which preceded Sunday school in Byron.  Mom and Dad — we called them Ma and Daddy in the early days — seldom went to any services except for Mother’s Day and Christmas.  

We usually got to the Byron Baptist Church between the formal service and Sunday school.  Children went to the basement of the church while the adults had their classes on the main floor.  The Baptist Church was a plain white wooden structure with a belfry containing a real bell, which was rung with a rope before each church service and before each Sunday school service.

On special Sundays, we children would practice a couple of songs in the basement, then march up to the sanctuary and sing for the adults.  We kids would grumble among ourselves that we had to sing for the adults on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, 

Christmas, Easter, etc., and even on Children’s Day and the adults were never made to sing for the children.  When we got older and played musical instruments, we were sometimes asked to prepare hymns to play for the congregation.  I don’t recall resenting it.  The old ladies would always come up to us after dismissal and tell us how much they enjoyed our performances.  Besides, there was one gentleman, Mr. Pratt, in his late nineties who would occasionally get up in front of the congregation and strum his banjo and sing, usually a song called, “Tell My Mother I’ll Be There.”  If he could entertain, so could we.

I can remember two Sunday school teachers for Earl, Chuck and me.  They were from our junior high and high school days.  One was a prudish woman that we didn’t enjoy very much.  I think the elders must have recognized that because, after a few years, they gave us a gentleman whose last name was Eddy.  He was a joy.   I can’t remember his first name, but, since the adult men called each other Brother This or Brother That, we called him Brother but with a twist.  He spoke with an accent and pronounced his th’s as d’s.  So we called him “Brudder Eddy.”  We loved him.  He made Sunday school enjoyable.  Brudder Eddy was well-to-do compared to us and most of the other people around Byron.  He was a railroad engineer who lived in Durand but came to Byron for church and Sunday school.  He drove a big Buick.  One time he took the class to Detroit to a Tiger’s ball game.  That was a big time treat for us. We were heart broken when he fell across the tracks in the railroad marshalling yard in Durand and a train ran over him cutting his legs off.  He died within hours.  Memories of one Sunday school classmate still haunt me.  He was a ward of the state.  They call such kids foster children today.  He was farmed out to a holier than thou type family who treated him cruelly, working him to a frazzle.  I can’t remember his name, but wherever he is now, I hope he is exceptionally successful.  Brudder Eddy was probably one of only a few people who treated him decently.         

After Sunday school, we would stop by Doc Foster’s Drug Store and buy the Sunday edition of the Detroit Times and two King Edward cigars for Daddy.  King Edwards were two for a nickel in those days.  During the warmest days of summer we would also buy a block of ice and put it on the front bumper to bring home so we could make ice cream.  When we got home, we would change our clothes, put the block of ice in a burlap bag, which we called a gunny sack, and smack it with the broad side of an ax until it was pulverized enough to use in our wooden, hand cranked ice cream freezer.  We would take turns turning the crank until it became difficult to turn.  We would then put the gunny sack with the remaining crushed ice on top of the freezer and proceed to the dinner table.  

While we kids and Uncle Herman were away at Sunday school, Mom and Dad took their baths and cooked the Sunday dinner.  Sunday dinner, which was a midday meal, was the biggest meal of the week.  Most of the time it was either chicken and dumplings, pot roast, ham, pork chops or a casserole.  When it was chicken, before we took our baths, we had to catch them with six foot long wire hooks and chop their heads off.  We developed bad eating habits in those days, which would be detrimental to us in later life.  We ate more than we should have.  Mom was a good cook and we always had all the trimmings with our Sunday dinner, including dessert.  Nobody had heard of cholesterol back in those days.  We always poured cream on our deserts.  No matter what we had for dessert, Dad always had to have one of Mom’s homemade cookies with which to chase the meal down, even after he had eaten his dessert.  Supper on Sunday nights was “bread-n-milk”, pop corn and apples.  For “bread-n-milk” we broke bread into mugs poured milk into them and ate with spoons.  For the pop corn, we would pop two large dishpans full before any one was allowed to start eating.  The popping continued after that until all were satisfied.

Sunday afternoons we mostly did the usual kid things, but among the more enjoyable activities was taking our instruments over to the neighboring Thompsons where we joined with other kids in the area to play music for our own amusement.  I can remember the names of two of the three Thompson girls, Anna and Helen, but not the other.  Others joining in were Eugene and Douglas Swartz.  Their brother, Harvey Swartz, didn’t play an instrument.

Once in awhile, Dad would load the whole bunch of us in the car and take us on an excursion.  One of our favorite places was Meyer’s Lake, which was a short drive.  There was a merry-go-round, which played barrel organ type music from punched paper rolls.  The refreshment stand sold Nehi Soda Pop among other things.  Everything cost a nickel including a water slide, which required those participating to climb to the roof of the pavilion and get on a wheeled dolly to ride down to the water.  I don’t think any of us ever went on the water slide.  A nickel for a three or four second ride seemed too extravagant for us.  I think we might have ridden the merry-go-round on an occasion and I remember drinking some orange Nehi Pop.  But the most fun was swimming, which, because we would change in the car, was free.  People using the bathhouse to change had to pay a nickel.  It was hard for the folks to get me out of the water when it was time to go home.  There was also a roller rink at Meyer’s Lake, but it wasn’t until I was in high school and earning my own money that I got to go there.  

There were two annual events that also took us to Meyer’s Lake.  One was the school picnic in which the whole school, elementary, junior high, and high school went there on buses.  There must have been some fund set aside by the school to do it because refreshments were served to all.  I remember an ice cream truck coming and, after the ice cream was distributed, the ice cream man would throw the left over dry ice—solid carbon dioxide—out on the beach and we kids would pile sand and pour water on it to make volcanoes.  The other event was the Thorpe reunion.  The Thorpes were Mom’s relatives.  We saw our many aunts, uncles and cousins on her side there.  The Whites, who had kids my age didn’t always make it, but the Thorpe girls, Ethyl, Arlene and Pat, did.  One of things I remember best from those reunions was the fancy car Uncle Arthur Smithingell brought.  My mother’s brother, Uncle Arthur Smithingell, always had a good job in construction, even during the depression, and, since he had no children at that time, had quite a bit of discretionary money.  He bought an Auburn  convertible.  At least, I think it was an Auburn.  It was impressive.  It was like those the movie stars drove in those days.  Big!  He took some of us kids for a ride in it, maybe more than once.  But the time I can remember, I put my foot through a loud speaker that was on the floor.  He had intended to install it.  I ruined it. He didn’t scold me.  He was a kind man and he was good to us.  We liked to visit him.  He let us use his pool table.  One time when we were playing pool, Uncle Art had another visitor who was retarded.  When I remember that visit, I feel ashamed that we kids snickered at him.  I would like to have second chances to do some things right.  Uncle Art’s first wife’s name was Hazel.  She could have no children.  In those days, they described her as barren.  After their divorce, he married Aunt Harriet who bore him several children, one of whom became a star football player at Northwood Institute in Midland, Michigan.  We saw him play once in Georgetown, Kentucky.  He was the star of the game.  Uncle Art wouldn’t sit with his wife at the game.  He sat right behind the player’s bench, while she sat on the top bleacher row.  He said she made too much noise for him.  When Uncle Art was still with Hazel, Uncle Hazen lived with them.  Uncle Hazen was a bachelor and adored by all of his sisters.  He was not as kind as Uncle Art though.  One time when I was about 6 years old, while he was smoking a cigarette, he told me to watch his ear to see him blow smoke out of his ear.  While I was staring at his ear, he burned me with his cigarette.  He thought it was hilarious.  Hazen probably had some good qualities, but I can’t help but remember that incident.    

We went to the zoo in Royal Oak at least once.  We brought our own food, of course.  A picnic.  We went to Belle Isle a couple of times when we were kids.  On one occasion, it was for the big speed boat race.  At that time Garr Wood was racing.  All I can remember about the race was the loud roaring up and down the Detroit River.  I don’t know if Garr Wood won.  Another time on Belle Isle, I remember canoes or rowboats on some little canals in a park like setting.  The people renting them were dressed in their Sunday best with hats and gloves on the ladies and blazers and flat top straw hats on the men.  Each canoe had a wind-up phonograph.   It was the stuff of which Renoir would make a painting.

Sometimes we would visit relatives.  When we went to Saginaw to visit our cousins, the Whites, we would stay Saturday night and go to Sunday school with them.  My most vivid memory of those visits was returning from Sunday school past a black church with its door open and we sat on the steps to hear the beautiful singing of the black congregation.  The Whites had two boys, Lester and Douglas, and two girls, Carlotta and Eleanor.  Their parents were Uncle Don and Aunt Helen.

Sometimes the Whites would visit us for a weekend.  The time I remember best was when we had a small white horse we called Topsy.  Although we had the team of Babe and Nell, the folks got Topsy so we kids could use it to cultivate with a one horse cultivator.  Topsy did not like to be ridden, but we would ride her anyway.  We didn’t have a saddle for her.   One of her favorite tricks when a kid was riding her was to gallop to a fence, put on the brakes and drop her head down throwing the kid over the fence.  Then it was a matter of catching her all over again.  Well, when Uncle Don looked out to see Lester tossed over the fence, he went berserk!  Needless to say, we had to give Topsy the rest of the day off.  

When a tornado, which, in those days, we called cyclones, hit a few miles from us.  Dad heard about it and loaded us into the car so we could go see the damage.   

When were living in a cinder block house near Fenton, three steam engines that were deadheading east on the track that was across the road from our place, caught our attention as they flew by.  In a few minutes, the earth shook.  They had crashed head on into a freight train coming from Holly.  The wreck occurred about half way between Fenton and Holly.  So, naturally, Dad had to load us into the car so we could go see a train wreck.

When the famous General Motors sit-down strike was on in Flint, Dad loaded us into the car to go see the machine gun nests amidst the sand bags.

Hot air balloon ascensions were pretty primative in those days.  But Dad took us to one in Durand.  They had dug a trench about four feet deep, four feet wide and twelve feet long.  Then they laid out the balloon at one end.  They built a fire in the trench and held the mouth of the balloon over the fire until the balloon was upright and filled.  It was anchored with some ropes.  When the magic moment came, the balloon started to rise and a man in tights dashed out of nowhere and grabbed a trapeze under the gondola just as they released it.  The man performed on the trapeze until he was too far away for the crowd to make out.  Then, a series of parachutes appeared.  I assume they had sandbags suspended from them.  The man must have come down with a parachute too, but it was too far away to see.  We got in the car and tried to follow, but we never did see the balloon come down.

OTHER OUTINGS:

Sometimes Dad would get restless and just want to go someplace.  Visiting Aunt Maude and Uncle Bert was a frequent trip.  Aunt Maude was Dad’s sister who was ten years older than Dad.  I remember one visit when the temperature must have been near Zero and they lived between Holly and Pontiac on what used to be called the Dixie Highway.  That part of the old Dixie Highway has been replaced by Interstate 75.  The heaters in those old cars were totally inadequate and we had to continually stomp our feet to keep them from freezing.  I don’t remember the purpose of that trip, but Dad sometimes called on Aunt Maude for financial help.  Other visits to Aunt Maude were more pleasant.  I liked them best when Aunt Maude lived in a place which was north of Linden and east of Gaines.  Aunt Maude was an excellent cook and made dishes that were exotic to us.  Roast goose for example.   And frog legs.  There was a vacant house near their place and one time we kids went over to explore it with our dog Brownie and Aunt Maude’s Boston terrier Penny.  There must have been tramps in the house because when we got inside the dogs went into a frenzy, barking their heads off.  We were so scared we were back at Aunt Maude’s place in seconds.  If track officials had been there with stop watches we would have been given medals for a new speed record.  We never explored that house again.  There were numerous tramps and hobos in those depression days.  

Aunt Maude and Uncle Bert were childless for many years, but finally adopted a boy.  They named him Harold.  I think he was about 7 years younger than I was.  He was allergic cow’s milk, so they bought a goat and milked it for Harold.  

I don’t know how we would have survived without Aunt Maude and Uncle Herman.  Dad “borrowed” from both of them.  When we lived in the cinder block house, Dad had gone deer hunting with some of his friends and he came back empty handed and broke but Aunt Maude financed him to another hunting trip.  Aunt Maude and Uncle Bert spent most winters in Arizona and would always bring us presents on their return.  One time she gave us a tent, which we kept and enjoyed for years.  She gave us our dog Brownie.  Brownie was actually black but we still called him Brownie.  We knew better but Brownie didn’t.  Aunt Maude was like a mother to Dad and like a grandmother to us kids. After they adopted Harold, they would tow a trailer behind their car on their trips to Arizona so they could take their goat with them.  

We also liked to visit Aunt Faye and Uncle Willie Atherton.  Aunt Faye was one of Mom’s sisters.  They had a farm east of Gaines.  It was a fascinating place, full of antiques.  They never had electricity while we were growing up.  They had an old wooden washing machine that was powered by pushing a lever back and forth.  We kids liked to work the lever.  We also liked to go to their attic and play with their old hand cranked console Victrola.  They had a stack of old thick 78 RPM records, one of which was a guy reciting Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  We would also play with their old pump organ.  I don’t know how they could put up with a mob of kids playing with all of their possessions, which today would be priceless, but they were sweet, gentle people who tolerated more than most people would.  They were good to us.  In addition to farming, Uncle Willie had a farm truck in which he would haul people’s livestock to the stockyards.

Our longest excursion was to Florida in late 1934.  We sold the farm with the cinder block house and intended to live permanently in Florida.  It didn’t work out that way, of course, but Dad had heard that people living in Florida had an easy life.  That if you slept under an orange tree your breakfast would fall down to you in the morning.  With some of the proceeds from the sale of the farm Dad bought an extra car.  We left for Florida with two identical 1928 green Chevrolets.  We must have left some of our belongings with Aunt Maude.  Barbara, who was the last one born in the cinder block house, was a baby 5 or 6 months old.  My arm was in a cast at time.  I had broken it a few days before while climbing around in an old abandoned cement factory. We had two 

 cars with three adults, six children and a dog.  I can remember stuff strapped  even to the back bumpers.  It took us five days to make the trip.  In those depression days people who had more room in their houses than they needed would rent out rooms to tourists.  The first night on the road, we stayed in such a house.  I’m sure that if we had tried to stay at that house on our return trip our hosts would have found some excuse to turn us away. The family at that house lived on the first floor and we were above their living room on the second floor.  There was a register in the middle of the floor of our room, which provided us with a view of them in their living room.  I still feel ashamed of spying on them until they retired for the night.  On another night we stopped at some tourist cabins and, after Dad had negotiated a price for the night, we started piling out the cars and the owner saw how many of us there were and stormed out to tell us the price was supposed to be, fifty cents a “poison!”  He meant person, of course.  We moved on to another place.  For a long time, Mom was amused by the man’s accent.  In the morning after one overnight stay, Chuck (Charlie in those days) was trying to get Brownie relocated in the car that Uncle Herman was driving while the car was in motion and fell out into a rock lined ditch.  We were all alarmed at the time, but, after a few minutes of examining him, Mom decided he was fit to travel.  Food for the trip was another matter.  Mom had cooked up lots of chicken and other stuff.  I was embarrassed, as I’m sure my brothers also were, when we stopped at a rustic restaurant, carried in our own food, and ordered milk.  Uncle Arthur and Aunt Hazel also traveled to Florida that year.  We had made plans to meet them in Lake City.  Since they made the trip in two or three days, they were waiting for us when we got there.  They were just there for a vacation, so we didn’t see them for very long.  We went on to rent a house at 515 West Patterson Street in Lakeland.  The house was still there and looked exactly the same in 1960 when I relocated my family to Lakeland while I went to spend a year in Saudi Arabia.  We enjoyed our stay in Florida, but our money ran out and there were no jobs for Dad or Uncle Herman.  So after about six weeks or so, we headed back to Michigan.  Some of my best memories of Florida were the fun programs we had at school and exploring the neighborhood.  We prepared a picnic for a Christmas trip to Silver Springs, but when we were underway and asked for directions, a man told us it was, “A right smart piece.”  So we altered our plans and went to Sulfur Springs where we spread our picnic out by a small lake.  It was delightful to have a picnic on Christmas day. 

While we were still in Florida, Dad heard that Miami was 

 place to see.  He couldn’t afford to take us all so he started out by himself.  He was gone for only a couple days and told us Miami was too far, so he went only as far as Palm Beach.

When our money ran out we had to return to Michigan.  We had already sold one of our 1928 Chevys, so we had to cram three adults, six children, a dog and other stuff into our remaining 1928 Chevy.  I remember crossing a toll bridge which charged for the number of passengers in a car, so dad had as many of us as possible lay down on top of each other on the floor to reduce our toll.  The toll taker might have spotted our deception, but in those days, probably pretended he didn’t.

The trip back to Michigan didn’t take as long as the trip down to Florida.  I really can’t remember staying overnight, although we might have.  The one memory I do have of that return was stopping in Bowling Green Kentucky.  We didn’t have enough money for gas and other necessities, so Dad had to wire for help.  I thought it was to Aunt Maude, but Chuck said it was a real estate agent in Fenton named Fred Clark.  Chuck is probably right.  We waited at the town square for the money to be wired back.  The town square was like a park surrounded by stores on all four sides.   We kids were sitting on the fenders and hood of the car when a midget came by.  A popular tune at that time was “Little Man, You’ve Had a Busy Day.”  Little Vic couldn’t resist singing out, “Little Man, You’ve Had a Busy Day” as the little man passed in front of us.  We did our best to restrain our laughter until the little guy was out of earshot.

When we got to Fenton, we rented a nice big house for $10 per month until we could get more permanently settled.  We then bought the Kitson farm one mile straight north of Byron.  That was in 1935.  The farm was 80 acres, but the sale also included 40 acres of woods about a quarter mile away.  The soil was not very productive, but we did manage to grow navy beans (which are now called great northern beans), wheat and oats.  We initially had sheep.  I think they came with the farm sale.  There was also wild life.  Chuck trapped minks, muskrats, skunks and rabbits and sold the pelts to Dan Hadden in Fenton.  He would get about 5 to 10 dollars for the minks, 2 or 3 dollars for the skunks and muskrats and a few cents for the rabbits.  Dad bought a shotgun to shoot pheasants, but we were never able to hit one.  The first shotgun was a 410 gauge.  Dad decided a larger gun was necessary, so he traded the 410 gauge for a 16 gauge.  That one was no more successful than the smaller one, although I was able to shoot rabbits with it in my senior year of high school when I was working for Mrs. Walts for my room and board on her poultry farm.  Chuck had a subscription for a magazine called, “Open Road For Boys.”  He found plans in it for building a figure four trap, making use of an empty bee hive box.  He was determined to shoot a pheasant.  We set it up on the rear of the farm near the Ann Arbor Railroad tracks, which bordered our farm.  We baited it with corn and found it tripped the following morning.  Chuck got the gun ready and had me lift the box.  As I lifted it, the pheasant flew out and Chuck fired.  The pheasant wasn’t phased, but I felt the whoosh of wind as the blast missed me too.  We didn’t try that again.  

The Kitson farm was the place that had the cistern for storing water for livestock that had to be repaired by relining it with bricks.  

We had some cows, chickens and pigs.  We also had three horses, Babe, Nell and Topsy.  For my 4H project, I raised a pig.  Earl and Chuck raised lambs.   Mr. Hath, the superintendent of the Byron schools, had us take our animals to the Shiawassee  County Fair.  We stayed in tents for about 3 days.  My pig eventually got cholera and had to be destroyed. 

Uncle Fred, not to be confused with our newfound brother Fred, came to stay with us at the Kitson farm.  Dad bought a Model A pickup truck with which Uncle Fred was to deliver cordwood from our woods.  Earl learned to drive using that Model A.  Chuck and I learned to drive on a 1933 Chevy.  In those days, we got drivers’ licenses at age 12.  Back to Uncle Fred and the wood delivery, it didn’t work out.  Uncle Fred was an alcoholic and was not too reliable.  Besides, it didn’t make sense to cut up sugar maple trees for wood to burn.  Dad then contracted with a lumber company to make lumber out of the marketable maple trees.  They set up a sawmill right in the woods.  

More about Uncle Fred:  Mom didn’t like him too much because of his drinking.  He turned cider into hard cider, an alcoholic concoction, in the basement of the Kitson house.  One time he came to our house with a drinking buddy.  He parked his 1928 green Chevy coupe at the end of the driveway and got out carrying a lit kerosene lantern in the middle of the day.  He was drunk, of course.  Mom yelled at him, “What in the world do think you’re doing?”  Uncle Fred shouted, “We’re looking for daylight!”  Mom didn’t think the performance was as funny as Uncle Fred and his buddy did.  Aunt Maude didn’t care much for Uncle Fred either.  They had sort of a running feud going.  Uncle Fred didn’t seem to have a home.  He just worked around as a hired hand.  We visited him once when he had a regular job though.  It was at a tuberculosis sanitarium.  I don’t remember the geographic location, but it might have been near Howell.  His job was taking care of the animals on the large farm, which was part of the facility.  I was impressed with the large bull that he showed off to us.

During our high school years, Earl, Chuck and I owned a 1933 Chevy in partnership.  We used it to get to the peppermint fields and apple orchards to earn money.  Uncle Fred wanted to buy it after a work season was over.  Mom and I took it to Flint where Uncle Fred lived so he could test drive it.  While we were test driving it on the highway between Flint and Linden, a drunk came from the opposite direction.  He lost control of his car and it spun around and around.  The rear end of his car crashed into the front end of our car.  We were all unhurt and we all piled out to inspect the damage.  The drunk pointed at the rear end of his car and demanded, “Who banged into my car?”  Mom gave him a good scolding, telling him he was the one who banged into our car.  His car was drivable and he quickly jumped into it and blazed toward Flint.  The frame on our car was broken so we couldn’t drive it.  When the Sheriff’s  Deputy came, he said he knew who it was and we would be contacted.  We had the car towed to Linden for $2.50 and had the frame welded for another $2.50 and were able to drive it to a salvage yard where we got $25 for it.  We were contacted by the drunk’s insurance company and asked what the damages were and, since we had initially paid $35 for the car, we told them $35.  They sent us a check for $35.  

Years after that, after Betsy and I were married, she and I ran into Uncle Fred in Ypsilanti.  He started commenting on how good the Guernsey kids were.  He said none of them smoked or drank.  Betsy told him, “But I smoke.”  He said, “Quick, give me a cigarette.  I haven’t had one for 3 or 4 days.”

Uncle Fred never married.  Well, maybe he did get married once, but it was a short marriage.  After he sobered up he had the marriage annulled.   After he died, he was buried in a pauper’s grave in the Linden Cemetery.  

Uncle Herman never got married either.  Or so we thought.  He was engaged to get married one time and his mother, who was a widow, told him he couldn’t because she needed him to look after her because she couldn’t depend on Fred and the others were too young.  I have to amend the statement that he never married because, in digging through some old documents, we found a receipt made out to Mrs. Herman Guernsey!  It shocked us.  I think Grandma made him cut the marriage short so he could take care of her and the other children.    Uncle Herman had a set of dinner knives that he had saved for a marriage in a wooden box and Mom would borrow them when we had company.  She would ask him for permission each time before she borrowed them.

Another thought about Uncle Herman was his weather predictions.  Mom washed clothes every Monday except Labor Day.  She would always ask Uncle Herman, “Is it going to rain today?”  If he said, “Yes,” she would wash anyway.  She would hang clothes on the lines in some of the most severe weather.  One of the most interesting things was, when it was below freezing, the clothes would get stiff as boards, but water can evaporate even when frozen.  She knew they were dry when they got limp.  She got a clothes dryer after Dad and Uncle Herman died.  She spent Tuesdays ironing.  Several baskets full.  She had a hard life. 

More about Mom: She did a lot of canning.  When she canned tomatoes, she would dump them in a tub of hot water so the peels would come off at a touch.  Dad and Uncle Herman would help.  They bought a bottle capper one time and made catsup.  They bought a bunch of used beer bottles and caps like the ones bottling companies used to cap soft drinks and beer bottles.  

Mom baked two or three times per week.  With such a big family, she baked in volumes.  Each time she baked bread, she baked a dozen loaves and what she called a “tin of biscuits.”  The biscuits were really yeast rolls.  When she baked cookies, she baked two 50 pound lard cans full.  She filled one can with molasses cookies and the other with what she called vanilla cookies.  All of them were about 3½ to 4 inches in diameter and about ¾th of an inch thick.  She also baked pies and cakes.  She made one kind of cake she called apple turnover, but it was different than what I later had as apple turnover.  I guess one might describe it as an apple upside down cake with a crust on top.  She might have made it with baking powder biscuit batter in a square pan.  I loved it.  She often made two layer cakes of all types.  Whipped cream cakes were some of my favorites.  She had a funny way of cutting the cakes. 

Chuck always chose first, unless it was someone’s birthday, and was able to figure out which was the largest piece.   He would study it after Mom cut it and point at his slice.  But we kids were treated pretty even handedly by the folks.  I do remember one time though, when we were living south of Byron, that Dad took only Chuck to a baseball game in Detroit.  We all went out to the chicken coop to catch enough chickens to finance the trip.  When Dad needed money in a hurry, we would catch some chickens and Dad would take them to the chicken processing plant in Linden and sell them.   Dad would also buy an ice cream cone for Floyd Junior when he didn’t have enough money for the rest because Junior was so “puny” that Dad wasn’t sure he would live through the winter.  The rest of didn’t resent it as long as it kept Junior alive.

Chuck was the smartest of us kids, Vic was the most charming and I was the crybaby.  Chuck was also the most enterprising. He signed up to sell magazines and maybe that was while we were still in the cinderblock house in Fenton.  It was either The Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s. They gave him a canvas bag with a shoulder strap in which to carry them.  He also started his art work early.  He drew a cartoon strip which he called, “Bill The Printer.”   As an adult he was a commercial artist for more than 40 years at the Ford Motor Company headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan.  He illustrated training manuals until the Pinto trial.  Then he prepared exhibits for Ford’s trials. He read more than the rest of us put together.  He took a correspondence course while at Byron High for a subject that wasn’t offered at the school.  Vic became the executive vice president of Walbro Corporation before he died at the age of 51 in 1983.    

I remember one time while we were living on the Kitson farm that we loaded a wagon with wheat and had our horses Babe and Nell pull it to the elevator in Byron.  The elevator was really a grist mill.  We had them grind most of it into flour and the rest into “wheat grits.”  The people at the elevator sacked the ground up grain in 20 or 25 lb heavy duty paper bags.  When we got the bags of flour and wheat grits home we stacked them in the attic like cordwood.  Wheat grits were the same thing as Ralston, a hot cereal.  The elevator wasn’t equipped to make oatmeal, so we sold the oats that we didn’t feed to the livestock.

After harvesting our beans one year, the elevator couldn’t buy our crop, but they loaned a truck to Dad so he could haul the crop to another town that could.  It was a REO Speed Wagon.

 We grew lots of popcorn.  We had a hand cranked corn sheller that could be adjusted for field corn or popcorn.  We could also adjust it to take the outside husks from walnuts. We had a corn shed in which we kept both types of corn.  We had wheat and oat bins in the barn.  I loved to scoop out a handful of wheat once in awhile and chew it.  Not the oats though because they had husks.  

We belonged to a co-op creamery in Linden and sold our cream there.  Usually a route man picked it up, but when we needed money in a hurry, we would take the cream to the creamery.  I liked visiting the creamery.  It had huge stainless steel churns.  One of the workers there would take a container of whey from a valve on the bottom of one of the churns and hand it to us kids.  I loved it.  I doubt if I could drink it today.  We could not afford the equipment required to sell milk, so we sold cream.  Since we sold cream, it was necessary to separate the cream from the milk.  We had a hand cranked separator at which we kids would take turns cranking.  The separator worked like a centrifuge.  Inside, it had a stack of stainless steel cones, which were heavy enough that getting them up to speed took some time.  We would turn the crank until it was going fast enough that the bell on the handle would stop ringing.  Then we could turn the valve to let the milk flow from the hopper to the stack of cones.  There were two spouts. One for cream and the other for skim milk.  After the operation was complete, we had to take the thing apart, separate the cones and wash them.  We didn’t sell all of the cream.  We kept a supply so Mom could make whipped cream, and for a strange routine we had.  On almost all desserts, we would pour milk, cream and sugar.  When Mom made corn bread, we didn’t call it corn bread.  We didn’t put butter on it like normal people do.  It was a dessert we called, “Yankee Dish.”  Mom made it in a square baking pan and cut it into squares.  We would turn our piece upside down on our plate and put brown sugar and cream on it.  I still do that sometimes, but I substitute skim milk for the cream.  Sometimes I will make a strawberry short cake by chopping up the berries and putting them on a slice of bread and pouring milk on it.  I will use peaches or some other kinds of fruit too.  We treated pancakes in various ways.  Brown sugar and cream was a favorite.  Sometimes we would fold the pancake around a fried egg.  That tasted about like an omelet.

In addition to the cream separator and the corn sheller, we had another device that required turning a crank.  It was a butter churn.  It was made of glass, it was square and held about a gallon of cream.  The crank was located on top of the jar and turning it would cause some paddles to oscillate back and forth until the contents turned to butter.

We didn’t always churn our own butter.  Most of the time we got it from the co-op creamery.  Since we were members, we got a nice discount.

When we first moved to the Kitson place, it had no electricity.  The neighbors across the road were named Hibbard.  They had a son who lived up a lane next to their farm with his young family.  Their son was a gadget happy guy who made his own electricity.  He had a Zenith wind charger which was a generator on a tower with what looked like an air plane propeller.  The electricity it generated was sent to a room full of lead acid batteries similar to car batteries.  He ran lights and all kinds of appliances from that system.  We kids liked to visit him because he would entertain us with his collection of gadgets.  

I might have talked about Mom’s washing machine elsewhere in this paper, but scrolling back and forth, I can’t find it.  It was one of those old, square, wringer Maytags.  Whenever we lived at a place without electricity, Uncle Herman put the gasoline engine on it and when electricity became available, or we moved to a place with electricity, he changed it to the electric motor.

One time, Dad talked the elder Mr. Hibbard into hiring us kids to pull weeds called dock out of his oat field.  

Our next neighbors to the south were named Curie.  They were French and spoke with an accent.  We would ask them for favors. Once, when a parade was held in Byron, Chuck borrowed saddles from them so our horses could be in the parade.  On another occasion, we borrowed their cutter, which was a sleigh that looked like the one Santa Claus uses.  

Every time the school had us collecting for some good cause, our neighbors would donate.  Schools shouldn’t embarrass kids by making them beg people for money. 

We kids walked to a place where the railroad tracks crossed the Shiawassee River to go fishing.  One time we brought back 21 rock bass.  

The first time I ever went fishing was when Uncle Art took some of us out in a boat on an isolated lake.  I caught a sunfish and got so excited that when I pulled it up, it slapped me on the side of my face.  

My sister Evelyn was born on the 29

 of February in 1936.  Dad hired a young woman to come and help.  She lived about halfway between our place and Byron on a farm that Uncle Art bought many years later when he was married to Aunt Harriet.  

One night in October of 1937, when times were hard for us, I overheard a heated conversation I wasn’t supposed to hear between Dad and my Aunt Maude.  When they caught me listening, they shut up in a hurry and moved their argument out by the barn from where I could no longer hear.  The last thing I heard was Aunt Maude telling Dad she would take one of my sisters off his hands.  We had such a large family that Dad thought he couldn’t support any more, but he didn’t want to give up a child he already knew.  Mom was always so heavy that we never knew when she was pregnant.  I think she gave birth in the hospital in Owosso.   I don’t remember the excuse they gave for Mom being away.  I never discussed the argument with any of my brothers or sisters until a few years ago when I asked them if they had any objections to a search for the adopted one.  Dad had told Jim and Chuck about the other son when Jim was a senior in high school.  I don’t know if any of the others knew.  They might have had inklings.  Chuck and I did discuss the birth when we found a birth certificate in an old iron box while the folks were away.  I told Earl, but he adamantly refused to believe that we had a brother who had been given up for adoption.  We could not find the birth certificate when we began a later search.  My brother Chuck and I started our search with the Shiawassee County Court .  They refused to reveal our brother’s adopted name.  The original birth certificate was sealed.  It did not appear in the open books.  Chuck even went to Pontiac to get copies of our parents’ death certificates and sent them to the Shiawassee County people to show  that there would be no problem there.  Then, after several years, out of the blue, the lady from the Shiawassee County Court called Chuck and told him they had discovered a law that opened the adoption records of any adoptions that took pace prior to 1945.  She gave Fred’s adopted name to Chuck.  Chuck called me with the name which I brought up on our computer.  I found a half dozen people with that name, but one stood out because the address was in Shiawassee County.  I asked Chuck if he wanted to call him, or, should I.  Chuck said I should call because he had some errands to run.  That was on the Thursday before the 1998 family reunion, which was scheduled for Sunday.  I called the number the computer came up with and got Fred’s wife, Janet, who told me Fred was on the golf course.  She told me he knew he was adopted.  I told her about the upcoming reunion at Lake Lansing.  The next morning, Friday, Fred called me and said they would be at the reunion!  So, until that Thursday, we didn’t even know his name, and on that Sunday, we were picnicking with him!!  We didn’t have time to notify everyone about Fred, so most of them were in for a big surprise.  It was ironic that my doubting brother Earl looked and sounded more like Fred than any of the rest of us.  Fred showed Earl the adoption document, which he had retrieved from the bank lock-box after his adopted father died two years previously.  We all had a great time!  The best family reunion we ever had!  Fred and Janet were the first to arrive at the picnic grounds.  Next to arrive was a nephew, Paul, who lived in Chicago and hadn’t attended a reunion for years.  When he saw Fred and Janet at a picnic table, he said, “I know you are one of my uncles, but I don’t know which one.”  Fred said, “I’m your Uncle Fred.”  Paul said, “I didn’t know I had an Uncle Fred.”  To which Fred replied, “You do now!”  When we were ready to break up, our great niece Michelle got up on a table to ask how many would like to have next year’s picnic in the Lansing area.  Fred and Janet both raised their hands.  I was thrilled that they wanted to come again!  We have since exchanged e-mail and phone calls.  Fred told me his father used to take them to Meyer’s Lake on Sundays too.  It is likely that we were swimming in Meyer’s Lake at the same time Fred was! 

Through most our childhood, Chuck, Earl and I were called the “Big Kids” and Floyd and Vic were called the “Little Kids.”  We got along pretty well, but from time to time we would tease the “Little Kids.”  One thing we liked to do was get out the buffalo robe, (The skin of a buffalo that was used as a heavy duty blanket in the worst part of winter), and Dad’s old World War I gas mask which had a hose hanging from the face piece with a canister on the end.  A couple of us would get under the robe with the front guy wearing the gas mask and come after them with the hose and canister swinging from side to side like a charging elephant.  They knew it wasn’t a charging elephant, but they would run anyway.

Sometimes Dad would make a remark that, “I wouldn’t take a million for any of our kids, but I wouldn’t give a nickel for another just like them either.”  On one occasion, when most of us were adults and visiting the folks, Dad said that if he had his way, he wouldn’t have had any kids.  Mom scolded him by saying, “You had your way and we had elev—-, ah—, ten of them!”  When she started to say eleven, she was counting Fred of course, but caught herself to correct it to ten.

In 1936, World War I veterans were given a bonus.  Most of them went on spending sprees.   Coincidentally, with the payment of Dad’s bonus, the Byerly store in Byron set up a display of Rinso laundry soap, the kind Mom always used.  A brand new Radio Flyer wagon sat on top of the stacked boxes.  A sign indicated that everyone who bought a box should bring in the top with their name and address on it and put it in a large box.  A drawing was to take place when all of the Rinso was sold and the wagon was to go to the winner.  To short circuit the drawing, Dad bought the whole display and brought home a multiyear supply of Rinso and the Radio Flyer wagon.  This might have been the time when Dad bought the 1933 Chevy.  

He brought home a bicycle for the big kids and a tricycle for the little kids.  The bicycle was an antique, which would probably fetch a good price today for show.  It wasn’t so antique that it would have one big wheel and a tiny one behind.  It had two wheels of the same size—-big ones.  Instead of a tubular frame like today’s bikes, the frame was solid wrought iron.  It was the heaviest bicycle I have ever seen.  Somehow, Chuck was the only one able to ride it.  He stuck one leg through and under the horizontal bar. The bike leaned to one side and Chuck leaned to the other.  Later, Dad recognized his mistake in buying such a monster, so he traded it in on another used bicycle.  The replacement was a normal one with a tubular frame.  Sometime later, Chuck left the bike in the driveway where it got run over by the car.  I spent days working on it, maybe weeks.  I replaced spokes and straightened out the frame as best I could.  When I got it in good enough shape to ride again, it became my bike.  I rode it from the Kitson place, the Cook place, which was about 4 miles south of Byron, plus the last place we had in Byron, which was about 2 miles south of town.  Sometimes I would ride for miles through the countryside.  I rode it to school a few times when we lived at the place 2 miles south of town.  One of those times I had a low tire and I filled it with air at the little gas station next to the mill pond at the junction where the road to Argentine split off from our road.  I rode a short distance when I felt a bump, bump, bump.  I got off to inspect it.  The bike didn’t have a rear fender at that time.  The tire had a big hernia.  I touched the bump and it went “bang!” and my glasses flew way up in the air.  I pushed the bike the rest of the way home.

The Kitson place had a very large apricot tree, which was so high that we could crawl into it from an upstairs window.  It didn’t produce more than a dozen apricots, but in the spring it was covered with beautiful pink blossoms.  It was spectacular!  One time some of the women teachers from the Byron school hiked past our place when the tree was in full bloom and on the following Monday morning they were excited when they described it.  We also had a cluster of lilac bushes next to the road that one could crawl into and disappear from view.

There was excitement when it was time to harvest the wheat, oats or beans.  The threshing machine would come from Byron.  It was pulled by a steam tractor which looked like a small railroad steam engine except that it had wide steel wheels.  There were some rises and dips in the dirt road between Byron and our place.  We would see the puffs of smoke before we could see the machinery when it was in one of the dips.  Then, all of sudden, we would see the smokestack appear over the rise and the whole business would appear before going into the next dip.  The equipment would be set up with the steam tractor facing the threshing machine and a large driving belt placed on the pulleys of each piece of equipment.  Farmers from all over the neighborhood would bring their horses and wagons and go out into the fields, load the grain or beans and haul it to the threshing machine.  Farmers would have a degree of pride depending on how their horses behaved when they marched up next to the noisy machinery.   The loads would be unloaded into the thresher with pitchforks.  The women would prepare large meals set on tables in the yard.  To compensate for the labor and horses and wagons, Dad and Uncle Herman would provide the same service to the farmers who helped them.  All that has changed in modern times with the introduction of combines that do the cutting and threshing in the fields in one operation.  More efficient, but, in my opinion, not as exciting as the old ways.

It was at the Kitson place that I first saw a calf being born.  I had been sent to the fields to bring the cows in for milking and one of them was having a calf.  Naturally, I ran to get Uncle Herman to help.  We went to him when we needed help for most things.  By the time Uncle Herman and I got back to the cow, she was already licking the calf.  We sold the calves when they were old enough to be weaned.  I always felt bad when the calves were gone, not that I would miss them, but that the cows would.  For the first day or two, a cow would run from fence to fence with her head thrust up, mooing (crying) as loud as she could, trying to find her calf.

In 1938, when I entered the 8

 grade, I signed up to learn the clarinet and play in the band.  Earl also signed up that same year.  He was in the 7

 grade.  The school had some instruments to loan, but Earl and I shared one loaned clarinet.  We later bought our own clarinets on the time payment plan.  Chuck had been playing the trumpet for a couple of years by then.  Joining the band was one of my best moves.  I enjoyed playing in the band more than any other activity, except, perhaps, being at a circus. We played in concerts and marched in parades.  Every Decoration Day, now called Memorial Day, we had a ceremony in which we marched down Main Street and to the town cemetery, which was on the shore of the millpond.  There, we would play a couple numbers and girls in white dresses would row out a few yards in row boats and sprinkle flowers on the water.  Chuck would play taps on his trumpet and some unseen trumpet player on the other side of the pond would play the echo of taps.  For one of the school assemblies, I learned to play The Clarinet Polka and the other kids thought I played it better than I actually did.  For one of the concerts at the Town Hall, Earl and I played a duet with band accompaniment.  It was a number that sounded more difficult than it really was, but the applause felt as good as if we had played a difficult number.  Chuck, Earl and I, along with the Swartz brothers, formed a German polka band.  The places we played were mostly at the PTA meetings of  the country schools that bordered our school district.  The purpose was to encourage the eighth graders, after their graduations, to consider coming to Byron High School instead of Durand, Bancroft, Gaines, Morrice or Linden.  They would always feed us on those occasions and we called ourselves, “The Hungry Five.”  We had fun.

During the summers of those depression years, free outdoor movies were shown in the small towns of rural Michigan.  They were projected on white canvas attached to the sides of buildings.  The purpose was to bring shoppers into town once each week.  Saturday night might be the movie night for Byron, Wednesday night for Gaines and Friday night for Linden, etc.  We usually went to the ones in Byron and Gaines.  About once a year, a medicine show would come to Byron.  Those were quite entertaining with lots of laughs.  They always had a magician doing tricks and an Indian doing dances.  They sold snake oil and other fake remedies.  

We kids were swimming in the Shiawassee River while waiting for the necessary darkness one night when we heard band music and it sounded great!  We looked up and saw an unknown band marching across the bridge.  We raced to get our clothes on and get to the movie area where the band played a concert.  That was when we learned about the FFA (Future Farmers of America) Band.  To be in that band it was necessary to be a member of the FFA.  To get into the FFA, it was necessary to take an agriculture course in school.  Chuck signed up for the ag course, joined the FFA, auditioned for the band and made it.  That was a year or two after that concert.

We were living south of Byron at that time and we three older kids and Uncle Herman had summer jobs working in the peppermint fields.  It was hard work.  Only Mexicans will do that work these days.  We worked 10 hours per day.  Chuck and Uncle Herman got $1.50 per day and Earl and I got $1.25 per day.  The crop had to be weed free when it is distilled or the peppermint oil will have stains and get a much lower price.  The going rate was $16 per pint at that time.  Our main job was to keep the weeds out.  First year mint was in rows and we killed the weeds with hoes.  The older fields grew like alfalfa and we had to bend over all day to pull the weeds out by hand.  Some of the weeds were nettles which would make our hands swell.  One season I helped load the mint onto trucks after it was mowed.  The trucks took it to the underground distillery that the people for whom we worked, owned.  The mint grew on organic soil that we called “muck”.  There are cases in which muck has caught on fire.  I remember a time when a seam of seam of muck that was under several feet of normal soil north of Fenton caught on fire and burned for several years.  Lately, some owners of muck farms have been digging it up, bagging it, labeling it “Michigan Peat” and selling it in Kentucky and other states.  One of the fields in which we worked was about 100 acres.  

Getting back to Chuck and the FFA Band, he left the peppermint fields for two weeks to go on the concert tour.  While he was gone, I overheard some farmers in Byron talking about Chuck’s break.   One of them said, “Can you imagine that?  As poor as those people are, that oldest one takes two whole weeks to go gallivanting around the country playing music!”  I know those two weeks meant more to Chuck than all of the summers in the peppermint fields put together.  The following year, Chuck and I were both in the FFA Band.  I was on crutches the day I auditioned for it.  I had cut my foot while swimming by the cider mill in the canal that went from the mill pond to the Shiawassee River.  Doc Fox sewed my foot up without Novocain.  My companion who accompanied me to the doctor fainted and fell on the floor.   Before I auditioned, I had to compete in a livestock-judging contest.  I didn’t know it was a contest.  I just thought it was something we had to do to be allowed to audition.  I found out it was a contest when the school received a plaque with our names engraved saying our three man team had won third place.  After the audition, I was told I had won the 17

 chair out of 18.  The guy in the 18

 chair was better than I was.  Through most of my life I was lucky to squeak by in most endeavors.  We rehearsed for three or four days at an old CCC camp near the little village of Brethren and swam in the pond there.  We played for three days at the National Forest Festival at Manistee, then played several concerts at towns in the western part of Michigan before we went to Traverse City to play at the National Cherry Festival.  We had some belly laughs at one of the concerts at the National Forest Festival when a drunk guy decided he would help our director, Nick Muscleman, direct the band.  A march, “On The Mall,” called for some vocalizing in the trio.  We usually had the audience join in that part.  Our drunk repeated what Nick told the audience to do.  He said, “Thash right folks, just go La La La La La La!”  Our sides were splitting by that time and that is when the law came and took him away.  We wanted to pitch in and bail him out before our next performance, but Nick wouldn’t let us.  At the National Cherry Festival, we were competing with the kids from the National Music Camp at  Interlaken.  They were far more talented than we were because they were serious all 

star musicians from across the country, but we were able to able to win a trophy.  I had no idea that we were competing until, the adults passed our buses in their car on the way back to the CCC camp holding the trophy out their car window. I think we dazzled the judges with foot work.  The National Farm and Home Hour out of Chicago broadcasted from the Cherry Festival and we performed three numbers on it.  For the festivals, we slept at our CCC camp, but for the town concerts, they farmed us out to the homes of volunteers.  We had a girl vocalist who traveled with us.  She was a high school student too.  We called her the “Sweetheart of the band.”  One of her numbers was an Italian number called, “Il Bacio” which, in English means, “The Kiss.”  She sang it in Italian.  A few years ago, I found an English translation of the words of that song and learned that it is almost a naughty song.  I am now amused that our “Sweetheart” sang an almost naughty song.  

Chuck declined to take an agricultural course that fall so he was denied the chance to go to Kansas City where the Michigan FFA Band was designated as the National FFA Band. The occasion was the National FFA convention and the Royal American Livestock and Horse Show.  Before we went to Kansas City, we rehearsed for a few days at a beautiful convention center in some woods near Hartland, which was between Fenton and Brighton.  It was called Walden Woods.  There was a nice lake in which we swam.  While we were there, we played a concert at a Hartland church and for the halftime of a football game between Heartland and Howell.  Howell was an overwhelming favorite to win, but Hartland won and the locals gave credit to us for inspiring their home team to win.  The trip to Kansas City was my first train ride.  We stayed in a hotel.  We ate out, of course, and when I saw Ralston on the menu one morning, I just had to have it because I had heard so many of the advertisements for it on the Tom Mix radio show.  Well, it turned out that Ralston was exactly like the wheat grits that we had ground from our own wheat.  Those city kids weren’t all that more privileged than we were.  We played most of our concerts in a large auditorium, but we played one for a vocational school in their auditorium.  It was probably the most enthusiastic audience we ever had.  About 100 teenaged girls in the audience and 77 teenaged boys on stage. One evening, we took street cars from the Missouri side of the river to the Kansas side where we played in an arena prior to a horse show.   One of our concerts on the Missouri side was broadcast as part of the National Farm and Home Hour just as it was from Traverse City, Michigan.  One bad incident occurred to me one day in Kansas City.  While descending the steps from the auditorium, one of the adults who traveled with us, Ben Hennick, the president of the Michigan Farm Bureau, isolated me with tears flowing down his cheeks.  It seemed that some of the members of our band had engaged some girls with sexual activities.  I was not one of them, but was accused of it.  I think one of the guys didn’t like me, and to be mean, named me.  I adamantly denied it, but had had a hard time convincing Mr. Hennick that I was not involved.  I think I would have been more convincing if I would have had the presence of mind to tell him that I had yet to even kiss a girl.  He finally accepted my innocence, or at least pretended to, because he continued to be quite friendly with me whenever we came into contact with each other.

 Earl auditioned for the band the following year and was accepted, but the war was on and the shortage of gasoline prevented us from using the buses for the tour that year.

We moved from the Kitson place to an eighty acre farm south of Byron, probably in 1939.  We didn’t buy it.  We rented it on “shares” meaning we paid the rent with a share of the crops.  The previous tenants were named Cook, so we called it the Cook place.  It was rather isolated on a narrow dirt road about a mile from the main road.  When the Cooks lived there, the Cook kids would frequently bring rattlesnake rattles to school, but I never saw a rattlesnake while we lived there.  We frequently saw deer and other wild life though.  The deer would come to drink from the creek, which flowed behind our barn.  I remember a couple nights when we kids had to walk from the main road in the dark and the screech owls would scare us into running most of the way.  The Cooks had left in a hurry and left behind some antiques, which we kids managed to destroy.  One item was an old Edison phonograph which played cylinders instead of flat disc records. The  Cook place did not have electricity.  One nice thing about the isolation was that it was very rarely that any cars would come by, so, when it rained in summer, we could take our clothes off and have a shower bath instead of bathing in the galvanized tub.

The Cook place wasn’t very productive, so we bought a forty acre farm about half way between the Cook place and Byron.  It was two miles south of Byron.    One year Mom contracted with a pickle company to raise an acre of cucumbers.  When she signed up, it seemed like an easy way to earn some extra money, but when the vines began to produce, it became very labor intensive.  The whole family had to pitch in to keep up with them.  We would get home exhausted from the peppermint fields and pick cucumbers.  We tried to pick them before they got too large because the small ones brought a premium price, several dollars per bushel.  The large ones would bring just a few cents per bushel.  Although the farm was small, the soil was rich.  During the school year, we would rush home to listen to some of our favorite programs on the radio.  That farm had electricity when we moved in, so we could play the radio without worrying about the “A” battery which was six volts and looked like a car battery and the “B” battery which was a dry cell type that produced thirty-two volts.  Some of our programs were “Tom Mix and his Ralston Straight Shooters,” “Little Orphan Annie,” “The Shadow,” “The Black Ace,” and a couple others.

Part of the Ovaltine promotion during the Little Orphan Annie show consisted of the characters sending secret messages.  If one sent in seals from Ovaltine containers, one could receive a Little Orphan Annie secret decoding ring so one could decode the secret messages immediately after the show.  They would give the decoded text on the next program.  Since we couldn’t afford Ovaltine, we would take down the coded message one day and the decoded message the following day.  After a few days, we took delight in breaking their code.

I can’t remember when we started to get welfare help, but we were definitely getting it at the last place we lived in Byron.  I remember going to Owosso to get yard goods with which to make clothes and bed linens.  The embarrassing part was the commodities we received.  They called them Agricultural Surplus in those days.  A truck, which was leased from the Robinson Furniture store in Owosso, delivered them.  Among some of the items were grapefruit, grapefruit juice, baking goods and day old bread that had been turned back by the stores.  The bread came in bushel bags, several bags full each week.  Most of it was raisin bread, which I liked.  Since Mom baked most of the bread we ate, we got way too much.  We fed the surplus to the pigs.  On the school bus, the other kids would tease us by saying, “Hey, I see that you bought some more furniture again this week,” knowing full well the furniture truck was not delivering furniture.  Sometimes Dad would borrow money from finance companies.  He also bought some items on credit and would have a hard time making the payments.   One time he ordered a fold away bed from Spiegel’s catalog.  It turned out to be inferior and Dad refused to make any more payments.  A collection agency started to hound him until we got a notice from an outfit called, ‘Missing Heirs’ that they might be holding some money for him.  They provided a questionnaire which asked a lot of personal questions.  Dad filled it out and returned it.  A couple of weeks later the collection agency sent a letter listing a lot of personal information they knew about us and demanded some payments.  Dad sent them back a letter saying that “Missing Heirs’ was holding money for him and for them to get their payments from them.  We never heard from the collection agency again.

  Dad got a job with the WPA, which to most was another welfare program.  He dug ditches at first and then commuted to Owosso for a machinist course.  When the bomber plant was finished at Willow Run near Ypsilanti, he got a job there.  He car-pooled all the way from Byron to Ypsilanti for awhile, but that became too much for him, especially since the guys he rode with often stopped at beer halls on the way home.  He then got a sleeping room in Ypsilanti.  That made him homesick, so he decided to sell the farm and move to Ypsilanti.  We had an auction sale to sell the livestock and farm equipment.  One item that was not farm equipment was an antique muzzle-loading rifle.  By that time my FFA project, a prize Duroc Jersey pig, which had won a red ribbon at a fair, had a litter of pigs that were old enough to wean.  The auctioneer did a pretty good job because my pigs brought a price that astonished me and the rest of the family.  After the sale, a guy begged Earl and me to sell him a Model A Ford that I owned in partnership with Earl.  We had used it to get us back and forth to the peppermint farms and apple orchards. We reluctantly sold it to him.  The last I saw of it, it had stalled a couple hundred yards down the road.  Since it had a couple of broken cogs in the flywheel ring, he had to get out and crank it to get it started.

Here is more about that car.  The Model A Ford didn’t have a fuel pump.  Instead, the fuel tank was located above the engine, just ahead of the windshield, and the gasoline was gravity fed.  There was a valve under the dashboard that could be reached by the driver or the front seat passenger.  It had to be turned on before the engine could be started and turned off when the engine was not running.  This information is critical to my account of an evening when a couple guys in my class talked me into taking them to the roller rink in Argentine.  After we had skated and it was time to leave, they told me there was a girl there that needed a ride to her home in Linden.  They asked me if we could take her.  I said, “Sure.”  About a half mile before we got to her home, the car quit.  The guy in the  passenger seat had secretly turned the fuel valve off making it appear that we were out of gas.  They said one of them would stay with the car while the other would go to a gas station that we had recently passed and get gas and that I should walk the girl to her home.  After we had walked about a hundred yards, the car started up and went flying by us.  There was nothing the girl and I could do but walk on to her house.  Her parents were not home. The guys knew they would not be because they always partied some place on Saturday nights until the wee hours of the morning.  They expected her to seduce me.  It seemed that she was pregnant by one of my pals and he didn’t want to marry her, but wanted me to.  Well, the seduction never took place and their plan was foiled.  The guy dropped out of school before graduation.  

I worked for awhile one summer in Gute’s Drug Store.  Earl and Chuck were able to get jobs in Hyde’s apple orchard.  They got thirty-five cents an hour, so I left my drug store job and joined them.  When Mr. Hyde’s work ran out, we picked apples at the Morehouse orchards.  Some of the apples we picked there were Northern Spies, but they were the largest Northern Spies I had ever seen.  They were about the size of large grapefruit.  Besides picking them, we packed them in cartons with tissue paper to be shipped to Florida.  

That was in the fall of 1942.  Since I was a month or two into my senior year when the family moved to Ypsilanti, the superintendent at the school, Mr. Hath, convinced me to stay in Byron and work for a widow who needed help to run her farm.  Her name was Mrs. Walts.  She gave me room and board and $2.50 per week.  Her farm was a poultry farm and chicken hatchery.   We hatched 5,000 chicks each week. The incubators held three times that many eggs, but chicks take 21 days to hatch.  Each Saturday, a Japanese guy came to separate the boy chicks from the girl chicks.  He had a special talent and went from hatchery to hatchery through the week and made lots of money.  I envied him because he was issued what I considered unlimited ration stamps for gasoline.  Many things were rationed in those days, including sugar, butter, meat, shoes and tires.  I had to turn over my booklet of ration stamps to Mrs. Walts for the 8 months I was with her.  Tires and gasoline weren’t in the ration books.  Separate gasoline booklets were issued to every registered vehicle.  If one’s car didn’t have a purpose that helped the war effort, one got stamps for four gallons per week.  There were different categories for various occupations giving various amounts.  For tires one had to apply to the county rationing board.  When Dad’s tires wore out, he applied and was awarded a certificate good for 4 retreads.  

In addition to the hatchery, Mrs. Walts had a horse, 2,000 laying hens, a flock of sheep, and a cow.  She contracted with other farmers for the additional fertilized eggs she needed for the hatchery.  She also raised corn.  Near the woods, there was a building, which contained equipment for processing maple syrup which Mrs. Walts’ husband made when he was alive.  The horse was quite old and had difficulty walking.  When she needed water, I had to hold up one side to walk her to the watering trough.  The cow didn’t like me and kicked me into the gutter one time while I was milking her.  The laying hens required a lot of feed and water, which I carried to the hen house.  I also had to scrape their droppings from the roost area periodically.  The sheep didn’t require much attention except at lambing time.  If a ewe had twins, she would sometimes reject one of them.  I had to milk her and feed the milk to the rejected lamb with a bottle.  When shearing time came, a crew came to shear them.  The crew saved one for me to shear when I got home from school.  I had previously sheared a sheep on a field trip to Michigan State College, but that was with electric clippers, which looked like oversized barber clippers.  This time it was with professional equipment like they use in Australian movies.  The crew gathered around to watch me and when I was finished, they applauded.  One time a blizzard hit during the school day.  They dismissed school early, but some of the roads were already too bad.  The drivers could get through the east-west roads but not the north-south ones.  Most of the kids stayed overnight at the school, but I had my duty to Mrs. Walts, so the bus took me as far as it could go west and turned around leaving me with a mile to go south.  That road had drifted solid up to 3 feet deep.  It was a struggle, but I finally made it.  We were snowed in for several days.  Mrs. Walts had a son who had a nearby dairy farm.  His milk was piling up and our eggs were piling up so, after a few days, Charles hooked a trailer to his big-wheeled John Deere tractor and we were able to take our milk and eggs to town to the Byerly grocery store which needed them because the normal suppliers could not get through the snow filled roads. Nobody was able to go anywhere, so we went to the post office and picked up the mail, which was on hand before the storm, for all of the people along our route, which we delivered to them on our way home.  Charles and I hunted rabbits a couple times.  He and I skinned them and Mrs. Walts cooked them.  Charles called me over to his place one day to show me a two-headed calf that he had just delivered.  It had died during the delivery.   Most of my free time on weekends was spent husking corn or doing other tasks for Mrs. Walts.  Mrs. Walts did drive us to church on Sundays, she to the Methodist and me to the Baptist.  Before I went to Mrs. Walts’ farm, I let the athletic coach talk me into playing football on Byron’s 6 man football team.  The schools in that area didn’t have enough boys to man eleven man teams, so they formed a 6 man league.  Although the team had 6 men, they needed a substitute, so I was talked into it.  We lost almost every game by wide margins.  The rules in 6 man football called for the game to end if one team led by 50 points or more.  We forfeited several games by that rule.  One time I caught a pass and came within a couple yards of scoring.  The few kids that were standing by the field cheered and I felt good.

Mrs. Walts fed me big meals, but with all of the physical work I was doing, I needed them.  She insisted I eat a half dozen eggs with bacon and pancakes each morning.  I liked Mrs. Walts’ house.  It had an indoor bathroom.  

I had dates with a couple of the girls in my class, but never got up the nerve to kiss one.

At one dance, my partner left for the sidelines so fast that I didn’t know what happened. One of the women teachers ran out and took her place.

During final exams, some of us seniors took advantage of a break and caught the Ann Arbor RR to Durand where we had our pictures taken at a studio.  The ride cost us ten cents each way.  The train consisted of a steam engine, a passenger car and a couple freight cars.  It ran from Ann Arbor to Traverse City.  

Until Chuck’s class became seniors, the seniors took a senior trip to Washington, D.C. in one of the school buses close to graduation.  Because of gas rationing, Chuck’s class and subsequent classes couldn’t do that, so we had to settle for a boat trip from Detroit to Mackinac Island. It was fun though.  We slept and ate on the ship and rented bicycles to tour the Island.  We got to sit in the rocking chairs on the longest porch in the world.  At least, we were told it was the longest in the world.

I should mention some of our teachers.  The Byron school system was so small that the elementary school had one room and one teacher for two grades.  When we got to Byron, I was in the 4

 grade, so I was in a room with 3

 and 4

 graders.  The next year I was in a room with 5

 and 6

 graders.  Junior high and senior high were pretty much run together with all assembling in one large room to start the day with the headcount and announcements.  We would also gather there for occasional films and guest speakers.  The first time Earl and I performed with the Junior Band was in such an assembly.  We played parts of  “Finlandia.“ I really don’t remember much about my elementary teachers, but some of the 7

 through 12

 grade teachers were memorable.  Mr. Knight taught band, algebra, geometry, chemistry, and physics.  He was my favorite.  In teaching band, it was necessary for him to teach each child how to play his or her instrument, form them into a band, direct them and make arrangements for their appearances and field trips.  We participated in band festivals in Owosso and concerts in the town hall.  Mr. Knight took us to observe a big school band festival in Detroit one time, but we had the date wrong, so he got us into a concert by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra instead.  After my junior year, Mr. Knight took a job as a chemist at the Dow Chemical Company in Midland, Michigan where he achieved great success.  I didn’t like the shop teacher who was also the coach for football, baseball, basketball and track.  Not many others liked him either.  Chuck played baseball and basketball and Mr. Smith didn’t give him enough playing time.  During one six-week marking period in 9

 grade, the boys in shop traded places with the girls in home economics.  Miss Maas, the home economics teacher, was young, right out of college.  One of our tasks was to learn how to press pants.  The day we were to press pants, I asked her if she had some pants to which she replied, “Yes.  Some pretty pink ones.  Do you want to see them?”  She reached for the hem of her skirt and my face turned the color of a fire engine.  All of my classmates roared, of course.  I’ll tell you some more episodes of females embarrassing me later, but scattered chronologically throughout this writing.  Even one involving a nun and another involving a ninth grade girl.  

After high school graduation in June 1943, I moved to Ypsilanti to live with the rest of the family and go to work at Willow Run helping to make B-24s.  I was a riveter.  My  partner was Roy Taylor from Gaines.  One day I pointed out two girls riveting a few yards from us and told Roy that I thought they looked interesting.  He said, “Aw,  you don’t want to meet them.  They probably smoke and drink.”  I thought, “That should be an interesting introduction line.”  So I went over to them and asked, “Do you smoke and drink?”  Whereupon the one named Betsy got furious and said, “How could you say such a thing?”  I told her my partner had suggested it.  She bolted for Roy and gave him a bad time.  Later, we dated and got married.  One of our dates was a football game between the University of Michigan and Notre Dame.  Tom Harmon was the Michigan quarterback and the most adored football hero of that era.  On the morning of the game, Chuck and I drove to Ann Arbor to retrieve a console radio that had been left over there for repair.   The plan was to bring the radio back to Ypsilanti, then pick up our dates.  This was Chuck’s first date with Beverly.  We had an accident in Ann Arbor and had to leave Chuck’s car there and catch a taxi back to Ypsi to pick up our dates.  Even though Michigan was the favorite, Notre Dame won.  We had  Earl come to get us in Dad’s car.

Dad liked to move a lot and he bought three different houses in Ypsi.  One was on Campbell, one on Prospect and I can’t remember the other.  I lived with the family in two of them.  After Betsy and I got married, we lived in government housing.  It was in a duplex doublewide.  Our half was about 8 feet by 16 feet.  It had a double bed, a couple chairs, a kerosene space heater, a very small icebox, and a two burner gasoline cook stove which we had to pump up with air before we could light it.  We called it our “dog house.”  We lived in it until I was called into the Army Air Force.

During that time, Uncle Art and Aunt Harriet invited Betsy and me to go with them to a dance hall at Oxbow Lake, which was located out toward Pontiac.  We had a ball!  Most of the dances were square dances and polkas and Uncle Art whirled Betsy and Aunt Harriet whirled me around so vigorously that it almost seemed like our feet seldom touched the floor.

I had enlisted in the Army Air Force Reserve, when I was 17 and before I met Betsy.  I had gone to a recruiting office in Detroit and they said there was a special patriotic program going on in the suburb of Wyandotte.  They took us in buses to Wyandotte and we were sworn in with a band, an audience and photographers.  It must have been for the local Wyandotte paper because I never got to see our pictures published.

Betsy went with me to Fort Sheridan, Illinois where I had to report for active duty.  She had to ride the train back to Ypsi by herself.  She had to relinquish the “dog house” because only couples could live in them.  She lived with my family for a couple weeks before moving back into the dormitory.

I was at Fort Sheridan for only a few days to be issued uniforms, etc. and get a haircut.  They put us on a troop train for Shepherd Field in Texas where we had basic training.  The troop train took two or three days to get there.  It stopped quite often.  The stop that I can remember was in Oklahoma.  There were several women on the platform with tables of sandwiches and other goodies.  We were not allowed to get off the train, nor were the ladies allowed to bring the goodies to the train.  Our basic training was not bad compared to what I’ve heard other basics were like.  We slept in pup tents just a couple nights.  I didn’t have to pull guard duty, but those that did left a lot of dead rattlesnakes hanging on the mesquite bushes.  The worst thing about it was the red clay mud that clung to our boots, and which we had to scrape from the floor of the barracks. We took a series of tests and I found out I wasn’t qualified to be a pilot.  Instead, I was sent to Scott Field, Illinois for radio operator-mechanic school.  While I waited for space in a class, I was doing KP duty and other tasks for which we had to get up at about 4:00 in the morning until one day, in the morning formation, they asked for a show of hands of any who could type.  I immediately realized that typing was the most valuable course I had taken in high school.  I then reported at a decent hour each day to a warehouse where I typed stuff on forms until a class space opened up.  Betsy took a bus down to Belleville, Illinois to be near me even though I could see her for only 36 hours each weekend.  She rented an uncomfortable sleeping room in Belleville.  Belleville was an interesting town.  The population was largely German.  Almost all of the houses were old.  The streetlights were dim.  Every block had a tavern and every evening the families would send their children down to the taverns with silver colored pails to get the beer for supper.  Most of the people spoke German.  In the nearby town of Millstadt, German was the primary language in the schools.

 I enjoyed the radio operator-mechanic course.  We took Morse code for half a day and electronic mechanics the other half.  We built radio receivers and transmitters from kits and learned trouble shooting for all of the radio and navigational aids equipment that airplanes have.  We also learned some navigation so we would be prepared if the navigator on a crew should become unable to perform.  Betsy got a job grading the Morse code test papers.  After the course, Betsy went back to Ypsi and the Willow Run bomber plant.  This time they gave her an office job though.  

My class was put on a train for Sedalia Air Force Base, Missouri.  We got off at a little station called Knobnoster.  Knobnoster wasn’t really a town.  I think there was a store there and the train station.  The base was a Troop Carrier Command base with transport airplanes.  When I first got there, they were C-47s, but shortly thereafter, they switched to C-46s.  The C-46s had only two engines as did the C-47s, but they were much larger planes.  The barracks were one story tar paper covered buildings with a pot bellied coal stove in each.  The staff didn’t have us in the planes right away, so they had to find things for us to do.  At first, I guarded some German prisoners who did landscaping and painting.  I don’t remember being given any instructions if any of them decided to escape.  I guess we were expected to shoot at them.  But they were content and had no desire to escape.  After awhile, some of us were selected to perform maintenance on the radio and navigational equipment on the C-46s.  I enjoyed that.  We worked in pairs with each pair assigned to about eight planes.  We got to drive trucks out to our assigned planes.  They brought in some gliders, which were made of canvas stretched over pipes.  One day, while my partner and I were out on the flight line, one of the glider pilots asked us if we would like a ride in his glider.  We said, “Sure!” and we got in with him after he hooked the towline to the back of the C-46.  There was another glider parallel to us, hooked to the same plane.  We took off and circled around the area a few times and the pilot reached up and pulled a lever, which released the glider from the towline.  We banked so sharply that I thought I was going to burst through the canvas bottom of the glider.  We landed OK, but I had no desire to get back in.  I learned later that those gliders were very prone to accidents and that a lot of people were killed in them.  One night, they had a bunch of us go out into a field with flare guns to fire up at the planes as they flew overhead to give the pilots an idea of what anti-aircraft fire would look like.  

They eventually assigned us to crews, so we flew several times a week.  That meant that we got more pay.  The crazy pilots I rode with liked to fly over the Lake of the Ozarks and they would skim the water to harass the people in the sailboats.  They often let me sit in the co-pilot seat and take control of the plane.  I kind of liked that until one day when they said they were going to make me land it.  I immediately started to rise from the seat, but they kept shoving me back down.  After a few times, they let me out of it.  I think they would have actually let me land it if I had agreed.  

It was decided we needed more military training, so we camped out in the woods in pup tents.  While we were out there, the war ended.  The commanders kept us out there for a couple more nights so we wouldn’t go to town and get into trouble. 

We did do some useful flying.  One time they sent us to Omaha to get some tanks of oxygen.  While we were there, the aircraft mechanic and I went to a theater to see a magician’s show.  We were bamboozled into volunteering to be part of the act.  The magician pretended to hypnotize us.  It amused me to the extent that I had a big grin on my face and the magician whispered in my ear, “Stop grinning Kid, you’re messing up my act.”  I think I was able to subdue the grin enough to get through the act.  He had us do a hula dance for which the audience roared.

The Air Force had contracts to have fighter planes built that weren’t needed after the war.  But, since they wanted to honor the contracts, they kept buying them.  They had ferry pilots fly them directly from the factories to the graveyards.  We would fly to the graveyard at Altus, Oklahoma and pick up the ferry pilots and return them to their bases in the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Washington State and California.  

Betsy came to Missouri to join me and they were generous about letting us go nightly and weekends to Warrensburg where we rented a room from the county attorney and his wife. Two other couples also rented rooms in their home.  The husband of one of the couples was a pilot.  They liked to drink, and they favored cocktails called Tom Collins.’  They told Betsy how to make them and would share the bathtub together and sometimes shout at Betsy from the tub to bring them a TC!  His wife would yell, “It’s alright, I’ve got him covered!”  

Warrensburg was a comfortable old-fashioned town with a small college.  There was an interesting place that we would pass between the bus station and our rented room.  It was called Madelin’s Pavilion.  It was where the black people were entertained on Saturday nights.  It looked like it might have been a minor league baseball park in the past.  Every Saturday night, there would be much music and joviality going on there when we would pass it.  I often thought it would be fun to join them.

Our landlord was the county attorney.  One day his office announced that a woman had been caught running over the fire hose.  He told his people to bring her in and they would book her.  They brought his wife in.  When he got excited, he stuttered.  He took one look and said, “Ha-a-a-a-a-a-zel!!!”  They didn’t book her.  The Missouri State Fair was held in the neighboring  town of Sedalia.  He and his wife invited us to the fair.  On the way home, we were stopped by the state police for erratic driving.  He had been drinking.

They said, “You’re the county attorney!  You should know better than that!” And they let us go on our way.  He had generous gas rationing stamps, so was able to drive around a lot.  He took us swimming a couple times.  Once to an abandoned quarry and once to a town of Higginsville which had a municipal pool.  While we were at Higginsville, a storm hit and a tree fell on one of the lifeguard’s car and crushed it.  She was devastated. 

One time Betsy and I went into the town pool hall and shot a game of pool.  It was strange for a woman to be there, so all other activity stopped and all of the men gathered around to watch us play.  Betsy won and they all roared their approval.  

On a couple weekends, I went into Kansas City to earn some extra money.  One time it was for Railroad Express, carrying bags of mail from train to train.  Another time it was at a steel mill.  Before the sun went down, they had us chip mortar off used bricks to be re-used for lining the bowels of the open-hearth furnaces.  After the sun went down, they had us cleaning the slag out of the furnaces.  It was hard work in very hot conditions, and we would alternate with each other.  Since we got double time wages for anything over eight hours, I managed to work for 16 hours.  

They really didn’t know what to do with us after we got all of the ferry pilots back to their home bases, but they decided to close the base down.  The day we left Warrensburg, Betsy’s train going east and my train going west came into the station at the same time.  Trains were very crowded in those days, but pregnant Betsy was able to get seats all of the way to Berea, Kentucky.  My train was so crowded that I had to alternately stand or balance myself on my barracks bag in the aisle all the way to Ogden, Utah.  They had to do a lot of switching in Ogden and they had most of the passengers get off while the switching went on.  Some of us asked the conductor if our car was going on to Merced, California.  He said it was and he felt sorry for us and let us remain in the car, insuring us seats for the rest of the way.  I enjoyed the rest of the ride to Merced, especially going over the mountains.  There was one scene that I would like to revisit some day.  The train snaked around a deep valley which had a lake at the bottom.  It was beautiful.  I think the lake was Donner Lake in the Donner Pass.  

I didn’t stay at Merced very long.  Probably two weeks, but it was long enough for a free trip to Yosemite National Park.  I was then sent back east to Kerns, Utah.  We were pretty much just marking time at Kerns.  There was no runway at Kerns, so they would bus us to the Salt Lake City airport so we could get our flying time in to qualify for our flight pay.  On returning to Kerns one time a pheasant flew up next to the side of the road and the bus driver swerved off the road to hit it and he scored!  He got out picked up the dead bird and we went on our way.  One of the guys in my unit was John Agar, the actor.  He was 

Married to Shirley Temple at the time and he got unlimited passes to be with his wife in a hotel in Salt Lake City.  It was Christmas time while I was at Kerns and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was putting on their annual performance of The Messiah.  The recreation people gave us free tickets.  While a buddy and I were waiting to go into the Tabernacle, in uniform, two girls came up to us and asked to see our tickets.  When we showed them, they handed us some other tickets.  They gave us tickets for preferred seating!  It was an impressive performance by not only the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but also 4 soloist from the Metropolitan Opera Company.  

In a matter of a few weeks I was off to California again.  This time, it was to an air station in Long Beach.  My only duty at Long Beach was to practice my Morse code.  I was able to visit the Famous Long Beach Boardwalk.  But the big treat was when they loaded some of on a bus and took us to be guests of Sonja Henie for a performance at her Ice Palace in Hollywood.  I was at Long Beach for only a couple weeks when they sent me to Hamilton AFB north of San Francisco. 

Early in my stay at Hamilton, a buddy and I took a bus into San Francisco to see the sights.  We walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and back again.  We also got to ride a  cable car.  One time they assigned a group of us to report to the tarmac where a Paramount movie crew made a newsreel.  Before television, newsreels were shown in movie theaters preceding the cartoons and main feature.  They had us get in an airplane that was set up as a hospital ship.  One of the things in it was a movie projector/screen combination.  They put bandages and slings on most.  They gave me some crutches.  They took shots of us in the plane and then took pictures of us being lowered to the tarmac.  I wanted to go into San Francisco and see me in the movie, but I couldn’t.

Soon, we were assigned to C-54 crews.  We were to move supplies to places across the Pacific.  Since the war was over it was a real nice assignment.  We operated just like a commercial airline.  We would fly a plane to an island and another crew would take it to the next island and we would have a day or two to rest.  Then we would take another plane, which another crew had brought in, to the next island.  The first leg was to Hawaii. Johnson Island was so small it seemed like landing and taking off from an aircraft carrier. We didn’t stay overnight there because it was a short hop from Hawaii and the next leg to Kwajalein wasn’t bad either.  My first time on Kwajalein was delightful because I got to swim in the lagoon, which had beautiful, calm, clear water.  On a subsequent visit to Kwajalein, a typhoon moved into the area and it ripped up the young palm trees that the Navy had planted and caused a mess.  While we were waiting in line outside the mess hall with the sailors, several trucks pulled up and all of the sailors were ordered to get in them.  It seemed that the commander of the island who was a commodore, equal to a one star general, ordered that the island be cleaned up even while the storm was still going on.  Somehow we aircrew members were exempt from the order and the NCO in charge of the mess hall let us go on in.  We had the place to ourselves.

  The first time I was on Guam, I saw all the coconuts hanging on the palm trees and, since I really liked to eat coconuts, I climbed a sloping tree, broke off a coconut, broke off the outside husk, opened it and ate most of it.  I finally had my fill of coconut.  On a subsequent visit to Guam, a buddy and I went swimming.  We found an inflated raft on the beach and we floated out.  We soon learned that we were drifting out to sea, so we struggled to get back.  To make headway, we had to dig our feet into the bottom when the waves let us down far enough to reach the bottom.  The problem was the bottom was largely coral which cut our feet.  When we got back to shore, the shore patrol guys were waiting for us and took us to their commander.  We were told we were in big trouble for going beyond the acceptable limits.  They did bandage our feet and, because we identified ourselves as aircrew, they decided to let us go.  The commander said, “I am going to confiscate your raft though.”  That part didn’t bother us at all because it wasn’t our raft to begin with.

When we visited the Philippines, we used the Manila airport instead of Clark Field, so I got to see some of the city.  The end of the line was Atsugi, Japan.  Atsugi had been a base for Japan’s air force.  We enlisted men stayed in a huge multi-purpose building made of wood and stained dark brown.  We arrived at night and I didn’t realize the nature of the building until my first morning.  There was an open doorway between the toilet facilities and a hallway.  The row of about a dozen urinals started next to the doorway.  Every urinal had guys waiting in line except the one next to a wide open doorway.  I thought, “Lucky me.”  I soon learned why that urinal was unused.  While I was standing at the urinal, all of a sudden a parade of Japanese women came by the doorway and each one of them stopped and bowed and greeted me with a word that sounded like, “Sohio,” which I assumed to mean, “Good morning.”  Needless to say, that cut my water off.  The aircraft mechanic and I visited Tokyo by taking a train, which consisted of two or three streetcars hooked together.  We had to go through Yokohama to get to Tokyo.  Yokohama was flattened by incinerator bombs that had been dropped by B-29s.  I had seen the destruction in Manila, but Yokohama was much worse.  There was one area of several square miles in which the only thing standing was a bank vault.  A bride got on the train in one village and got off in another.  She was on her way to her wedding and dressed in a beautiful classic Japanese wedding attire.  I was tempted to take a photo of her, but I was afraid that it might offend her.  

In my 21 years of active duty, I was never in combat, nor did I ever do anything heroic.  But the pilots and navigator acted like I did one time when we were out over the Pacific.  A radio compass, a piece of equipment that, when tuned to a radio transmitter of known geographical location, will indicate which direction that transmitter is from the plane.  The main part of the equipment is usually located down in the bowels of a plane and a dial is located in the cockpit.  A crew member with a navigational chart can tune to a station or radio beacon and read the degrees from the dial and, with his protractor, draw a line from that station.  After tuning to three such signals and drawing the lines, he ends up with a tiny triangle on his chart to indicate his exact location.  Or, a pilot can tune to a transmitter located at his destination and just fly with the needle of the dial pointing straight up and he will be heading straight for his destination.  Well, one time when we were out over the Pacific, the pilot called me up and pointed to the dial and the needle was whirling erratically.   He asked me if I could fix it and, since I had worked on such equipment back at the base in Missouri, I said I could if I could find the black box in the belly of the plane.  I knew where it was in a C-46, but I had never been in the belly of a C-54.  They opened the trap door in the cockpit and I took my tools and flashlight down and, sure enough, I found it and made the proper adjustments and when I came up through the trap door, the needle on the dial was steady and both pilots and the navigator all acted like I had done something great.  They shook my hand and patted me on the back and made me feel as good as if I really had done something of value. 

One more vivid memory over the Pacific was seeing an island being born.  It was an under water volcano which was erupting.  Our pilot circled it several times for us.  The hot lava had reached the surface and the tip of it was even above the surface.  The ocean boiled all around it.    

The radio operator’s main function was to take position reports from the navigator and transmit them to ground controllers by Morse code.  My experiences were mostly positive with the exceptions of cutting my feet on the coral on Guam and getting and getting a lifetime fungus infection in my ears.  The later was caused by either sleeping on perspiration soaked cots on those tropical islands or from sharing headsets that stayed with the planes.

After my Pacific experiences, my commander sent me on a delay-en-route type of leave to be at the birth of our son in Berea, Kentucky and then to Fort Sheridan, Illinois to be discharged.  The others in my unit were discharged a couple weeks after I was.

After my discharge, I hitchhiked to Michigan to borrow Dad’s car and drive to Berea where our son was born so I could bring us all back to Michigan.  Getting a job was easy, but getting housing wasn’t.  I got a job at the Stinson Airplane factory in Wayne, Michigan.  I tried to find a place that Betsy and the baby could live with me near work.  We didn’t have a car, so it had to be near someone with whom I could commute to work.  I could find nothing.  If I even asked about just a sleeping room, they would turn me down when I said we had a child.  About that time, I resented the fact that those who had not served in the military during the war held down all of the housing while we who had served were denied a place to live.  The ones who had not served also had cars.  My brother Chuck let  me stay at their home while Betsy and Harold II stayed with my parents in Fenton.  I would hitch-hike to be with them on weekends.  After a month or so, we bought a trailer and had it towed to a trailer park about a mile or two from Chuck and Beverly.  I could ride to work with Chuck.  The trailer was officially an 18 foot one, but that length included the tongue, so the three of us lived in a space 8  feet by 16 feet.  It was a real task to buy that trailer because we had very little money and we had to come up with $1,050.  We had to borrow from Aunt Faye and her husband Uncle Willie and the bank in Fenton.  Uncle Herman co-signed for us at the bank.  We paid them back when we eventually sold the trailer. There was no plumbing in the trailer, of course, so we used the toilet facilities in the trailer park’s central wash house.  At the airplane factory, I assembled fuel tanks which were actually part of the wings.  The tops of the tanks were curved and were the surfaces of the tops of the wings.  Later that summer I had amassed so many of the tanks that I was switched to spot welding them.  There were so many of the finished tanks that I was switched again to spot welding the doors. Our lack of a car didn’t prevent us from taking outings on Sundays.  On one outing to Belle Isle, we bought some bad hot dogs and came up with severe food poisoning.  We got over it, of course.  

Sometime  that summer, I was able to get over to East Lansing and enroll at Michigan State College for that fall.  I put our name on the waiting list for the married housing project that was under construction.  Since those apartments would not be finished for the first term at State, we hired a guy to tow our trailer to Okemos which is a neighbor of East Lansing.  We parked it in the side yard of a residential lot.  We ran an extension cord to the trailer from the Bueller’s house.  About the same time, another couple, Monte and Phyllis Frazier, moved their trailer next to ours.  The Buellers also took in an Alzheimer’s patient.  Renting out space for our trailers and taking care of the Alzheimer’s patient for the state were ways of earning extra money for the Buellers.  It also gave them some excitement.  They often had to change fuses when the Fraziers and we both had our lights on at the same time.  The Alzheimer’s guy was a tall man in his 60’s.  Occasionally he would wander off and try to walk back to his boyhood home in Canada.  The word Alzheimer’s had not been coined at that time, but that is what he had.  The Buellers would get excited and hunt him down to retrieve him.  My brother Earl, who was also enrolled at Michigan State, had no place to live, so he moved in with us. Three adults and a child living in a space 8 feet by 16 feet. Earl and I took a bus to class in East Lansing.  The bus turned around at the only traffic light in Okemos.  For awhile, I worked part time at the diary on campus to supplement our GI Bill checks, which were $90 per month.  I also received free tuition and books and other supplies.  Since Earl was single, he got only $75 per month from the GI bill.  The living arrangement was such a struggle especially since winter was coming on, that we had to sell the trailer. We put a “For Sale” sign in the window of the trailer.  A day or two later, a man came along and said he would give us $1,000 for it, but he had to have the title before the weekend.  We had left the title in a bank lock box in Ypsilanti.  That meant I had to make a mad hitch-hiking dash for Ypsilanti.  The first ride dropped me off by the Michigan football stadium in Ann Arbor.  I started running toward Ypsilanti with my thumb out and was picked up almost instantly.  The people in the car said they were so impressed with my running that they had to stop for me.  They dropped me off in front of the bank 15 minutes before the bank was to close.  I hitch-hiked back to Okemos that Friday evening.  The man came Saturday morning and exchanged a $1,000 check for the title and hauled the trailer away.  We didn’t know if the check would be good until we were able to take to the bank in Fenton.  Talk about good fortune, the check was good.  God was really looking out for us!!!!!!!!  God has always taken care of us —- many, many times.  

Betsy and Harold II went to stay with her Aunt and Uncle in Berea, Kentucky, and Earl and I moved into a large gymnasium with thousands of other homeless students stacked three high in army bunk beds.  I don’t know how many of us homeless vets there were in that gym.  It had to be more than a thousand.  Perhaps several thousand. One of the worst things about living there was the boxers banging away at punching bags on a balcony above us, making it almost impossible to study.  After awhile, I begged the housing people to let us have a trailer in a trailer park the college owned. It was an interim measure until our name came up on the list for the barracks apartments which were under construction.  They let us have a single wide for awhile and then to a double wide.  While living in the trailer, one of our neighbors had a car and a refrigerator.  Betsy asked the wife how they did it and she told Betsy her husband worked nights at the Oldsmobile plant in Lansing.  She, who must be obeyed, ordered me to get a job there too.  I got on a bus and, instead of the Oldsmobile plant, I was let out at the Fischer Body plant where I signed up to work three nights per week.  Until then, I had good grades.  From then on, I struggled.  I would often fall asleep in class. My job at Fischer Body was on the receiving dock.  We unloaded materials from trucks and box cars which were used to manufacture Oldsmobiles.  I worked from 4:00 PM until 12:42 AM three nights each week.  Sometimes though, we would have to work overtime if certain cargo situations arose.  If a boxcar load of calcium carbide came in, we had to keep going until we had unloaded the whole boxcar.  That was because it was dangerous cargo.  Acetylene welding gas is made by adding water to calcium carbide.  One time, before I started working at Fischer Body, it started to rain during the unloading and the calcium carbide dust from the cans got wet resulting in a big explosion which blew up the carbide storage building and the boxcar.  The unloaders were killed.  The stuff came in 80 pound cans which we had to take out of the boxcar and stack them four or five cans high in the carbide building, all by hand.  I hated to see a load of calcium carbide come in because I would usually get home exhausted, just in time to change clothes and get to my 8:00 AM class.  The unloading dock was outdoors, so, in the winter, was in uncomfortable conditions.  Sometimes the temperatures would be below zero.  I could get 

 work on a city bus fairly easily, but getting home was not easy most of the time.  The late bus would go only to the Lansing city limits, and I had to walk, in the dark, a couple of miles to get home.  Eventually, we were able to buy a 1941 Nash coupe for $500.  I painted it by hand.  I would advise young people to avoid working at a job that much while in college. It is better to get good grades. 

 We finally came up on the list for a barracks apartment. We moved our belongings by pushing them on a bike and in a baby buggy.  The apartments were primitive, in single story, tar paper covered buildings.  There were four apartments to a building.  We had two bedrooms and a bathroom.  We cooked on an electric stove and heated with an oil space heater. Utilities were furnished including the oil for heating.  The oil was delivered to a 55 gallon drum attached to the side of the building.  I think our rent was $36 per month.  I also think our GI Bill pay was raised to $125 per month.   We had an ice box for which we had to buy blocks of ice which were delivered.  It was annoying to empty the water tray underneath the unit.  I drilled a hole in the floor and ran a  rubber tube from the ice compartment to the crawl space under the apartment.  As the result of my job at Fisher Body, we were eventually able to buy a refrigerator.  We were so excited about it that we stayed awake much of that first night listening to the machine hum.  The housing people built a little co-op grocery only a block from our apartment.  We joined it by buying a $25 share.  We were issued an ID number which we told to the cashier each time we checked out.  Some of our neighbors who did not join the co-op asked us if they could use our number so they could make purchases too.  We said, “Sure.”  We found out later that we got dividends based on the amount of our purchases, so our neighbors were adding to our dividends when they made purchases using our number.  One time our toddler son and his friend, Dickey Schmidt, sneaked off to the co-op and each took a pint of ice cream and gulped it all down before they got home. On our next visit to the co-op, the cashier told us about it and said she knew we were good for it.  The three neighbors in our building were an engineering student with whom we still exchange Christmas cards, an art teacher with whom we visited in Columbia, Missouri in 1998 where he was a retired University of Missouri art professor, and the other was a physical education student.  My brother Floyd lived with us for awhile in our apartment.  He would baby sit with our son while I was working at Fisher Body and Betsy was working at an on campus fast food place called, “The Huddle.”  We used our bicycle to get around campus.  In addition to riding it to classes, we used it for recreation on weekends.  I would peddle, Betsy would ride on the bar and Harold II would ride in the basket.  I have a vivid memory of one beautiful Sunday afternoon when we accidentally came upon an outdoor concert.  It was at the band shell by the Red Cedar River.  The stage was filled with coeds in long white dressy dresses, all playing harps.  It was a beautiful concert.  We went to several other entertainments with our student activity cards.

I will always be grateful to Betsy for talking me into signing up for the Air Force ROTC program at the start of my junior year.  It not only gave me a small stipend and clothes (uniform) to wear to class while in school, but it gave me my future career.  I enjoyed the classes too.  There was an inconvenience when I had to go to a summer camp between my junior and senior years.  I had to go to Chanute AFB, Illinois for that and learned some interesting things while there.  Mostly about aircraft engines.   Back at MSU we had a nice commissioning  ceremony at the end of the program.  The Michigan State band played for it.  About 45 years later, I met one of the band members who played at that ceremony.  His name is Earle Lauder.  I met him at the Great American Brass Band Festival in Danville, Kentucky.  At that time, he was a professor of music at Moorhead State University.  But, years ago he had a reputation for being one the greatest of euphonium players while with the Detroit City Band.  He also played in the U. S. Navy Band for 14 years.  He also is a member of the Lexington Brass Band, which is made up of music professors from various universities in Kentucky.  They play four concerts each year in Lexington to which I go when I can.  They have had tours in Europe.  

My brother Floyd’s future wife, Jackie, lived in one of the women’s dormitories.  She worked the telephone switchboard in that dorm to help pay for her room and board.  My brother Vic’s future wife, Alice, also lived in a dorm.  I think it might have been in the same dorm.  Four of the Guernsey brothers were all at Michigan State at one time.  My father took a picture of us together and sent it to the Flint Journal and the paper printed it.  Dad was proud of us.  When he visited downtown Fenton, and would come across a friend who, in the common greeting of those days, would ask, “What do know?,” he would answer, “All I know is what I read in the paper,” and he would whip out the Flint Journal clipping of four of his sons to show them what he read in the paper.

To cope with the housing shortage, Earl, Floyd, and Vic bought a junky looking trailer which was even smaller than the one Betsy and I had owned.  It was parked in a trailer park between East Lansing and Okemos. One cold winter night, they had no heat and had to come to our place to spend a couple of nights.  

We saw a lot of family while at State.  The brothers and their future wives visited us often and ate with us.  My parents would visit us on Sundays from time to time to dine with us and bring Uncle Herman, sisters Barbara, Evelyn and Maryland and brother Jim.  The visits were almost like family reunions.  

With the help of a 20% employee’s discount, we bought a new Oldsmobile for $1,800.  We would take Vic and Alice for occasional outings, and, one time we drove to Grand Ledge, which was about 8 or 10 miles from East Lansing.  The car quit working and we had to be towed back to Lansing.  We did something which was dangerous and against the law.  The tow truck driver tied a rope onto the steering wheel to keep the front wheels straight, hooked his hoist to the rear of the car and lifted it so it would ride backwards.  Since Vic, Alice, Betsy, Harold II and I would not all fit into the cab of the tow truck, we all got into the car and rode backwards, looking down at the road passing beneath us.   It was Sunday evening and the car dealer’s place in Lansing was closed, but we left the car there and took a taxi to East Lansing where Alice didn’t quite make curfew, but was able to talk her way into the dorm.  God was looking out after us.. 

I did my practice teaching in mathematics at the West Juniour High School.  At that time there was a movie star named Morgan.  The girls thought I looked like him and whenever I walked down the hall while classes were not in session, they would tease me by chanting, “Ohh, Mister Morgan!”  The other thing I remember about my experience at that school was an eighth grade girl swimming in the school pool one morning and having a baby that afternoon.  

Michigan State was on the quarter system, having 3 quarters during the academic year instead of 2 semesters.  I graduated at the end of the winter quarter in 1951.  The state of Michigan issued me a certificate to teach science and mathematics in grades 7 through 12.  After I retired from the Air Force in 1970, the state of Georgia would issue me only a certificate for mathematics because they would not count some of the courses Michigan counted as science, such as metallurgy and surveying.  I was happy with that because Mr. Sypes was a far superior science teacher at Warner Robins Junior High than I could ever have been.

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