When I was about nine or ten years old. I remember going to Olds grocery store for our groceries. Mom had a list and would give it to the clerk, usually one of the Olds brothers, and they would get what ever was on the list, bag it and take it to our car.
I remember lots of things about this place. One was the time I almost fell off the wind mill, I was playing with a handkerchief made like a parachute so I thought I would climb to the top of our wind mill and throw it up from there and it would go a long way. Well when I was in the process of this I almost fell off the windmill. This scares me to tell this now.
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One time when my dad and I were getting some corn stalks from the field to the barn to feed the cows, a field mouse ran up my dad’s pant leg. My dad always wore bib overalls, and I remember Dad grabbing his overalls in the chest area catching the mouse and squeezing it until it was dead.
I got my first shot gun here. It was a 44 caliber rifle bored out to a 410 caliber shot gun (single shot). I got it from my cousin Ralph Till when he got a new one. The first time I went hunting I got a pheasant. I was in the corn field and saw the pheasant running down the corn row ahead of me so I ran after it. When it took off I shot just as it was at the top of the corn stalks.
THE STRAIGHT FARM
When we lived here we only had an outside toilet, It was OK in the summer time, but in the winter it was not so nice going through the snow, and the wind would sometimes blow through the cracks in the door and make little snow drifts. I remember when my dad made a small room on the back porch and put in a toilet stool. but no running water so we had to carry water to flush with. This room had no heat but it was better than going out side. I took my bath in a wash tub in the kitchen because it was the warmest room in the house and that was not the best sometimes. We had a wood burning stove in the kitchen and a coal burning pot bellied stove in the living room and they would heat the whole house. We would close off any room that was not needed. When my mother would build a fire she would put some fuel oil on the kindling and sometimes we would have a small explosion, and sometimes she would get that pot bellied stove red hot getting the house warmed up.
THE GREAT TRAIN ESCAPE
One time when I was about 10 or 12 years old Dale Swinford and I were out at the railroad trestle north of Hartford throwing rocks down at the turtles in the mill pond. For some reason we did not notice that a train was coming and when we did see it we started for the end of the trestle but did not have time to get there. At the very last second we swung over the side and were hanging on the railroad ties. It was so close that the train men thought they had hit us and stopped the train. With the train stopped we could not get back up on the tracks so we hand over handed to the end of the trestle and hid. The train people told people in town that they hit some kids playing on the trestle and they came looking for us. Later we came out of hiding and acted like we were looking too. Dale and I vowed never to tell anyone. Years later, after I was married, one day I told Mom and Dad, and Mother remembered that day.
THE BRIDGE
While we lived there us kids would go out north of Hartford to the mill pond and go swimming at the bridge. We would ride our bicycles out to the bridge and ride them off the end of the dock into the water. After we were through swimming we would dive down to the bottom and get our bicycles. I could dive off the cross bars of the bridge about 15 feet from the water but some of the older kids (I was about 10 or 11 years old) could dive off the top of the bridge about 30 feet to the water. The current was so strong and I was so small I couldn’t swim up stream so I would swim down stream until got to shore and would walk back up the road to the bridge.
This is where we lived when we got our first refrigerator. Up until then we always had an icebox and had ice delivered. It had legs of about 12 “high and the box was about 24” X 24” x 36 “ high with a round compressor unit on the top.
HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY
This house was on the west side of Hartford, Michigan about across from where Galati’s Pizza is now. This house only had one bedroom so my father closed in the front porch and that’s where Bernarde and I slept.
I call this place “the house by the cemetery” because it was across from the cemetery. One night I was walking home from a scary movie and when I got at the cemetery gate opening someone said something and I looked and saw two ghosts! But it was two of the Yeats girls with white blouses cutting through the cemetery on their way to town.
One night I was coming home from a movie in the rain on my bicycle and hit a light pole on the corner by the cemetery and almost fell in front of a semi truck. It was a close call.
When dad would milk the cows he would take the milk to the basement and run it though our cream separator so my mother would have cream to churn into butter. We also raised a big garden and mother canned.
I remember one time around Christmas my father came home from work and started to take off his boots on the back porch and fell down in the process. It seems that they had a few drinks after work celebrating Christmas. Well, after he fell down he said to himself, “Well then I will take you off sitting down”. I never remember seeing my father take a drink.