7-12 bill went to the county garage to heat & pump tare [tar] for 2 hrs. we had breakfast at 9am after he got home. it rained hard this AM to
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Grandpa Thomas (Bill) worked for the Van Buren County road commission. In the winter he drove a snow plow, and in the summer he drove a tar truck. He had just retired a few days earlier, on July 2, 1964, but apparently was called back in on this day to help out for a couple hours.
A lot of my memories of Grandma and Grandpa revolve around breakfast. In the wintertime, Grandma would get up about 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning and cook a big breakfast of eggs, bacon or sausage, toast, oatmeal, sometimes pancakes, orange juice and coffee -- enough coffee to fill a thermos for him to take with him to work. And then after seeing him off to go drive the snow plow, Grandma would go back to bed for a couple hours. When I was at their house sometimes I would get up and eat with them, and sometimes I would stay in bed and wait for Grandma to come back to bed.
These are pictures of Grandma and Grandpa's house on CR 681 about 3 miles south of Bangor, Michigan. They were taken in 1992, after Grandma and Grandpa had both passed away and the farm had been sold.
As far as I know, Grandpa built the whole house from the ground up. The original house was just the center part that you can see facing the road, with a mud-room entryway, living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. Every once in a while Grandma would decide she needed another room, so Grandpa would build one for her. Grandpa built another bedroom on the left side of the house, and later an extended kitchen on the right toward the back of the house. Those were added on during the years I was growing up. There was a basement under the back of the house where the furnace was, and the washer and dryer, and also a root cellar (dirt floor and walls) where they kept jars of home-canned fruits and vegetables on the shelves.
One time a car careened off the road, through the yard, and crashed right through the living room. Grandma and Grandpa had just left the room to get ready for bed, or they would have been sitting right where the car came in. The front window you see in these pictures (above) is not the original windows that were there before.
Here is a picture of Grandma standing in front of the house with the original windows before the car crashed into them. This is how the house looked when I was growing up.
The property was 16 acres -- 2 acres wide and 8 acres deep (I think). There was a driveway to the left of the house that circled around behind the house and came back out to the road on the right side. The driveway also went straight back from the road to the back of the property where Grandpa had a corn field. The little building on the right was the garage/workshop. Beyond the garage was the barn. On the left side of the barn was a pig sty, and a muddy area outside fenced in for the pigs. Next to that used to be a corn crib (like an open-air silo) that held feed corn for the pigs. These pictures were taken in 1992, after Grandma and Grandpa had both passed away and the farm had been sold, so the corn crib is not there any more. You can still see the giant weeping willow tree, though, behind the house to the left of where the driveway passed beyond the barn toward the back of the property. There were a couple of rolling hills between the front and the back, perfect for sledding and skiing in the winter. There was also a little "pond" somewhere back there (less than a foot deep) that would freeze solid and we could skate on it. Whenever we knew a blizzard was coming, we would go to Grandma and Grandpa's house to be snowed in there, where all our sleds and skis and skates were kept in the garage. Snow is lots of fun when you're a kid. (Not so much when you grow up and have to shovel it and drive in it.)
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