THE SUMMER OF '42

I don't know why but all of a sudden I have been remembering the "Old Days".  Maybe that is what happens when you have been a round nearly eight decades.  And some of it may be the fact that my daughter Shannon said she didn't know much about the time when I was a kid.  So here are some more memories--thos of the Summer of '42.

Many moons ago I was listening to National Public Radio as essayist Tim Brookes discussed the things his 9-year-old daughter Mattie has learned on her own—things that he had no clue of when he was the same age.  These things include smells, colors, textures, directions, dates, time, responsibility, etc.

And a few days later I heard country singer Tim McGraw singing his new release, “Back When”.  The lyrics rang many bells for me.  Here are some of them:

"Back When"

Don't you remember
The fizz in a Pepper?
Peanuts in a bottle
At ten, two and four
A fried bologna sandwich
With mayo and tomato
Sittin' round the table
Don't happen much anymore

We got too complicated
It's all way over-rated
I like the old and out-dated
Way of life

Back when a hoe was a hoe
Coke was a coke
And crack's what you were doing
When you were cracking jokes
Back when a screw was a screw
The wind was all that blew
And when you said I'm down with that
Well it meant you had the flu
I miss back when

I love my records
Black, shiny vinyl
Clicks and pops
And white noise
Man they sounded fine
I had my favorite stations
The ones that played them all
Country, soul and rock-and-roll
What happened to those times?

It started me to think about what things I knew “Back When” I was the tender age of 9.  Now 70 years later, it may not be easy to cull out what I know now from what I knew then, but let’s go back to the summer of 1942. 

The summer of ’42—I had just finished the third grade at Wilson School and my brother Tom just finished the first grade at the same school.  I had gotten into my first fight with a kid named Ted Woods.  He punched me, I punched him back in the stomach and the fight was over! 

The United States was six months into World War II and rationing was underway.  There were ration stamps for food to include special red meat stamps, stamps for shoes, tires, and gasoline.  You could save up meat drippings such as bacon drippings and trade them in for extra red meat stamps.  I never did know why, but suspect it was simply to make citizens feel like they were participating by doing this “patriotic” thing. 

The summer of ’42 was the first summer for Victory Gardens.  Posters flourished all over the place encouraging people to plant a garden for victory.  Americans responded with over 40 million home gardens. 

We think that recycling is something that just started in the past few years, but not so.  My brother and I and our friends were into “recycling” in the summer of ’42.  We would collect scrap metal of any kind for the “war effort” and sell it at a small scrap yard near the railroad tracks.  Old tires were good profit center when you could find them.  Because there was a rubber “shortage” most people saved their tires and recapped them. 

People were being encouraged to help finance the war by purchasing War Bonds.  You could get books that would hold war bond stamps and when the book was filled, it was traded in for a war bond.  Even us kids would save our pennies to buy the stamps until we could buy an $18.75 bond that could be traded in at maturity for $25.00—a king’s ransom to us in the summer of ’42.  

We began to play “War” in the summer of ’42.  The only problem we encountered was nobody wanted to be the enemy.  We carved out wooden guns that fired rubber bands cut from old real rubber inner tubes.  When synthetic rubber came along it killed our rubber band guns.  And speaking of inner tubes—everybody had a patching kit to patch punctures in inner tubes.  There were “hot patch” and “cold patch” kits.  The “hot patch” kits had a patch fastened to a holder that contained some slow burning inflammable material that heated the patch and the cement helping it stick to the inner tube.  They were considered better than the “cold patch” kits, which simply used an early contact cement to hold the patch on. 

In the summer of ’42 we lived on a small two-acre farm at the edge of town, but our Dad did a lot with that two acres.  We had a cow, a large garden, a couple of apple trees, some black berry and raspberry canes, grapes, an asparagus patch, some strawberries and a peach tree.  We grew potatoes, sweet corn, green beans, tomatoes, peas, rhubarb, beets, turnips, cabbage, lettuce, strawberries, black berries, raspberries, watermelons, peppers and popcorn.  We had a huge elm tree near the garden and we would sit under that tree and shell sweet peas and shuck sweet corn.  Mom canned many things and we had a root cellar for potatoes.

I mentioned we had a cow—a Jersey cow by the name of Bossie.  She was a beautiful brown thing and a gentle as the day is long.  She gave oodles of rich, creamy milk.   I think I learned to milk a cow in the summer of ’42.  But our Dad usually did the milking, twice a day so we had fresh whole milk; we churned butter and had buttermilk.  Dad use a one legged stool to milk and I was always amazed that he could keep his balance with milking.  My brother and I helped keep the barn clean and we would carry the milk to the house for Mom to strain and bottle.  I loved a glass of warm fresh milk—nothing so sweet.  No pasteurization or homogenization unless you count shaking the bottle to sort of blend in the cream, which would separate out again given the opportunity.

Bossie was fond of watermelon rinds.  We would feed her chunks of watermelon rind during the summer; she would close her eyes in ecstasy and the juice would dribble out of the side of her mouth.  She could have been a Carnation cow during those moments because she certainly was the picture of contentment.  I think my brother Tom and I may have tried our first bareback riding adventures seated on the back of Bossie.  She would never go very far and never attempted to buck us off because we generally fell off along the way.  She was very patient and seemed to tolerate our childish efforts at being cowboys.

Movies were still a dime in the summer of ’42 and a quarter was a good week’s allowance.  For a quarter a kid could have a great Saturday—take in a movie, get a bag of popcorn, a double dip ice cream cone and still have a nickel left for a soda—and you could get a 12 ounce Pepsi Cola—“Twice and much for a nickel, too; Pepsi Cola is the drink for you!” was the theme song.  The best part about the movies was that you could stay all afternoon for that one dime.  Often we saw the whole thing twice. 

Cowboy movies were regular fare at the “Glory B Theater”.   The “Glory B” showed “B” movies and on Saturdays, the place would be crowded with kids.  For one thin dime, we got to see the news, a serial such as “Jungle Jim” or “Flash Gordon”, a cartoon and the feature—a shoot’em up cowboy movie.  Not the extravagant westerns we have today; I’m talking about Hopalong Cassidy                                                  

(played by my favorite ,William Boyd), Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and his famous horse Trigger.  Later, Dale Evans (Roy’s wife) joined him.  In some of the movies the Sons of the Pioneers sang along with Roy.  Smiley Burnett and Gabby Hayes teamed up with Roy Rogers.  Sometimes it was cowboys and Indians or cowboys and other bad guys.  Not a lot special effects like today, but, of course, there were stand-ins for the stars and it seemed like rifles and pistols never ran out of ammunition.  Stagecoaches went over cliffs, wagons overturned and men were shot off their horses—cowboys and Indians alike.

It was not all westerns.  Johnny Weissmuller, winner of five gold medals for swimming in the 1924 and 1928 Olympics was Tarzan the Ape-man.  There were other Tarzans before and after Weissmuller, but for our generation he probably is remembered as the prototypical Man of the Jungle.  Kids around the world imitated his Tarzan’s yell.  Maureen O’Sullivan was his mate Jane and Johnny Sheffield played Boy—no other name, just Boy. And then there was Cheetah the chimpanzee.  Cheetah was Tarzan’s constant companion, swinging through the trees with him on their adventures.  It was never quite clear if Tarzan and Jane were married, but do you think a 9-year-old kid worried about that?

And, of course there were the “horror” movies.  “Frankenstein” with Boris Karloff playing the Monster.  Then there was “Wolfman” with Lon Chaney, Jr. changing into the wolf when there was full moon.  We all worried about discovering a pentagram  (a star within a circle in the movies) in the palm of our hand—a sure sign you would turn into a wolf with each full moon when the wolf bane was in bloom.

  “Count Dracula”, with Bela Lugosi, would leave you worried about bats when you walked home from the movie.  You were tempted to carry a cross around your neck just in case you had to ward off this vampire. 

Not all of these came in the Summer of ’42, but they just popped into my memory as I was putting this on paper.  Most of them had been made in the 1930s, but a new generation was in place in the Summer of ’42 and these movies were recycled!

DOWN MEMORY LANE--RECOLLECTIONS FOR MY 50TH HIGHSCHOOL REUNION

    DOWN MEMORY LANE 

I’d like to take this opportunity to ask you to accompany me down memory lane.   I’ve been a writer all of my life, but an especially serious one for the last 12 years.  That is, I feel guilty if I don’t write something every day.  Therefore, I’m well acquainted with a writer’s problems. More likely than not, it’s not what to write, but how to keep it brief and to make every word count.

I’m going to make a list of experiences common to our generation. I could tell you a story about every one, but I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to let your memory make your own stories. 

So, here  goes.

Do you remember?

Clotheslines, bluing, wash tubs with wringers, ice cards in the window, or if your family was rich, metal ice cube trays with metal levers.  Dishwashing machines consisted of two teenagers. One to wash and rinse, one to dry and put away the dishes. Sometimes this great tool for interpersonal relationships deteriorated into sibling spats. For this reason Mother served as referee.

Hot, breathless Oklahoma summers with fans, sleeping in the yard, visiting with neighbors on the front porch while enjoying fresh squeezed lemonade and asking, “Did anybody feel that breeze?”

Chasing fireflies in the twilight.  Dizziness from whirling in circles to make you giggle. Playing Batman or Superman with a dishtowel as your only prop. Hide and seek, king of the mountain, tire swings, reenactment of Tarzan movies.  Cork pop guns, roller skate keys, Tinker toys, Lincoln logs, erector sets, making balsa wood airplane models, beanie flips, inner tube rubber guns; the beauty, feel and smell of a brand new, white, virgin baseball in the spring and how by the end of summer the red threads would no longer hold the cover together, requiring black friction tape to keep the ball intact.

P.F. Flyers.  This was a cheap canvas and rubber “tennis” shoe, but it was light.  It seldom outlasted the insult and wear of one summer, but it could make a boy run faster and jump higher than any of his barefooted peers. (We saved our good leather shoes for going to church.) Saddle oxfords. Bobby socks.

Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Captain Midnight, The Torch, and no Cliff notes—only Classic Comics for emergency book reports.

Fishing with a cane pole and a cork bobber.  Making your own kite from strips of an orange crate, newspaper and home made paste. Thanks to the lead & zinc mines, blasting powder boxes which made great chairs and tables for tree houses. Wooden cheese boxes.

Door to door salesmen, home delivery of milk in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers.  Cream that oozed out of the bottle in the winter time.

The pre-television age of radio left our eyes and hands free for building model airplanes, doodling, or doing homework while we listened to Bob Hope, Jack Bennie, Inner Sanctum, Green Hornet, Jack Armstrong the all-American boy, fireside chats from FDR, and soap operas with Stella Dallas.  Johnny Lee Wills and all his boys. Town Talk bread.

Telephone numbers with prefixes such as Kimball 5027. Party lines.  Mimeograph paper with very faded blue ink.

Penny candy, nickel candy bars, candy cigarettes, five cent soda pop in glass bottles.  Twelve ounce

Pepsi Cola--twice as much for a nickle.

The Saturday Evening Post with its great short stories and Hazel cartoons; Colliers, Life Magazine.

Gas stations with attendants who’d check your oil, tire pressures, and clean your windshields while filling your tank with 20 cent/gal. Ethyl gasoline. Free air and water at every pump.

Studebakers, Nashes, Hudsons, and Kaisers.  That first driving lesson by your father in cars with starter buttons and headlight dimmer switches on the floor boards, clutches, standard shift (only four gears if you could find them), rubber bladed fans on dash for defrost. Radios not standard. Roll down windows. Developing good upper body strength while trying to parallel park without power steering.

Greyhound, and Trailways buses that could deliver you to any small town in the U.S.

Sooner Drive-in movies, Doc’s Barbeque where a half dollar could buy you a delicious BBQ sandwich, a Miller’s Highlife bottle of beer, and leave you a nickel left over for a tip.  I know, I know. You’re going to say—a nickel tip? What a cheapskate!  Not really. The going rate for mowing a lawn was 50 cents—no power mowers, strictly push and pull. So five nickels was the half the price of admission to a movie at the Glory B or the Ottawa theaters. Twenty nickels would buy you five gallons of gas.

Ray’s root beer in frosted mugs.  Tucker’s hamburgers and chili.  Tableside jukeboxes in cafes.

Coleman theatre—twelve cents for kids, 25 cents for adults. Theatre manager, the bald

headed Mr. Griffin taking tickets and often challenging ages of pre-adolescents with

growth spurts. Aside from the bank, the only air-condition building in town. Newsreels

before the movie and cartoons afterward.  Glory B theatre with B grade movies.

Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry Lash Larue, and Roy Rodgers.  None of the boys liked

Roy because he sang too much and kissed Dale Evans.  You’d never catch Lash kissing

any dumb old girl. Of course, his having to stand on Alan Ladd’s box may have had

something to do with it. Ottawa theatre for the Three Stooges, really bad movies, and

drawings for a set of dishes. All movies were rated G. The closest we came to a PG was

at the final scene of “Gone With The Wind” when Rhett Butler told Scarlet he didn’t

give a (Oh, God! A four letter word!) damn.  Hollywood writers tried their best, but Clark

Gable refused to say “hoot”. It wasn’t dignified. Only Gabby Hayes said hoot.

Winart pottery factory near the high school. 

High school. C.C. Feree’s PA announcements, “Now hear this. This is your principal

speaking.”  Feree had been a Navy Lieutenant during World War II.

 Generational school teachers who taught fathers, mothers, and their children..  No school buses, no cafeteria.  No free textbooks. All bought, mostly second hand. Those whose parents could afford new textbooks were really cool. The reason everyone was slender was we either skipped lunch or walked briskly to home and back for lunch.

Football: concrete stands, pall of blue tobacco smoke against floodlights, the smell of dry

Bermuda grass. War Dogs with leather helmets. No face masks.

Band- story of third trombones.  Jerry Bressie, Jim Campbell and myself. We played a lot of whole notes and half notes, leaving the rhythm, fourth and eighth notes to the smart aleck 1^st and 2^nd trombones who could actually read music. We were so bad, Doc Killion told us to forget about playing, just march. We sounded like braying llamas who really needed to spit.

School assemblies with Eddie McGinnis and Gary Truman skits.

Tobacco was the only habit forming drug. No metal detectors, no dope sniffing dogs, no

locker inspections.

Only race problems were arguments over who could run the fastest.

Dress code unspoken. Boys: just weren't cool unless one wore denims and white shirts.  Girls: No shorts.

Girls wore below the knee skirts, white blouses, or two-piece sweaters.  Lipstick grudgingly allowed, but I can’t remember pierced ears or painted nails. I do remember the current saying that “only Mexicans and Gypsies wear dangling earrings and paint.” Saddle oxfords. Blue jeans allowed on Fridays.

Bicycle racks. No parking problem because no students owned cars.  One car families. People walked to town, to the movies, to school, to the store.

Neighborhood grocery stores.  Farrier’s on main street was closest thing to a supermarket.

Highway 66 was Miami’s Main Street.

Parades consisted of nothing more than a float or two, HS band, and Mutt Farrier’s Roundup club bringing up the rear, yet people lined the sidewalks to watch. Miamians just loved parades no matter what the reason. 

VE Day. VJ Day.  The atomic bomb. The flood of July ’51.  Returning home from Korea three years latter to discover that that was the last rain. Grand Lake was down to its river bed.

Bud Wilkinson-OU football.  Harry Carey-Cardinal Baseball.  Only two sports in Oklahoma: Football and spring football.  Sandlot baseball, track, and basketball existed only to keep in shape for football.

Barbershops with male barbers and Field & Stream magazines. Served as a forum on local and

national politics. Fifty cent haircuts.

Boy Scouts of America never heard of the word homosexual.  The ACLU didn’t exist.

These were simpler times and harder times, but they were OUR times.

SOME THINGS I BELIEVE

Back in February 2009, my youngest daughter Katie sent me a piece that the late John Updike wrote for National Public Radio on things he believed. The webiste for this piece is here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4600600

I wrote back to Kate and here is what I said:

Dear Katie--

Although I will never be a John Updike, I think I believe in some of the same things he believed in.

I believe in my children--they are a part of me and all those who have gone before me. They are my connection to the future.

I believe in love and the need to be loved.

I believe in miracles because I have seen them.

I believe science and God can co-exist but that one does not explain the other

I believe that this country offers every person the opportunity to succeed--but it takes the will to do so.

I believe people are basically good, but circumstances can make them do terrible things.

I believe that a government of the people has a duty to do for the people what they cannot do for themselves.

I believe that we have a duty to serve others in some way--to share our talents to the betterment of those who do not have those same talents.

I believe that laughter is tonic for the soul.

I believe in planting a tree in whose shade you will never sit.

I believe there is no such place as Hell--but without a belief, your life may end and that is all there will be--that alone would be Hell.

I believe I have rambled far too long.

Much love,

Dad

And so for today, that is what I am thinking about.

MAM, CAN YOU SPARE A MEAL

I thought I would republish some pieces I wrote several years ago. They have nothing to do with current events, the reelection of President Obama, the Patraeus mess or whatever today's latest scandal is. They are just memories from my younger years--much younger years. I hope you enjoy them as I continue to post them.

This particular post is hoboes as I remember them.
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During the Great Depression of the 1930s, thousands of homeless, jobless men took to the road to find work or simply to run away from their surroundings. Great numbers of hoboes rode on trains, primarily freight trains, without any thought of payment for their passage. They road on top of trains, inside boxcars and under the trains on the rods—part of the suspension system of the train. They were subjected to abuses from fellow hoboes and from the railroad police whose job it was to insure that passengers paid their way. Hoboes were beaten, robbed, thrown from trains and often killed. Hoboes suffered the vagaries of the weather and tried to keep moving from colder climates to warmer climates without freezing or baking.

Many were honest men, simply trying to find a better life. There were always rumors of work in another place often distant from where they were at any moment. With no money, they hitched a ride on the railroads when they could.

My father, (and for some short time my mother), my maternal grandfather and my uncle all worked for a small ore hauling line in Northeast Oklahoma before, during and after the Great Depression. So for many years, we lived close to the railroad tracks. In addition to the North Eastern Oklahoma Railroad, the ore hauling line, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (or the St. Louis and San Francisco [the Frisco] Railroad) and the Kansas, Oklahoma, and Gulf Railroad ran through my hometown. And, since these lines went from colder places to warmer places, hoboes frequented them. I seem to recall there also was a small “Hobo Jungle” or camp just on the northern outskirts of town on a small creek called Tar Creek. Hoboes would lay over here waiting for their next ride. It was not unusual to find them knocking on door of houses close to the railroad seeking a handout. Many would offer to do some menial labor in exchange for a meal. Since many folks had wood or coal burning stoves, tasks such as splitting kindling and filling the wood box were common. My grandparents had a coal-burning stove for years and kindling splitting was a chore often exchanged for a meal. Nobody had much in those days; even those folks who were working made little money and did many things to stretch their pay. But my grandmother and grandfather both came from families of small means when they were growing and so they tended to share what little they had with those they perceived were worse off than they.

Standard hobo fare in my grandmother’s kitchen was a bowl of pinto beans, generally cooked with a little salt pork along with cornbread or biscuits, homemade butter, buttermilk, sweet milk, sweetened iced tea or coffee depending on which was available. Some sliced Bermuda onion or green onions might be on the menu also along with sliced tomatoes when in season. What the hoboes didn’t know was that this was sometimes standard fare for all of us! But we had some variety since in the summer my mother or my grandmother would cook up “a mess of green beans” with some salt pork or smoked ham hock and new potatoes. You may ask what “a mess of green beans” is—well then it consisted of fresh green beans that had been picked and snapped and then cooked all day long until they were very well done. Hot cornbread, homemade butter, a cold glass of buttermilk, sweet milk or sweetened ice tea and you had a king’s feast! You can still find green beans cooked that way, particularly in small southern cafes, and when I find them those halcyon days return, all the sweeter for having been away so long.

I know there are still hoboes, but somehow I don’t think they are the same kind of folks that I remember from so long ago. I will not make any judgments regarding present day hoboes, but I do remember (somewhat romantically I confess) the Knights of the Road some 70+ years ago. I remember them as humble men, down and out on their luck, trying to get to better place. I am sure there were those who were on the run for some crime they had committed and there were those who committed crimes against their fellow hoboes, but the ones I met were good men, just trying to keep body and soul together.

The Dust Bowl--Memories of My Early Years in Oklahoma

I recently wrote a short piece on my Facebook page yesterday (November 20, 2012) about some of my memories evoked by watching Ken Burns' new project, Dust Bowl.  For those who have not been around as long as I have, the Dust Bowl Era, sometimes call the the Dirty Thirties, began about the same time as the Great Depression.  It included counties in the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas and the states of New Mexico and Colorado.  Much of this area, thousands of acres, was dedicated to dryland farming.  That is farming where there is very little water and grains are one of the most common crops.  Becasue the Dust Bowl Era coincided with the Great Depression, it was "Three strikes and you're out", for a lot of folks.  The land dried up and blew away, farmers couldn't produce crops and they couldn't borrow any money.  But this was not the case in the northeastern part of Oklahoma where I grew up.  My parents, Orville F. Harris and V. Muriel (pronounced Merle) Barnes met and married in Miami, Oklahom in April, 1929.  Dad was 24 and Mom was 18.  Mom was going to the Miami Business College to study bookeeping and Dad was working as a lineman on the Northeastern Oklahoma Railroad (NEO RR).  I think he may have been going to the Business College also since being a lineman was not his long term plan. 

While I am not certain of the year, it was pehaps in the Fall of 1931, Dad got laid off the railroad.  The NEO was an ore hauling line, moving lead and zinc ore from the mines in Northeastern Oklahoma to the Eagle-Picher Smelter where the lead and zinc were extracted, made into ingots and the NEO hauled them to the two mainline railroads that run through Miami.  Like everything else during the depression, the price of lead and zinc dropped, so some of the mines shut down or did less mining and thus the NEO had less work and so folks got laid off.  Like many "Okies", my folks decided to go to California where Dad's mother and step-father, Anna and Harry Bachman,  lived on a small farm in Watsonville.  So they packed up their Model A Ford Roadster (the kind with the "Rumble Seat") and off they went to the Land of Milk and Honey. 

Route 66, the Mother Road, was still being built but I can only guess that is the route they took since it was the pathway Okies and Arkies (folks from Arkansas) took to travel to California.  Motels were few and far between and money was just as scarce.  While I don't remember my folks talking about it, I suspect they did like many others, the slept in campgrounds or pulled off and slept alongside the road either in a tent or in the car.  When they finally arrived in Watsonville, the were able to get work as crop pickers, picking peas and other crops.  In the Fall, Dad picked apricots and Mom worked in a drying house where the apricots were prepared for drying.  Dad used to say they didn't make enough to live on so he took their earnings to a nearby grocery store that had some slot machines and did well enough that they were able to mutiply their earnings. 

Sometime in late 1932 or early 1933, Dad got notice that the railroad's business was picking up and he was offered a job.  So, off they went to return to Oklahoma and my Mom was pregnant with me.  In June 1933, I popped into the world at my maternal gransparents' home and the rest is history--so to speak.  My brother Tom came along two years later in March 1935. 

Between 1933 and 1938, my parents managed to save enough money to buy a bigger car, a Dodge Sedan (probably a 1935).  It was in this car that our family took our first trip to Califronia.  So off we went on our great adventure in the summer of 1938.  I was five and my brother was three.  You have to remember that cars of that era did not have air conditioning except to have all four windows rolled down.  I don't remember whether we stayed in motels or not but I do remember sleeping in the car.  We would pull off the road, and bed down in the car.  I do recall one time when a large truck  whizzed by us in the middle of the night and my Dad woke up screaming because he thought we were running off the road or was about to be hit.  And I don't remember much about meals.  I suspect we stopped at grocery stores, bought "stuff" and Mom made a lot of baloney sandwiches.  We drove across the Mojave Desert at night and it seems to me that we got to California in about three days.  I don't know about showers, bathroom breaks and all that--just too long ago.  But I suspect that gas stations, which had the old glass cylinders at the top with gallon markings on them, did not have restrooms like they do today.  More than likely they had a privy out back, complete with a crescent moon cut into the door and perhaps a Sears-Roebuck catalog for toilet paper. 

I believe our next trip to California was in 1940 but it may have been the summer of 1941 when I was eight and my brother was six.  We still had the same Dodge sedan and the four of us headed off to see my Dad's parents who still lived in Watsonville.  As I recall, the trip was much like the earlier trip except that as we approached Needles, California the universal joint on the car went out.  We managed to get to Needles and Dad dropped Mom and my brother and I off in a local park while he went to get the car repaired.  I don't have a clue how he got the job done but expect he helped do the repair work since I suspect he didn't have a lot of money.  Mom, my brother and I spent the day in a city park and I remember there was an old Civil War era cannon there, much like just about every park in the Nation.  I have two other memories of that trip--one was about the large garden my grandfather had; it ran down the side of the hill and I remember being amazed at all the things growing there.  He also had a large vineyard where he grew grapes for the wine he made each year.  And the wine is the other thing I remember.  Grandad had a large wine cellar where he kept wine in small oak kegs.  Tom and I went down to the cellar one afternoon and at eight and six managed to get a little "likkered up" after tapping into one of the kegs!  I also remember that my grandfather was a pretty good fiddler--the one song I remember is the "flight of the Bumble Bee".  Grandad Harry played with great gusto and I understand that he played for square dances all over the place.  Oh, I do remember one other thing about that trip.  My grandparents raised rabbits and chickens--they were not pets--they were to eat.  While we were there one of the doe rabbits had a litter of kits.  I made the mistake of opening the cage and picking up the kits.  The next day we were out at the rabbit cages and all the babies were gone.  Needless to say, my grandfather was upset and he asked me if I had been "messing around" with the kits.  I said I had been and then he told me that more than likely the mother had killed and eaten the babies because they smelled strange to her.  He told me that I could have prevented that if I had first picked up the doe and left my scent on her first.  I don't know if that is true or not since I have never raised rabbits and thus never had a chance to find out if his theory was correct.

Enough for this post...