My earliest memories begin at 358 Mary Street, Marion, Ohio in the late ‘50s. There are photos and home movie memories of things I don’t truly remember, but there are memories stuck in my mind that have never faded.
It was a huge two-story house. It seemed huge to me, anyway. But then, it had to be to house mom and dad and my four siblings…and a cat or two. And a rabbit in the backyard. It was white, with a big fenced-in backyard. We made good use of that backyard. We and our neighbor friends would nearly denude the yard of any grass during the summers. We had great neighbors: the Smith’s, the Jones’s, the Clark’s, the Finch’s, the James’. All with kids of all ages so that each of us had friends our age.
One summer the Clark’s got an aboveground pool. That was a good summer. We’d be over there sometime in the morning. After a lunch break, mom would make us wait a half hour before going back to splash and play in their pool—I’ve always wondered if that whole wait a half hour thing is an old wives’ tale. The James’ had a tree house in the big tree in their backyard. I was told I was too young to climb up to it, but I think that was just my brothers not wanting their baby brother hanging around. It’s probably a good thing. There was their story of dropping a kitten upside down from the treehouse to see if it would land on its feet.
I married Diane Smith when we were four or five years old. Her older sister officiated.
There was a huge warehouse fire one year, just a few blocks from the house on Mary Street. My brothers and their friends were up in the treehouse watching it burn. Standing at an upstairs window, my mother and I could see the flickering red flames reflected in the dark sky. It was scary.
In the winter, our dad would build us an ice-skating rink in the backyard. This was no easy task. After the ground had been frozen for a few days and we had snow, he first built a rectangular outline of the rink with snow curbs. Then, over several nights, he would go out around midnight and spray a layer of water inside the rink to let it freeze. Every two or three hours he repeated this, building up a thicker and thicker slab of ice. It was always hard waiting for him to complete his process so that we could finally lace up our skates and get on the ice. I was four or five when I learned to ice-skate on those rinks. We’d play ice hockey, of a sort. After a few days, we’d get a little bored with just skating. My brothers would find items to stack in the middle of the rink. We’d jump them, starting low and adding more things to build up height. I don’t recall any major injuries, nor our parents ever stopping us. Such was growing up in late 50’s early 60’s.
We moved across town to 260 S Vine Street in 1962, when I was six years old. Mom and dad paid $11,000 for our 31/2-bedroom home. It was a wonderful old house from the early 1900’s. There was lots of tooled woodwork around the doorways, high ceilings, and pocket doors between the downstairs rooms.
During the move, I was not supposed to go on one of the final runs ferrying furniture and other things to the new house. But I wanted to go. So, my brothers rolled me up in a rug to make the journey.
There were three bedrooms. Mom and dad took what became the blue room. Our sister, Twyla took the front room with the bay window. Dwayne, Dwyte, and I took the room in the middle. And Floyd, the very small L-shaped room at the end of the hallway, near the bathroom and back stairway to the kitchen, and with stairs to the attic in his room. I could have never taken that room. Scary, creepy things prowled the attic.
We used the back stairway to confuse friends who didn’t know it existed. A bunch of us would be standing in the entry hall or living room. One of us would visibly go upstairs, then around to the back stairs and down, then come up from behind and surprise everyone.
We would play a sort of game upstairs at night. A group of us would stare at the front hallway light. When it was turned off, in the momentary blindness we’d scatter and wander around the hall trying to touch someone and guess who it was. Kim Scholtz fell down the back stairs playing that game, thinking it was a doorway into one of the bedrooms.
He was fine.
Vine street was another neighborhood full of kids. Most of our neighbors were Catholic with at least four or five kids. Summer nights were filled with the sounds of hide-n-seek or kick the can. In the fall we would rake fallen leaves into floor plans for houses and “live” in them for our own amusement. Winters, we built snow people—a snow rabbit family one year—and shoveled snow for our older neighbors who weren’t able to do so on their own. Some of them were hand-me-downs from my brothers. They always paid me a few dollars.
I loved horses. My parents would never buy me one, immune to the pressure I put on them. But we had friends, the Roth’s, who had a horse, Stormy. The first summer in the new house, I was bored one day. I had a bike. I told mom I was going to ride my bike out to the Roth’s to ride Stormy. She smiled and nodded her head approvingly. I don’t think she believed me. The Roth’s lived out in the country…six miles away.
I guess we’d visited them enough times that I knew the way. I don’t remember it being that challenging or eventful. I did get chased by a very large dog at one point. Still, a six-mile bike ride at six years of age, well, I was pooped by the time I got there. They gave me some water and let me rest for a bit. They were a little suspect that my parents would let me set out on such an adventure on my own. They called my parents. Mom and dad were on their way shortly. I believe I was grounded after that.
But I got to ride Stormy.
OLD MACDONALD HAD A FARM
Our mother’s side of the family was all farmers. There’s a photo of me in my grandpa’s arms, in front of the barn on the old homestead just outside of Chesterville, Ohio. He farmed until he had a heart attack at age 80. We were over there the day they were hauling the livestock away. I was sitting on the stairs leading up to the haymow, watching the cattle file by one by one. One of the cows started up the stairs toward me. It scared the bejeebus out of me. I jumped up and ran up the stairs as fast as my four-year old legs would carry me. I climbed up the stacked bales of hay as high as I could, fearful that that cow was still going to get me. That may be why another photo from that same May shows me standing in the yard there, bawling my eyes out.
My brothers each had a particular aunt and uncle’s farm where they would spend their summer vacations. Floyd “grew up” on Aunt Francis and Uncle Paul’s dairy farm outside Fredericktown, Ohio. Dwayne spent his vacations on the old homestead, now owned by Aunt Isabelle and Uncle Forest. Dwyte landed on our Aunt Geneva and Uncle Lester’s farm near Mount Gilead, Ohio. I bounced around from farm to farm from the time I was little, never really becoming a fixture at any of them. Initially, I didn’t do well with the separations from my mom and dad. I was afraid of the dark, and, being used to city noises, it was too quiet on the farm. I cried a lot at night. Somehow, though, they put up with me, and I kept going to one farm or another.
The summer I was 12 or 13, I was at Aunt Geneva and Uncle Lester’s. They lived a mile back a lane off a country road off Rt 95, the main road. I learned the most about farming there. Not just from Uncle Lester, but from Dwyte and other farmers, too. The neighboring farmers would often help each other during harvest times. We’d be in the fields in the morning, break, then settle into a big lunch prepared by the farmers’ wives. All of it homemade and fresh from their gardens. At the end of one of those long days, it was all I could do to make it through a bath and dinner before collapsing in bed.
Dwyte taught me to shoot a 22-caliber rifle that summer. We’d hunt groundhogs. They’re a scourge to farmers’ fields. I’ve been on a hay wagon, baling and stacking hay, when we hit a groundhog hole and dumped half the load overboard. Luckily there was no damage to the equipment or me. We’d also hunt pigeons in the barn. They were known to carry hog diseases.
It was the summer puberty hit me right in the groin. Our cousin Warren and his wife Linda were building an A-frame house, just a ways back the lane from the farm. Actually, two A-frames in the shape of a T. Dwyte and I would help when we didn’t have other farm duties. But for a while, I sometimes couldn’t get through a day without taking a nap, regardless of what needed doing. I had my first wet dream. No nocturnal emission for me, it was during one of my mid-day naps. It was about sheep having sex. Go figure. I tried going back to sleep. I wanted to dream some more. Puberty.
It was also the summer we lost Grandma Grace, dad’s mom. She’d been living with us for a few years until we had to move her to a nursing home. I was the only one at the house when the phone rang. It was our cousin Shirley calling. She asked if there wasn’t anyone else around. I told her they were all down working on the new house. So, she delivered the message of grandma’s death to me, though she didn’t want to be the bearer of sad news. I felt the loss, but don’t think I cried. I walked down the lane to the construction site and broke the news to Dwyte. I’m sure we must have left the farm for the funeral, but don’t remember that. No recollection of her funeral.
As I got older, I truly enjoyed spending time on the farms. I loved being outdoors, in the fields, in the woods, in the barns. I always loved the smell of the animals and the barns. That mixture of animal hides, wood, hay, straw, shit. To this day, I love to visit properties with old barns. Wandering in, taking in the smells of livestock long gone, the ghosts of past inhabitants. So many memories of the barns I spent time in as a boy.
One of the things I loved most of all was the birth of livestock.
I was on Francis and Paul’s dairy farm, keeping an eye on one of the cows close to calving. The day finally came when I found her down in the straw, in labor. I was excited and planned to watch the whole thing. There was one leg of the calf sticking out for the longest time. Concerned, I ran to get Uncle Paul. After checking out the situation, he called the vet. The calf had gotten turned around and faced the wrong way for an easy birth. I watched, fascinated, as the vet donned long black gloves and proceeded to work his hands into the cow’s birth canal and turn the calf around. Once the procedure was completed, it wasn’t long before there were front legs and a nose, then a head, then, almost with a woosh, the rest of the little Holstein calf made its entry into this world. I visited them daily after that. The calf and I became good friends. It would follow me around the barn like a puppy when I let it out of the pen.
That farm was where I was chased by one of the meanest roosters ever. EVER.
I saw the birth of calves, lambs, piglets, and chicks hatching. I enjoyed pigs the most. For one, because there are so many of them. The first time I watched a litter of pigs born, it made me laugh. Just before each piglet made its appearance, there would be a surge of fluid. It reminded me of seeing hamburger patties at Burger King slide down the ramp from the grill, preceded by a surge of grease.
The fascination with birth never waned. I always wanted to have a fermette. That’s French for small farm. A horse, couple of sheep, goats, that’s all I wanted. Wasn’t meant to be.
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