Remembrances
of Charles Frederick Sutton, Jr.:
The Earliest Years: South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New
York (1946-53)
I have had a
blessed life, one that is filled with good memories. There have certainly been painful times and
some experiences that were negative, but in the mercy of God, these have passed
and I have learned much from them. As I
sit down to reflect on my early life, I am filled with thankfulness for all
that God has given me in my parents, brothers and sisters, and friends. I want to record as many of the memories I
have that I can. Not everyone has had
such a blessed life; I have friends who say that everything before their late
teens is a blur.
Some of my
memories are wonderful ones of very pleasant events; other things I remember
with some degree of horror or shame. As
I have pondered these memories, and enjoyed them, I thought it might be nice,
for me and for anyone else who might be interested in the recollections of an
early Baby Boomer, to compile them in a series of documents. I am enjoying writing these memories and
reflections, and I hope that whoever reads them will find them to be at least
somewhat interesting.
The
Earliest Years: Georgia, Texas, and South Carolina
I was born in Moultrie,
Georgia, on 22
nd December 1946, the first child of Mary Catherine
(“Kitty”) Shaver Sutton and Charles (“Chuck”) Frederick Sutton, Sr.
(I have another document that Mom wrote of
her memories, telling of here early life and of how she met and married Dad,
along with our travels afterward; it will be appended to my own accounts.)
My dad was in the Air Force and had recently
been transferred from a base in South Carolina to one in San Antonio, Texas for
multi-engine flight training.
My parents
decided that it would be best if she delivered me in her home town, so Mom came
back home to Moultrie.
Labor began on
the 21
st, and for quite a few years, she had to think hard to remember
that my birthday was actually the 22
nd.
I arrived about 2:00 AM.
I came home to my grandparents house on
Christmas Day.
My dad tells me that I
had a pointed head when I was born and when Grandma Shaver saw it, she said,
“He looks like Denny Dimwit (a newspaper comic strip character of the time),
and if he comes home looking like that, I am going to take a hammer and beat it
down!”
My head, however, must have been
OK when I arrived at 215 6
th Ave, SE, because she let me be.
My dad had come as soon as he heard the news
that I was about to be born and he soon took us back to San Antonio. (
Photo left: home from the hospital.)
Our
home in Texas
We
were in Texas because my dad had been a glider pilot in World War II and, while
the Air Force (still the Army Air Corps at the time) released many men, my dad elected
to stay in. He had been in Air Transport
and was asked to train for multi-engine aircraft to remain in that field. Dad had loved small aircraft, and
particularly loved sailplanes, but multi-engine aircraft are quite
different. He did well in flight
training, but near the end of his course, his instructor, for reasons we do not
know (perhaps a death in the family or perhaps some great need elsewhere in the
service) had to leave his class behind.
The new instructor was one who held the office of instructor but was
more of a critic than a coach, and Dad “washed out” of the course. Dad was to some degree relieved; he knew that
transport pilots were often away from their families. He was recently married, with a child on the
way, and more hoped for; he was not anxious to be away often, and of course,
there is always some risk in flying, especially if for some reason he was
assigned to a combat role, such as carrying paratroops. Dad remained in Air Materiel throughout his
time in the Air Force, part of the vast network of people who kept those in
flying status supplied with what they need.
Mom and Dad
have told me a story of a trip that they took when I was about ten months
old. It may have been when they were on
their way from Texas to Greenville. Dad
and Mom also had the wife of one of Dad’s friends along, and her son, about the
same age as me, as well. (If it was the
trip from San Antonio to Greenville, the other man had gone ahead to find
housing for us.) Along the way they
stopped at a restaurant for lunch. They
went in and sat down – one man, two women of about the same age, along with two
babies about the same age. Dad says that
it was clear that the waitress was not at all sure of this odd arrangement –
which woman was Dad’s wife? Was this a
case of mutually accepted bigamy? It was
clear that all three adults were close, so the poor woman had no idea. I had fried chicken at that meal – or at
least was given a drumstick bone to occupy me.
I reached over to the iced tea glass of one of the adults and started
stirring it, as I had seen the grown-up do.
They were torn between laughter at my earnest stirring and a fear that I
would spill the iced tea. We little boys
were wearing some of the earliest of disposable diapers. They were pretty convenient while on a trip –
unfortunately, my mom said, they had a tendency to leak. I had no idea; I just went on as usual,
eating, drinking, waking, and sleeping, happy as a clam, in a diaper and
t-shirt.
I am not sure
how long we were in Texas, because we moved back to Greenville, SC before I
knew anything of Texas. My brother Bill
was born there, in October of 1948, and we stayed until I was about 4. I have a few memories of South Carolina,
which is pretty remarkable. One is
something that I am not sure is a true memory or simply a vision of what might
have happened, and that is of crawling under a porch stairway of three or so
stairs and being stung by nine wasps. My
dad told me about that painful event happening several times before I was very
old; I have vision of unpainted, worn stairs, and that may have been where the
wasps were. I suspect it is a
“manufactured memory,” however, shaped by the story Dad told me.
We lived in a small
trailer, which I think had a bedroom and a kitchen/living room combination, but
no bathroom. I can remember going with
my dad to get a block of ice at the ice house for our icebox; that is where I
first saw a man using ice tongs to move a large (about a foot, cubed) ice block
into the wagon we were using to transport the ice. I also have a dim memory of going to a shower
house to get bathed. Most trailers of
those days did not have bathrooms, so trailer parks had central shower houses
for their residents. The Air Force base
in Greenville had an area of base housing reserved for trailers, and had such a
central bathing house, with toilets, sinks, and showers, for those who lived in
trailers. Housing was scarce in post-war
days, with many men home from the war, newly-married and in need of a place to
live, so trailers were common residences for many people.
Greenville was
within driving distance of Moultrie, so in the three years we lived there, we
did visit my mother’s parents several times.
It was close enough to visit, although it took a while to get there, as
the two places were about 350 miles apart – and in the days before interstate
highways, those would be hard miles to cover.
I do not remember those trips, but Dad told me some stories of the
visits, mostly concerning my grandparents house help. My grandparents had a couple of “colored
people” (such was the term used at the time) who worked for them. It was common in those day for many white
families to have “help” come in, and the Hopsons were their help; Mr Hopson did
the yard work and his wife Frances did housework. She would take the Shaver laundry on Mondays,
go to her home, and wash it, outside, using a large kettle over an open fire to
do so. It was dried on lines, and then
brought back to my grandparents.
Frances also
cooked, or at least helped with cooking.
My grandmother kept chickens, and when one or two were needed for
dinner, Frances would wring their necks, picking them up by their heads and
then just swinging them around in a circle until the head was twisted off. The chickens used to run around for a few
minutes before collapsing, after which Frances would pluck and dress them. My dad also has memories of Frances taking
them out to get watermelons (at that time, watermelons were a principle crop
for the area); she would go through the field, looking for likely melons,
thumping here and there. When she found
one she knew was ripe, she would pick it up, drop it, and then, when the melon
cracked, they would eat the cool heart of the watermelon, which was delicious.
Mom says that
the relationship between the Shavers and the Hopsons was quite close, but the
social structure of the time meant that they were never quite friends in the
same way two white families would be.
Even so, my grandmother would go to their home if they were ill to help
care for them, just as they would help the Shavers if there was illness in
their home. If the Hopsons encountered
difficulties with the authorities, my grandfather, who was active in town
politics and had been acting mayor for a time, would help get things sorted out
so that the Hopsons were not unfairly treated.
When Mom came
to Moultrie for my sister Linda’s funeral, in 1954, Frances came over and sat
with my mom, and listened to her in her grief.
Frances’ open heart and listening ear at that time always meant a lot to
my mother.
It was an
intimate relationship of families who were not social equals. My grandparents were fair-minded people who
did not want to see anyone abused, and so treated the Hopsons as fairly as they
knew how.
(The
arrangement the Shavers had with the Hopsons was called “patronage;” it was a
way for Blacks to have a voice in the system, if indirectly. If a Black man or family could find a white
man with some standing in the community and demonstrate respect and
responsibility, then the white man, and his family would stand up for
them. Often, the white family employed
them. This was not a fair arrangement,
for the two men or families were in no way on equal footing, but it was the
kind of arrangement that would arise in a time of legal segregation and ethnic
prejudice.)
Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania
About 1950, Dad
drew overseas duty and was transferred to Okinawa, as part of the US occupying
force. Okinawa had served as a base of
air operations in the closing months of WW II and still had (and has, as I
understand it) an Air Force base. While
he was there, we moved up to Wilkes-Barre to stay with Dad’s parents, Hiram and
Sarah Sutton. That was my first
experience of living in the house where my dad had grown up (184 Mill Street),
but not the last; we later lived there for about six months after Dad retired
from the Air Force, and we visited often in the years after settling in
Delaware.
I remember Mom
telling this story about our trip up to Wilkes-Barre. I was about four years old at the time, and
Bill was about two; Mom was pregnant with our sister, Linda Beth. It was a long trip up to Pennsylvania and Mom
was in a bad mood. This was unusual for
her, but it’s understandable – two boys and a long trip up US 1 (Interstate
highways were yet to be thought of) can be wearing. My dad, who was a bit grouchy himself by then -
uncharacteristically so - asked my mom, “Where's your broom? Mom replied, also uncharacteristically, “I'll
use your mother’s.” Mom laughed about
when she told it, remembering a time when her usual patience had run out.
Linda Beth was born 10th
July 1950 about a block away from my grandparents, at the doctor’s office on
the corner of George and Mill Street.
She was very soon diagnosed with Down Syndrome (although it was called “Mongoloidism” in
those days) and with a heart defect. The
birth of a child with severe defects when Dad was oversees and Mom living with
her in-laws was not an easy thing. There
was good support from the larger family; my Aunt Claire and Uncle Walter lived
on the other side of the duplex and my Aunt Shirley and Uncle Jack lived a few
blocks away. They had children of their
own, but were nevertheless available to help.
Aunt Claire’s
children were older than Bill and I by several years (Dick was born in 1930). I do remember them, especially my cousin
Joyce, the youngest and older than me by only 18 months. Aunt Shirley’s oldest, John, born a few
months before Bill, became a frequent playmate.
As the years passed, especially after we moved back East, we became very
good friends, but then, we simply played together a lot – the definition of
friendship for pre-schoolers, I guess!
One day, John,
Bill and I were playing in the back yard, near the garage at the back of the
lot. It was a warm summer afternoon, and
Grandma Sutton was hanging clothes on the line, while we played with our toy
cars and trucks, describing our vehicles’ movements to one another. My mom came out to the back steps, where
Grandpa Sutton was reading the newspaper.
She began to call for Bill, who, engrossed in our make-believe, didn’t
respond. She called again, to no
avail. Grandpa spoke up: “Billy, your
mother is calling you!” Bill replied matter-of-factly,
“Her don’t hear me.” (In our early
teens, Grandpa never tired of telling Bill about this incident!)
Grandpa, and
Mom, also never let us forget that Bill and I had decided that we would be
firemen when we grew up – Bill would set the fires, and I would put them out –
his role as arsonist being necessary so that I would have something to do!
Grandpa Sutton
taught Mom how to drive. I can recall
sitting in the back seat of his Oldsmobile (which had a covered cord stretching
across the back of the front seat, to hang blankets on when they were not being
used by the passengers in the rear) and listening to him teach Mom. At first Mom was a bit nervous, but Grandpa was
a patient teacher and she learned quickly.
The culmination of her lessons was a trip “out the mountain” to Aunt
Claire and Uncle Walter’s summer retreat (and winter hunting lodge) in
Thornhurst, about thirty miles away. I
also remember Sunday drives in that Oldsmobile, which was Grandpa’s first car,
bought in 1947 or thereabouts. (I later
learned that it was purchased with the proceeds of my Uncle Bill’s life
insurance; sadly, he had been mortally wounded by the Japanese in the South
Pacific in May of 1945. He had enlisted
in the Marines at the age of 17, with my grandmother signing the form to give
him permission to enlist before 18. He
wanted to join his two older brothers in serving the war effort, and became a
medical corpsman. He was shot while
serving as a stretcher bearer on the battlefield, shot multiple times by a
Japanese machine gun. He died about a
month later. He had lost an arm and I
think a leg because of his wounds, and the family was never sure whether the
injuries themselves overcame him, or the sorrow at being so crippled cost him
his will to live.)
While we were
in Wilkes-Barre, I started kindergarten, at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial
School, a simple, multi-story building about two blocks away, across George St,
the main street of the Parsons neighborhood.
I don’t remember much about my time there, except that I brought a towel
from home and about 10:00 AM, we would all spread our towels, or a small
blanket, on the floor, and lie down for a rest for fifteen or twenty
minutes. A grown-up walked me to and
from the school for a few weeks, but later I walked by myself.
While we were
in Wilkes-Barre, I saw a street cleaner for the first time. Every other week, people had to clear their
cars from one side of the street on a certain morning. The huge, ungainly beast that was a street
cleaning machine would pass through, brushes whirring, water spraying
underneath, and a clean, wet streak on the street behind it. The first time I saw it, I had no idea of
what it was or what it did, and I was understandably nervous – it was so big
and so active that I almost thought it was alive! After that, though, when I saw it, I would
wave to the operator, and he would wave back.
The summer we were
there, some of our relatives went to the sea shore and brought back some
saltwater toffee. I loved licorice and
went through the toffees and ate as many licorice ones as I could. My taste buds may have loved them, but my
stomach was overwhelmed, and I heaved up the whole lot. I have avoided licorice ever since.
Grandma Sutton
had a washer in the basement. It was one
of the early ones with a wringer – the launderer would put clothes in the tub,
and when they were washed, take the clothing out of the tub item by item and
run it in the wringer to squeeze the excess water out. In good weather Grandma would hang the
laundry out on lines in the back yard.
In bad weather she hung them in the attic, three flights of stairs
up! I remember watching her and my mom
work on the wash week by week. Bill and
I would play there, often with boxes that became ships, trains, cars, or
airplanes as we set up all kinds of imaginary scenes and stories. In the wintertime, the coal furnace would
keep the basement really warm.
One of the
fascinating things about living in an area where anthracite coal was mined, and
nearly everyone heated with coal, was the delivery of the fuel. A large dump truck would come to the house,
and the crew would run a metal chute from the truck’s back panel to the coal
bin in the basement. At our house, the
bin was in the very front of the house.
The truck would raise the dump body and coal slid into the bin. There were colored tags in the coal, and when
a load was delivered, I would watch them and look at the different colors. I asked my grandfather what they were for and
he told me that the driver watched the tags go by and count them – this told
him how much coal had been delivered.
They were different colors because one color stood for 1,000 pounds,
another for 500, and another for 100.
Then the family would be charged for that amount of coal. It was rather interesting – although exactly
how they knew where in the load to place the tags I could not tell you. My grandfather had to take a scuttle full of
coal, or more, and feed the furnace each day.
A couple of times a week Grandpa would take a scuttle up to the kitchen,
where there was black cast-iron stove where Grandma cooked. (When Dad was growing up, Grandma baked ten
loaves of bread, twice a week, in that coal fueled oven – it takes a lot of
food to feed ten or so people.) Once a
week Grandpa would remove the coal cinders – that was a job my dad had had when
he was growing up, and he did it willingly (but with occasional resignation)
because he knew it had to be done.
Another memory
I have of my grandmother is when she was doing an extensive cleaning of the
house. She had carried (or got Grandpa
to carry) the carpets outside and hung them on the line. Then she took a flat implement of heavy wires
and started whaling away on them, raising clouds of dust. I asked to try doing that, and got some hard
swings in, but not hard enough to get much dirt out. There were vacuum cleaners in those days (and
door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen) but they were not good enough to get rid
of all the dirt, and so every spring, housewives would bring out their carpets
and beat the dirt out of them. Tedious
and cumbersome, but it did the job – if you had a good arm!
(The coal stove, scuttle, tools & tiling is what Dad grew up with; photo taken 2021)
The kitchen at
184 Mill Street was the center of family life –even apart from meal time. I can remember a time
when Bill, John and I
were at the table, playing a game or something, and our aunts Betty and Peg
came in to do their nails. We were
fascinated by the procedures of filing, sanding, and then applying bright red
nail polish. As they admired their
handiwork, we saw how nice it looked – and we asked to have our nails done,
too. So, they painted our nails bright
red – choking back laughter as they did so.
After they had applied it, we admired our nails – and then turned red
ourselves as we recognized that no boy, of any age, we had ever seen had had
red nails. We were quickly
panic-stricken, and they kindly removed the polish.
Once, after a
meal, we were all sitting around and talking, and somehow Mom’s origin in
Georgia came up – along with the fact that Bill and I had been born in Georgia
and South Carolina. Grandpa began to say
that we were Rebels, and someone began to sing “Dixie.” Grandpa told us that we needed to stand up
whenever we heard “Dixie” because we were Southerners and should be proud of
our heritage. This proved to be the
start of my identifying myself as a Southerner – which is a long and complex
subject I will go into later on. I do
remember that, when we later lived in Mississippi and played war – which could
be WW II or the Civil War – Bill complained because, when we played Civil War,
he always had to be the Yankee because he had been born further north than the
rest of us in the games.
Not all our activities took place at
home. I remember seeing lightning bugs
for the first time in the summer of 1951. I was four at the time, headed for five. My maiden aunts, Betty and Peg, had taken
Bill, our cousin John Humble, and me to the park along the edge of the Susquehanna
River in Wilkes-Barre. We had worn them out at home, and they put us
out of the car and said, “Run!” And so
we boys ran up and down the dikes along the river, and a few times we rolled
down them, getting so dizzy we couldn’t stand up straight once we got to the
bottom. We had a picnic supper while
there, then played along the dikes some more. There were trees in the park, in ones and twos,
and as twilight came, we began to the random blink-blink of the lightning bugs
among them. We were utterly fascinated
and delighted. We chased them, but
caught none. Our aunts were enjoying our
delight - and they were also glad that we were running out of energy, as they
had begun to wonder if it was inexhaustible, although theirs was not. Once we had slowed down and were a bit
sleepy, they picked us up, tucked us into the car, and drove us home. We were asleep after we had traveled less than
half a mile. They got us into bed, and
we awoke the next morning thankful and refreshed - and ready to exhaust the
grown-ups all over again!
While we were
in Wilkes-Barre, we attended the Parsons Primitive Methodist Church, a church
that my grandparents had attended all their married life, and where my
grandmother had attended since a child.
Her father, William Hilburt, had been Sunday School Superintendant there
for some thirty years. My Dad and all my
aunts and uncles had grown up attending there.
I learned as an adult (in my 50’s, I think) from Aunt Shirley, how much
the ministry of Christian Endeavor played a part in the lives of my aunts and
uncles. It was a ministry that worked
with the youth groups of churches, training them in organization and in the
disciplines of the Christian life. Each
youth group met at its own church most of the time, but at intervals (I am not
sure if it was monthly or every other month, CE would hold a youth rally of all
the groups involved at a central location.
It had quite an impact on my aunts and uncles, at least from Aunt Betty
on down. Uncle Bill had become friends
with another young man, John Barrall, whom Dad and I later met; he had become a
doctor in Providence, RI, and had written to my Aunts Shirley and Betty about
how much Bill had meant to him and how his devotion to Christ had inspired and
shaped his life. He was an avid gardener
and had developed two varieties of a flower that he named after Uncle Bill. Dad and I had lunch with Dr Barrall in Providence
over one Thanksgiving weekend when Dad and Mom were up.
At any rate,
while we were in Wilkes-Barre, we attended Parsons PM. What I recall most of all is the stained
glass window that dominated one side of the nave, a picture of Christ as the
Good Shepherd, carrying the lost lamb he had rescued from its foolish
wanderings. In many ways, that became my
chief image of God throughout my childhood.
My Aunt Betty was my Sunday School teacher; I do not know how long she
taught the kindergarten class, but it must have been decades. She loved children, and because she had never
married, she poured her heart into her students, and into her nieces and
nephews. I was enfolded into the love of
my family in Wilkes-Barre, and my church family there as well. It was a blessed experience.
I can also remember
sitting next to Aunt Betty during the worship services, during the sermon, she
often gave me a few Butter Rum Lifesavers – I enjoyed them then, and I still
love them now.
Two little
stories from Dad:
Aunt Betty had
had, I understood, a fairly serious relationship at one point, but it had come
to naught in the end. She lived at home
nearly all her life, and cared for my grandfather in his last years. While everyone else called her “Betty” my
grandmother insisted that since she had named her daughter “Elizabeth,” she was
to be called “Elizabeth.” One day, my
grandmother answerer a phone call asking for “Betty.” She replied, “There is no Betty here, but
there is an Elizabeth. Is that to whom
you wish to speak?”
Dad also told
me a story about Uncle Walter several years before he – Dad – died. Uncle Walter and Aunt Claire were married in
March of 1930. Perhaps a year later,
Uncle Walter went down to the shoe store to see my Aunt Betty, who worked at
Walter’s Shoe Store [no connection to my uncle!] as the bookkeeper all her
working life. He took my Uncle Bill with
him. Uncle Bill was then about five
years old, having been born in 1926.
Someone who knew that he had gotten married and had had a son asked him,
“Is that your boy?” To which Uncle
Walter replied, a bit embarrassed, “No.
He’s my brother-in-law.”
Trumansburg,
New York
After Dad
returned in the spring of 1951, we moved to Trumansburg, New York, a farming
community about 12 miles north of Ithaca and not far off Lake Cayuga, one of
the Finger Lakes. We lived in a rented
farmhouse a few miles out of town. It
was a furnished house, and I remember a pump organ in the living room. The bathroom (on the first floor) was huge;
it was off the kitchen, and I suspect that it was a room converted from some
earlier use to serve as a bath. We had a
telephone, one of the ancient kind that hung on the wall and had a hand crank
to alert the operator we wanted to make a call.
We were on an eight-party line, and each household had a distinctive
ring to let them know that the call was for them. Ours may have been two shorts and a long,
although I can’t be sure. There were
bedrooms upstairs; I shared one with Bill, and Mom, Dad, and Linda shared
another. I think that there was at least
one more, as I cannot imagine an older farmhouse of that era having only two
bedrooms. There was an attic upstairs,
where Mom sometimes dried clothes in bad weather.
My dad was
stationed at Sampson Air Force Base, north of Trumansburg. My memories of this time are episodic, and in
many cases I can’t remember the order of events. One memory that stands out is the day that
the house we lived in caught fire. That
must have been in the fall of 1952, because the fire was caused by sparks that
drifted up and lodged in the eves after Dad had been burning leaves in a barrel
late that afternoon. Bill and I had been
asleep in our room when Dad rushed in, hauled us out of bed, grabbed our
bathrobes, and took us downstairs. A
neighbor driving by had seen flames, stopped, and banged on the door, then told
my parents that he house was on fire. We
were sent to our neighbor’s across the street and there we watched as fire
trucks converged on the house and the firemen began their work. Blessedly, the fire was not large, and the
house only had a two or three foot area burned out of the roof. It was soon repaired. I will never forget, however, standing on our
neighbor’s front porch, looking anxiously at our house with all the trucks,
men, ladders, and activity, and wondering what was going on and why were people
so anxious. I didn’t understand at the
time how dangerous house fires were, and the reality that death and injury can
result. Mom still laughs at the fact
that Dad grabbed our worst clothes when he tried to rescue some things in case
the house burned down.
We moved to
Trumansburg in the spring, and my parents did not enroll me in school to
complete kindergarten. When they went to
enroll my into first grade, they found out that in New York, unlike
Pennsylvania, a full year of kindergarten was required. So, instead of entering first grade, I began
another year of kindergarten. I think
that the school may have accepted me into first grade anyway, but given that I
was born near the end of the year (at the end of Pennsylvania’s set time for
ages to enter school) and that New York required an earlier cut-off, my parents
thought that it would be better for me to wait.
I am glad that they did, because I was slow to mature emotionally, and I
would have had greater trouble in school had I become a member of the class of
1964, rather than of 1965. I do not
remember much about kindergarten, other than taking the bus early in the
morning and playing “The Farmer in the Dell” during class. I also remember that the girls wore jeans or
corduroys under their dresses in the cold, cold winter. The dress code required dresses for girls, so
the only way that they could keep their legs warm was to wear pants underneath
the dresses.
Linda had been
born in Wilkes-Barre in 1950, and in the summer of 1952, our next sister made
her appearance. She was born on the 8th
of July. I don’t remember much about
it. I just knew that Mom had more work
to do because she not only had to ride herd on us boys, but she had two little
girls to care for. Lots of diapers!
That summer, my
grandparents, aunt, and cousin came up from Georgia to visit us. We went to Buttermilk Falls State Park while
they were there, and took a hike along the river, which has a series of
waterfalls, some small, “ordinary” falls, plus others, the largest being the
falls which gave the park its name.
Buttermilk Falls got its name because rather than being an “over the
precipice” waterfall, it was a steep series of cascades, so that the water was
always churning and bubbling as it moved down the cascades. Buttermilk is whitish and bubbly, so that
resemblance led to the name. It is quite
pretty; not as awe-inspiring as a tall waterfall, but still an attractive
sight. I think that we three kids wanted
to be carried at some point along the two or three mile hike, but Mom was
carrying the newest arrival, Carol, and Dad had Linda, so we had no one left to
be carried by but Aunt Mina, who was not about to try to carry us all.
I can also
remember the three of us, Bill, Patsy, and me, just playing around the
farmhouse, in the small apple orchard, and in the fields. I think that one day we went berry picking;
we had some nice blackberry bushes, whose berries were worth getting stabbed by
the prickles.
Speaking of
berries, I can remember Mom making blackberry jelly, and possibly other
jellies. I was fascinated by the ricer
that she used to separate the cooked berries from their seeds, putting them
into the ricer and turning the pestle to squeeze out the juices and a little
bit of the pulp – but no seeds! (The
ricer is an inverted aluminum cone, with small holes, into which one could put
foods and then use a conical wood pestle to squeeze the contents through the
holes; it gets its name from the fact that boiled potatoes look like rice after
going through it.) I don’t know how many
jars of jelly she made, but it sure was delicious!
One weekend in
the fall, Uncle Walter and several (maybe all) of his sons came up to hunt
pheasants in the cornfields. We rented
the house, and another farmer rented the fields to plant some of his crops. After he harvested the corn, he allowed our
uncle and cousins to come and hunt on the land.
They had a good day hunting, and we enjoyed their company during the
evening. When they left, they gave us
one of the pheasants for us to eat. My
mom roasted it, and we sat down to enjoy a real treat. It probably was delicious, but we had a hard
time enjoying it, for it was hard to take a bite and not find a dozen birdshot
pellets with your teeth while trying to chew.
Because we were
out in the country, Mom and Dad decided that having a few chickens would
augment our diet, with both meat and eggs, so they got some. These were kept in the barn a fair
amount. Bill and I were fascinated by
them. We enjoyed feeding them grass
through cracks in the barn door – but did we ever get talked to about it when
Dad killed one of them for supper, and discovered all the grass in its
crop. Chickens, unfortunately, will eat
nearly anything, but not everything is good for them. I do not think that we kept chickens very
long.
We also got our
first dog there, a German Shepherd, whom we named Scout. On the whole, he was a very nice dog. Alas, we did not have him long! Scout was found to be raiding our neighbors
chicken coop, killing the chickens. We
had to wait until our next home, in Mississippi, before we got another dog.
Trumansburg was
not too far from my Aunt Ann, Uncle Bill, and their kids. (They had five overall – Sally Ann, Dick,
Tom, Billy Michael, and Alan. Alan
wasn’t born until 1955, so it was the older four who were there when we
visited.) I remember eating in Aunt
Ann’s sunny kitchen, watching my older cousins play catch (they were always
into baseball and softball, and have remained a sporting family all these
years), and going to sleep in an upstairs bedroom – watching the lights from
passing traffic as the light moved across the ceiling. The house was at a tight turn on US Rt 11, so
the lights of traffic, and its sounds, were just part of life there. I think that we visited several times, at
least once just to visit them, and several times on our way to Wilkes-Barre to
see my grandparents.
On our travels
to Castle Creek to visit Aunt Ann and her family, we drove through some scenic
country, along the bottom of the Finger Lakes over towards Binghamton. We passed an unusual hill, one that stood
almost alone and which was cone-shaped, although with a rounded top. My dad used to call it “Pimple Hill” because
of that shape. I wonder if I would
recognize it now, were I to drive along that road.
I have a few other
memories that are detached from any sense of time. One of the oddest is the time Dad took Bill
and I to a barn to watch a calf being born.
It was a fascinating, and messy, process. I couldn’t believe that a cow could have
something as big as that calf inside her!
It just came out, guided by the vet, and then plunked down on the straw
in the stall.
At some point,
when Dad and I, and probably Bill, were driving somewhere, I spotted a
red-winged blackbird – but I didn’t know what it was. I remarked on the red patches on its wings,
and Dad told me the name. He loved
birds, and as the years went by, he became more and more observant of
them. Indeed, he loved nature in general,
and encouraged us to be conservationists in many direct and indirect ways. The red-winged blackbird was the first bird I
could identify, after the robin, which most of us pick up at a very early age.
Another memory
is taking a Sunday afternoon walk on a little-used road; we probably drove to
the area and then walked. We were still
in church clothes, and I can remember Mom trying to cross a bridge that had a
metal grid floor to it – strips of steel on edge, about two inches deep and set
two inches apart. Mom was wearing high
heels, and had to walk on tip-toe to keep from getting her heels hung up on the
grid work.
And another
detached memory is a recollection of driving somewhere with Dad and Bill and
our green Chevy (a 1950 or 51 four-door sedan, with a split windshield and an
after-market turn signal system) overheated because the radiator was
leaking. Dad stopped at a farmhouse,
asked to borrow some oatmeal, put a handful of rolled oats in the radiator, and
got more water. He told me that the
oatmeal would be carried to the leak, and because it expanded in the water,
would block the leak. The radiator would
not work as well, but it would get us home.
I suspect that he had to replace the radiator after that, but it did get
us home.
Once, when we had
a flat tire on one of the rear tires and Dad needed to change it, I noted that the
car had fender skirts (cars do not have these anymore; they are panels that fit
over the wheel, attached with clips, so that the panel comes down to the same level
as the rocker panel, giving a smooth line from the front wheel openings back). Dad had to remove the fender skirt in order to
take the wheel off and use the spare tire. I helped him put the fender skirt back on, holding
it in place while he reached back up to the clips and fastened them, a somewhat
challenging job because in addition to be a “blind” job, the wheel well and fender
skirt tended to be caked with dried mud, making it even harder to find the fastening
clips and get them snapped on.
At some point
in our stay in New York, Dad recognized that with four children, there were
going to be a lot of trips to the barber as we got older, and that the costs of
that would mount up. In order to cope
with that, he decided that he would barber us boys, at least, and so he bought
a clipper and we began to have him cut our hair. His first pair of clippers was hand-operated;
the “barber” squeezed the handles together to have the clipper trim our
hair. I am glad that I was only five or
so when he began the process, because I wasn’t as conscious of how I looked to
others at that age as I would be later on.
My dad cut my hair up until my junior year of high school, I think – and
while he got to be pretty good, and did get an electric hair clipper by the
time I was eight or nine, it began to wear on me that my hair was always
slightly odd. (My old school photos show
some really ragamuffin haircuts!). But
for a long time, my only complaint was how itchy the little clippings of hair
that landed underneath my collar were.
Somewhere along
the line we went to the circus, probably in the summer of 1952. I just remember seeing crowds of people, the
big tent, the Ringmaster, and the elephants and a horse riding act. We had popcorn and cotton candy and enjoyed
ourselves thoroughly. In those days,
there were several private circuses that toured around the country in the less
populated areas, and it was always a big day when the circus came to town.
Driving in farm
country in the summer was wonderful. We
passed through rolling, green hills, often seeing herds of cattle as well as
fields of corn, or a patch of woods.
Since the lesser roads connected the farms to towns, it wasn’t uncommon
for the highway to pass right between the farmhouse and the barn, which I found
odd. We did hit a chicken or two, if the
farmer had been careless about shutting a gate.
Sometimes we had to wait for cows coming from one side of the road to
the other, to get to the barn to be milked.
Winter in
upstate New York could be tough, and the winter we spent there was no
exception. It was very cold and
snowy. I was, sad to say, a bed-wetter,
and so my mom had to wash sheets almost every day. In early winter, she hung them out to dry –
and then had to take them in, stiff as a board and hard to manage. She tried hanging them in the attic, but they
didn’t dry fast enough there, so we wound up getting a gas dryer, to Mom’s
great relief.
I can remember
bringing in the milk on winter mornings.
We got it in quart bottles, an old-fashioned kind with a bulb at the top
for the cream, so that those who bought it could pour out the cream separately,
or shake the bottle up for whole milk; it wasn’t until later that homogenized
milk became more common. On the mornings
when it had been well below freezing, the milk and cream had frozen in the
bottle and expanded, so that there was an inch and a half of frozen cream above
the top of the bottle. Mom would skim
that off, allow the bottle to thaw, and then either use the cream for her
coffee, or (more often), pour it back into the bottle and shake it well.
My cousin Sally
came to visit us once, early in the snowy part of the winter. Bill and I were very excited to see the snow
and couldn’t wait to get out to play. We
were bundled up into our snowsuits (probably with at least one of us having to
get peeled down again to go to the bathroom) and then Sally, who was about
twelve, sending us out across the screened porch to the yard. Bill and I got out there and played a bit,
but we soon decided it was too COLD and banged on the door to be let back
in. Sally opened the door and told us,
“You wanted to go out and play, and by golly you are going to go out and stay
out!” So Bill and I stayed out for at
least half an hour, perhaps longer, and had a good time, once we got active and
used to the cold.
Sadly, the
winter also had its trials. I got chicken
pox, and then, just after I recovered from the chicken pox, I got mumps. I don’t know which was worse; the chicken pox
itched like crazy, and my throat was sore and swollen from the mumps. Dad gave me a dill pickle during that illness
(why, I have no idea; perhaps he was teasing me) and the combination of a dill
pickle and mumps was a strange one. Perhaps
he thought that the mild acid of the pickle would help in some way. It didn’t, however, and trying to swallow the
bite I took was work. But in due course,
I got over both illnesses, and thank heaven have never had anything
back-to-back again.
I did have a
recurring illness that had begun in Pennsylvania – ear infections, with
concurrent tonsillitis. I don’t know
whether or not the ear infections brought in the tonsillitis, or if the
tonsillitis led to the ear infections, but either way, it was miserable. My ear hurt terribly; we tried using warm
compresses, and they helped the pain, but did nothing to the underlying
infection. I was given penicillin, at
first in capsules, which I found difficult to swallow. That is not surprising – getting two large
capsules down a child’s throat with a “gateway” of swollen tonsils is a
challenge. Mom had always had difficulty
swallowing pills, and had developed a technique of putting the pills in her
mouth, holding the tip of her tongue between her teeth, and then pouring water
into her mouth, lifting her face up (“Like a chicken drinking,” my Dad said),
and then swallowing. I tried it, but
could never hold my tongue in place – I still had no success with the capsules. Dad did try pouring the contents of the capsules
out so that I could take the penicillin directly, but penicillin is quite
bitter by itself.
So, the next
step was to inject penicillin directly into my body. For several weeks, I went into the clinic in
Sampson AFB to get my shots, which were (classically) given in my rear end,
where the muscles were large enough to endure a good dose of penicillin. That worked well for a while, although as you
can imagine, I did not look forward to my trips to the clinic twice a
week. In those days, shots were given
via glass syringes and permanent needles.
One always hoped for a relatively new needle that was still sharp! One day, as the nurse was in the midst of
giving me my shot, the syringe broke, and the nurse’s hand slipped as she was
doing the injection. As her hand
slipped, she cut her thumb on the sharp edge of the broken syringe whose needle
was deep into my rear end. She cut the
artery in the thumb and bled profusely.
She and Dad were trying to staunch the bleeding off to one side of the
room where there was a sink and towels.
It took a while, and all that time, I was lying on the clinic
examination table, face down, with a bare butt and a broken syringe sticking
out of it. I was not happy, and let the
two of them know it in no uncertain terms.
I am thankful that soon the nurse came back to the exam table and had
the needle out of me. I am not sure if
that was the last shot or not, but it was definitely not an event that I ever
forgot. Not long afterwards, the
tonsillitis was over, along with the ear infections, and I very glad of that.
While my
Georgia relatives had come up over the summer, they still wanted to see us and
we were invited down for Christmas. Mom
and Dad decided to go, so we loaded up the car and went. With four children to travel, as well as our
luggage, presents etc, Dad had to figure out how to get everything in. He was a clever man, and handy with tools, so he built a little
platform the same height as the rear seat of the car that would fit between the
front of the back seat and the back of the front seats. He placed some of the gifts and luggage in
the footwells for the rear seat, and then spread a blanket or two over the top
of the seat and the platform. Bill and I
had plenty of room to sit or lie down, along with at least one of the girls –
who would be in a metal-framed folding bassinet that fit well on top of the
platform. Mom would have the other girl
in front with her. There were no laws
about car seats in those days (nor any car seats, for that matter) so we were
free to configure ourselves as seemed best to us. It was a pretty comfortable trip. I think that we went first to Wilkes-Barre,
then took a day to head south along Rt 1 (the idea of the interstate highway
had come, but I-95 lay several years ahead), and wound up somewhere in South
Carolina, where we stayed overnight in a hotel.
I remember getting out of the car, stumbling over the curb at having
been awakened, feeling the cold night air, seeing palm trees, and also seeing a
strand of Christmas light lying on the ground, with some of the bulbs
broken. My parents warned me not to
touch it – probably because in my incessant curiosity, I had reached down to
see what was going on. We went inside,
and I remember taking the elevator, the first elevator ride that I think I ever
had. I don’t remember much else about
the trip, or if I do, my memories of my grandparent’s house are wrapped up in
my general memories of other Christmas visits.
My mom was glad to have gone to Moultrie; she missed her family.
When we moved
up to Trumansburg, Mom and Dad found that there were four Protestant churches
in town, none of the of the denominations they had grown up in (Primitive
Methodist for Dad, Disciples of Christ for Mom). They decided that we would attend each of
those churches in turn, and then make a decision as to which to attend
consistently. There were Presbyterian,
Methodist, Baptist, and Episcopal churches, and the first Sunday we went to
church (which would have been the second Sunday we were in town most likely),
we went downtown, and Mom and Dad asked Bill and I which church we should
attend that morning. We chose the
Presbyterian Church, whose pastor was the Rev Howard Mickelson. Pastor Mickelson got our address from the
visitors register and came out to see us later that week. He heard our story, and in particular, he
heard about Linda and her challenge. Mom
said that he was wonderful as she shared her concerns and her struggles about
Linda, and the challenge of having a severely handicapped child to care
for. Several people, including the
doctor in Wilkes-Barre who had delivered Linda, had advised Mom, and later both
Mom and Dad, to put Linda in a home.
While Mom could see some of the wisdom behind that idea, but she was
worried that we would wind up being separated from Linda by hundreds of miles
because of the transfers between Air Force bases that awaited us as Dad
continued his career in the Air Force.
Even though it would be hard, Mom and Dad had decided to keep Linda at
home and care for her themselves. But
Mom was worried; with three other children, and perhaps more, how could she
take care of Linda? Pastor Mickelson
heard her and her doubts and struggles; Mom tells me that he “listened with his
heart” and was a true pastor to her and Dad.
So, we never attended any of those other three churches.
We had come to
Trumansburg in the spring, and that fall, as school began, Dad was asked to
teach Sunday School. He wound up having
half a dozen fourth grade boys to teach.
He enjoyed teaching his class and over the years he taught Sunday School
several other times in various churches.
I have a little plaster of Paris elephant, outfitted as a circus
elephant, that one of the boys had made and painted and which the class had
given to Dad in thanks for his teaching them.
Dad kept it, along with the accompanying card and note of thanks, on his
chest of drawers, and I got it after he died.
It now sits on top of my chest of drawers, where it reminds me of Dad
and his care for others.
