family, part two

Continuation of the last post... cuts off rather abruptly.

Grandpa was a great guy Monday though Friday. At noon on Saturdays he went into town. He would come home Sunday still drunk from the night before. He was a weekend alcoholic. He never bothered me but I did not understand it and it worried me. He had problems too.

In a small town surrounded by farms all the people went into town on Saturday night to listen to the band concert, have some popcorn or maybe a hot-dog. I remember that as a happy time. All the boys walked up and down the street teasing the girls. My aunt Bertha and Uncle Frank lived in town so he would park their Model T by the bandstand, then after supper everyone walked into town and we had a ringside seat for the whole evening. I still like John Phillip Susa music.

On the fourth of July, in a small country town, it is a big celebration. During the day they had displays of animals. Cooking with judging and Aunt Bertha always won the pickle contest. At night they had fireworks and for the adults they had dancing. Of course I enjoyed the fireworks display but did not understand the dancing. All in all, it was fun.

This is also the place where I learned how to fish. They called them bullheads, but they were talking about catfish. Now that I think about it, they do look more like bulls than cats. Also trout, bass and pickerel. I usually went with Charlie Miller, aunt Bertha’s son from a previous marriage, and he really taught me about fishing. I enjoyed it a lot and mostly when we went early in the morning.

Walking behind a draft horse that is pulling a plow and your holding the plow into the ground is not fun. It was part of my job that spring and I developed shoulders and arms that were too large for the rest of my body. I thought it was tough but the horses did most of the work. At the end of the morning we all took a bath. I used the hose on them and then brushed them clean, and if they could have talked they would have said thank you. I could tell by the way the treated me that they appreciated the bath. They responded to my commands when they were working. I learned from them also. Some evenings I would climb up on one of them and we would ride down to the swimming hole. This was nothing more than a stream running between our farm and the next farm that had been damned by my grandfather and the man on the adjacent farm. Their name was Gracey, and they had four children and we would all meet there to go swimming. No-one wore clothes because we did not have bathing suits. Another lesson, two of them were girls.

In the fall that year I was put on a bus to go back to Forty Fort.
I was now a new boy in town and in a different school. A Jr. Sr. High School with a stone carving on the main entrance. Horny Horn High School. I think the builder thought he was using a foreign language and being clever. I was very comfortable in this school until the fourth or fifth week when we took an Intelligence Test. I scored higher than the teacher thought I should so she went to the principal and accused me of cheating on the test. I heard her say to the principal, anyone who dresses like that could not score that high. I was required to take the test again, in the principals office. By the way ,I was still wearing the jeans and shoes I wore on the farm. The kids called me “li’le abner”. I scored seven points higher the second time. I went home and told my mother what had happened and saw her personality for the first time. She went to the school with a look on her face that told everyone she was very angry. Three nights later they had a special school board meeting. She was there and calmly told her story. She did not raise her voice, her face told them how she felt. The teacher was put on probation and later fired when she created another problem with another family. I thought for a long time that when they said,” the wrath of God” they were talking about my mother.

My father read the bible every night and started my religious education with stories about people in the bible. I had never gone to church because I didn’t have “suitable “ clothing. Church was for the wealthy people. I still think about the stories that Pop told me. Jesus, Paul, Joshua, Ruth, Ishmael and yes, about Chronicles and Revelations. We spent a long time talking about Psalms and even memorizing many of them. It was not a required thing, it was for pleasure. This, by the way, was long before everyone’s time was devoted to television. He and I used to also listen to the radio in the evening. Amos and Andy, The Green Hornet, Mr. Keen-tracer of lost persons, Inter-Sanctum, I can still hear the door squeaking shut. There were many others that I still remember.

After school Bob and I would sit by the old Crosley radio and listen to Tom Mix, Jack Armstrong,and other kids programs. It’s hard to remember the names of all of them but I can still hear “raise the flag to Hudson High boys” from Jack Armstrong and the music of “when it’s roundup time in Texas”.

A few times, we didn’t have electricity because we couldn’t pay the bill, but we had fun by candlelight. Even played Ping Pong on the kitchen table by candlelight.

My sister had finished nursing school by this time and my brother was away at college so Bob and I had one bedroom just for us. Bob got the chickenpox that year and my mother said to me, ”you can’t get them because you already had them”. Wrong, I had them in about week. Bob and I shared almost everything. Every night I read to Bob while we were in bed. It was the time of Big-Little Books and it was fast reading . Dick Tracy, Joe Lewis, Tom Swift and the Go Ahead Boys. A series of about twenty books. My favorite was The Go-ahead Boys on Smugglers Island.

This was the time of the big flood in “da Valley’ as the locals called it. We lost our house but saved the furniture by putting it on the second floor. We had to move again to Kingston, but we didn’t tell the school where we had moved so we could stay in the same school. Bob and I now walked about four miles to school. Not my idea. It was not that bad however, the railroad track went right from the school to our house. The only part we didn’t like was the long bridge over the river, especially in the winter when there was snow on the ties. At the end of that school year we got another house in Forty Fort.

I went out for wrestling that year even though I was not eligible to wrestle in competition for two more years. I enjoyed it very much. When I moved to the farm I weighed seventy pounds but now I weighed one-hundred and ten so the first two years I wrestled at 105. Two years later I wrestled at one-twenty-five. Now it was all muscle. No baby-fat.

The teachers that worked in the junior and senior high school were from very bad to excellent. I was lucky , most of mine were good. I do remember one teacher however who started every class by saying, “read the chapter and do the questions “ then he would sit and make paper airplanes for the entire forty-five minutes. Each day we had to hand in the paper with the answers from the day before and we would never see them again. I’m sure he put them in the incinerator each day.

I also was lucky enough to have Dan Davies for Science, Kattie Hawk for Math , Ed Miles for History. I worked real hard for two marking periods for my English teacher Lorraine Rice, and got two “A’s and thought I was all set for the year so I slowed-up in the third period . The third marking period I did all the work and passed all the tests and was really surprised when I got the report card my English grade was a big red “F”. I went to her and questioned it, after all, I did all the assignments and passed the tests. Her answer was, you didn’t work up to your potential so you failed you failed yourself and you failed me. She also said that if I worked up to my potential the next marking period she would change it. I learned a lot from her.

At this point I want to say some things about my fathers parents. My grandmother died before I was born. Influenza took many people back in those days. My grandmother and grandfather lost six children in one month. A few years later my grandmother died from the same disease. My grandfather was blind when I first met him. He had been blinded in WW1 in France. He had been a Welsh coal miner who moved here to work in the mines and ended up in the army.

We talked a lot but he spoke little English and I spoke very little Welsh. We did talk however and he told me about the old country. I was his favorite grandson. WHY ? His name was Tom Herbert and of course, so was mine. When I was about six years old he died and I missed him for a long time. My father was his only surviving child so he had visited us almost every weekend. Not much to say about a whole lifetime.
When we moved back to Forty Fort we moved to two bedroom apartment ,over a cleaning store. This was good for Bob and me because we were right down town and we got to know a lot of new kids. We had a coal stove up in our kitchen, so, all the coal had to be carried up two flights of stairs. This time Bob joined me to become a selective volunteer. Actually it was fun. We still had our own bedroom and could sit in the living room at night and watch all the people going up and down the street. The trolley car stopped right in front of our place and you could ride to Wilkes Barre for eight cents.

A family at the other end of town owned a bar and the parents worked at night. The mother of a girl the same age as me asked my mother if I could baby-sit with her four nights a week. Of course we needed money so my mother agreed. I don’t know what I got paid because she gave the money to my mother. From eight-thirty until eleven-thirty for the next two years I was a baby-sitter for Betty Eaton. What a wonderful job. We did our homework together and listened to the radio. The mother always left snacks for us and soda. Betty and I became very close friends and we went together to dances and to the movies. We sat many times and planned our lives. Our marriage, our children, where we were going to college. This relationship continued all through highschool until a we went to college. Many nights her mother would come home and we were both sleeping under a blanket, her in her pajamas and me in my clothes. Her mother would say, "you two are something else” and then take me home.

Going back a few years, I remember how we heated our house in those days because it was cold back then, too. My older brother would get up on the train when it was coming out of the colliery and ride down the mountain until it got down where we lived. He would then start pushing the coal off the car until it was past our place. Then he and I would pick-up the coal in our wagon and take it home. We never had to “buy” coal. It always reminds me of a book , “How Green Was My Valley”.


I have been reading this and I want to say this before I go on with it. Our family was a proud family as kids and later as adults we never felt abused by the fact that we were financially poor. We were rich in many ways. These are the facts of my life and not a judgment of society or my parents.

At this same time I was able to get a job as a bowling-pin setter at the local bowling alleys. We got three cents a game up to twenty games. Then we got five-cents for each game. On a league night I could take home a dollar or more. If that doesn’t sound like much think about this. Bread was six cents a loaf, milk five cents a quart and we were paying twelve dollars a month rent. Everything is relative I guess.

We celebrated the sesqui-centennial of Forty Fort. A big pageant at the high school football field with people dressed like settlers and Indians. Fire-works and food .It went on for a whole week. They also had rides like a Ferris- wheel and several others. This was a big event for a small town.

I was now into sports in a big way. Football in the fall and wrestling in the winter. In my freshman year in wrestling I wrestled on the varsity team and won seven of my ten matches. In my sophomore year I didn’t make the team because someone else beat me every week in, what they called eliminations. In football that year I played varsity as a fullback and linebacker. I was very happy with the results. In my junior year in wrestling I won the district championship and in football I played varsity again and scored seven touchdowns. All of sudden those rich girls wanted to be friends but I remembered them from the old days and wouldn’t give them the time of day. It’s called cutting your own throat. I still had Betty as my friend and that’s all I needed. I have always been vindictive. and always thought I was right.

As kids we had our own amusement. We would make a sandwich, then go for a hike up the mountain that was right behind us. We had great times walking up those mountains. Buttermilk Falls, Wolves Den, and Dead man’s Cliff. Such imaginations!
We went swimming in the river in the summer even though it was paluted with raw sewage. We would dive from the Port Buckle Railroad bridge and sometimes played hide and seek on the bridge. If a train came we would climb down on a peer until the train passed. It sure made a lot of noise.

Pop was now working at IBM and we were getting along fine. We had a 1929 Essex automobile. What a car! The fenders were thicker than the bumpers are on cars today. It had a rumble seat and isinglass (plastic) windows. Top speed was about twenty-five miles per hour.