Mud and snow

The road past our house was dirt, really slippery clay, until I was 14 years old. In the winter and springtime it would get ruts that were up to the axils on the car. About the only vehicles to get through were the milk truck and the mailman’s Model A Ford. Both of these had wheels that were big enough in diameter that they could make it through the mud. Dad would park our car up at the turn to the main road and we would have to walk up there to the car. Rubber boots were a necessity. The school bus didn’t come down the road when the ruts got deep and I would walk to the turn to catch the bus in the morning.

As soon as the weather got dry enough Dad would hook the tractor to the drag and drag dirt back to fill in the ruts. He only maintained the road from the turn to our house because the township wouldn’t pay him to maintain the road. The section of road between our house and the next farm would be rutted until the Township Supervisors came with the road grader and pulled the dirt from the ditches to the center of the road to fill in the ruts and make a crown on the road so the rain would run off.

In the summer when I was 14 dad convinced the Supervisors to haul in stone and put down a stone base on the road from the turn past our house and the next farm to the next hard road. The stone they brought in was large sand stone that needed to be broken in to smaller size to make the base. My friend and I got jobs with the Township, for $1.00 an hour, to break the rock with sledges. We worked for a month 8 hours a day. Boy, we were in good shape.

The year I was in first grade we had a major snowstorm. The snow drifted across the road and filled it in from bank to bank. We were snowed in for six weeks. Dad had left the car out at the main road and would walk out there to go to work. He carried in any groceries that we needed. The neighbor had a team of horses and he hauled the milk from his cows and ours out to the main road to put it on the milk truck. My oldest sister was going to highschool and she had to walk through the field to get to the main road to ride the school bus. It was during World War II and the whole country was on Daylight Saving Time through the winter, don’t ask me why, and she had to carry a lantern to see where she was going if it was a cloudy night and there was no moon light.

My bother, other sister and I were going to the one room school near our house. The teacher had to walk in from the main road to get to the school. There were only 9 kids in the school and I was the only one in first grade.