Grandma

I was still three years old when my Grandma died in May 1941. I don't remember that. What I do remember was the Grandma and Aunt Marcella lived on the one side of our house and we had the other. Grandma was an old lady (80 years old) who was not very well and she spent a lot of time sitting in her rocking chair. My Aunt Marcella took care of grandma and really was like a second mother to me. When I wanted something that I couldn't get at home I would go over to their side of the house and ask Marcy. She would usually find a way to give me what I wanted. I remember asking her to read to me and she would. Or if I wanted coffee soup instead of what we were eating at home I could have it. That didn't always sit well with Mom.

I think it was in the spring of 1940, the year I turned three, that Aunt EmRose and Aunt Lois, who lived in Akron, Ohio, came for a visit. They were 57 and 58 years old at that time but to me they were really old. They were siting on the side porch along with Marcy and Grandma and of course I was out there with them. One of them got a banana washed it and laid it on the porch rail for me to find. I did find it and ask where it came from. They said that the Easter Bunny had laid it. Well I look it over and it was still wet because they had washed it. I wouldn't it because the Easter Bunny had laid it and it was still wet. They got a big kick out of that and that story got told over and over.

That same year Dad and Uncle Joe decide to have a wiener roast up on top of the hill behind the house. There was a kind of trail that went up to the top of the hill and Dad loaded Gandma, Marcy, Mom, and me in the old Buick and drove to the top. The other kids hd to walk.

After Grandma died in May of 1941, Marcy joined the St Joseph Sisters convent in Erie. She took the name St Emily Rose. Her sister Margaret , Sister Jane Francis, was all ready there, having joined in 1914 when she was 17years old.

1941

I was four years old in 1941, so a lot of my memories are fairly cloudy. One the that is clear though is that people were really upset when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Mom and Dad listen to the news every evening that they could get the battery radio working so that it would pick up KDKA from Pittsburgh.

One evening I went with Dad down to the barn when he went to milk the cows. I remember the light from the kerosene lantern was not very bright and it seemed to cast all kinds of shadows so it was a place where it was good to have Dad there. I was sitting up on the ledge behind the cows watching him milk and I was asking him questions about the war that President Roosevelt had declared. Why were we going to fight? Would they be fighting here? Where was Japan? Where was Pearl Harbor? He was trying to explain where Japan was and who the Japanese were. I guess I thought about that for a while and then I said, "If God hadn't made the Japs we wouldn't have to fight them." He readlly agreed with that and said I had that about right.

When I was 10 years old

When I was 10 years old we got electricity on the farm and in the house. Bill Clinger was the electrician who did the wiring in the evening after his main job and I helped by holding the flash light when he had to work in a dark area. It was a big deal for us to get electricity. For one thing it meant that we could have a radio that didn’t run on batteries. And we could have a real bathroom with water pumped to the commode, and sink and shower. No more house! We could have an electric washing machine rather than one that ran on a one cylinder gasoline engine. We got lights in the barn and didn’t have to carry a kerosine lantern. And we got an electric milking machine.

That was the year my sister Susie got married. The reception was at our house and there were a lot of people there. Mostly big people. No kids to play with. During the afternoon a big thunder storm came up, so everyone was inside.

Dad had drilled a water well close to the house and the rig was still sitting there. A bolt of lightening struck the drilling machine and shocked some of the people who were sitting on a metal daybed in side the window about 8 feet from the rig. No one was seriously hurt but it did cause a lot of excitement.

We learned later that the father of one of the people at the reception was killed by lightening that afternoon while he was working on a dragline at a stripmine. That was a sad thing.

I think Peggy started her senior year in highschool that year and Ed was a junior. That year I started 5th grade at Summerville. Helen Wesson was my teacher and she was a tough old girl. Helen and her sister Mary had been teaching 4th and 5 grade forever, or so it seemed.

Coming from out of town and being one of the 3 Catholics in the school I had to defend my rights for a while until the kids got use to me. Glenn Reed, Dick Garis, Don Getty and Tom Fitzsimons turned out to be pretty good friends. Later on Tom Eshelman (Mouse) and Jack Snyder got added to our group.

During April at the end of 5th grade. Roy Gourley’s parents bought a farm around the hill from us. Roy was one day younger than me and he thought that he had to prove how tough he was so he tried to bully me on the school bus. I took it for a while and then decide that I needed to do something, so I turned around to face his seat and hit him on the nose. I broke his nose and it bled like everything. We have been friends ever since.