The Room Is Done

My first four cars

This is the same style as my 1954 Plymouth that I bought in may 1958 for $600. Mine was Blue and White.










This is like the 1957 Ford that I bought when I started to work in Meadville.








Here is a picture of the 1962 Rambler American like we had when we moved to Maryland











Here is the 1964 Malbu like the one we had before the 1972 ford

More Cars

Here is a list of Cars that Debbie and Bob have owned in reverse order:

2006 Honda Accord
2004 Honda Accord
1998 Mercedes Benz E320 (leased 2001)
1996 Honda Accord
1989 Pontiac Sunbird
1989 Ford Escort

Cars

This is a 1935 Ford that we had util WWII was over. Ours was Gray.













Here is a 1929 Buick. That is the first car that I can remember that Dad owned.
I was 4 years old when we got the 1935 ford

Going to school

I’ve always thought that I got to where I was in life in spite of my education rather than because of it. I started to first grade in 1943 at a little one room school about 1/10 mile from our house. That year there were only 9 students in the school. Besides myself and my brother and sister there were 3 Switzers, 2 Bowersox and 1 Dwyer. Our teacher was mister Hetrick. The school had a big coal stove in the center and did not have any electricity. Two pictures hung in the front of the room, one of George Washington and one of Abraham Lincoln. We had a 48 star U.S. flag and a Pennsylvania State flag.

There was a crockery water jar with a spigot on the side. We had to walk to the neighbors spring, about a quarter mile away, to get water and carry it back in a bucket to fill the jar. We had a dipper to fill the bucket. It was the same dipper that we used to drink from. I don’t think the Health Department would approve to this arrangement today.

The toilets were outhouses, one for the boys and one for the girls.

I spent a lot of time that year listening to the older kids recite their lessons and being taught by the older kids because the teacher was working with someone else. At recess, and we had a lot of recess, we would play out in the school yard sometimes the older boys would knock out flies. Or we would rotate around the bases and then up to bat. In the winter we would sled ride from the neighbors woods down past the school to the creek. We also played Fox and Goose and Warriors Base.

Everyone had to learn and recite poems and the older kids had to read the classics, like “Tale of Two Cities”. I remember the older kids reading Evangeline, The Village Blacksmith, and A Cask of Amontillado.

Art Work by Victor

Here is the progress this week. It seems that Victor knows what he is doing.

August Vacation

We will now have 2 houses on Sundown Lane. The usual place and the one across the street. That will be good.

Basement Overhaul

Today we started the overhaul of the basement. Victor and Kevin are the final two in our March Madness. The panneling is gone and we are going to bring the whole thing up to code with new studs and pressure treated base plates. Also going to wire it with coax and speaker wire and maybe Cat5.

Expertise

Well here I am responding to a tag from DamselFish. A meme (rhymes with theme) tag. I didn’t have any idea what a meme might be so I searched back across the blogs and discovered: an idea, a thought that gets conveyed but may mutate in the process.

The original tag from Paul via eninnej was to state what five resources - online or otherwise - would you point people to, if you wanted to give them an entry into your field of expertise?

First I must first say that I am retired. I was, and for that matter still am, an Economist whose major area of interest is in government policy related to agriculture.

If one were to feel that this was their major calling then to enter this field they mst first have, as a minimum, a BS and Masters or, preferably, a BS and PhD in Economics or Agricultural Economics. I presume that within this level of education you have fields of study in International Trade, International Development, Statistics, Agricultural Policy, Resource Economics, Environmental Policy and Agricultural Finance.

As to Resources:

1. A fundamental online resource can be found in the Core Historical Literature of Agriculture collection at Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library which offers free electronic access to back issues of AJAE for years 1919 through 1995. To access the 1919-1967 issues of the Journal (at that time called the Journal of Farm Economics) can be accessed here. The Journal's back issues from 1968 through 1995 are available there. Electronic back issues of AJAE for the years 1919 through 1999 are available at www.jstor.com to members who are at institutions that participate in JSTOR's Art & Sciences Complement Collection. A list of participating institutions can be found here.

2. Choices Magazine published by the American Agriculture Economics Association (AAEA) provides current thinking by University and Government Economists on issues related to food, agriculture, resources and development.

3. EuroChoices was launched in 2001 by the Agricultural Economics Society (A.E.S.) and the European Association of Agricultural Economists (EAAE). EuroChoices main aim is to bring current research and policy deliberations on agri-business and rural resource issues to a wide readership, both technical & non-technical.

4. Resources for Economists on the Internet “This guide is sponsored by the American Economic Association. It lists 2,100 resources in 97 sections and sub-sections available on the Internet of interest to academic and practicing economists, and those interested in economics. Almost all resources are also described. Those searching the Internet for economic information might also wish to try the Economics Search Engine (ESE). It indexes 300,000 pages on 10,000 economics web sites from around the world. Searches with it only return their contents”.

5. Agricultural Statistics, USDA, National Agricultural Statistics Service -- provides links to the electronic version of this publication starting in 1994

Big Cat and Big Sister

One of my greatest fears when I was young was going to the barn to do the chores after dark, particularly before we got electricity. It was always kind of spooky, even in the daytime and when the light started to get dim outside the shadows really got dark inside. On top of that, if it was windy, the barn would creak and you couldn’t be sure what made the noise. I didn't mind the noise of the livestock moving around and making noise, I knew what those sounds were. It was the unexpected things like a screech owl, a bird, a bat or the wind that caused the hair on the back of my neck to stand up.

It was often my job to put down straw from the strawmow to bed the shed and you couldn’t have a lantern in the strawmow because if it upset the whole barn would be on fire in a few minutes. So you worked in the near dark and there might be anything in the corner where you couldn’t see, or so I thought.

It didn’t help that dad had told me about going down to the barn in the early morning to feed the horses, when he was 10 or 11. He said that he opened the stable door and a big cat jumped of off the steps to the barn floor and came past him out the stable door. He said he thought it was a mountain lion. Well I knew there weren’t suppose to be any mountain lions left in Pennsylvania, but knowing and believing are two different things. And I really did believe that there could be a big cat in the barn.

Also I was working on the barn floor one day and was coming down to the feeding room to get a fork. Unknown to me, Peggy was hiding behind the steps and as I came down she reached through and grabbed my ankle. Well I cleared the 10 feet to the stable door without touching the ground and didn’t stop until I got to the middle of the barnyard. Peggy thought that was great. I didn’t think so. She might have been a big cat.

Jockey and Skinny

When I was in 1st grade I had a hat that was a jockey’s cap. It was made of a silky material, had a red bill, and had alternating red and white sections around the cap. I thought it was really great and I wore it every where. However, it created a conflict between me and Mr Hetrick, my first grade teacher. I wore the hat to school and Mr Hetrick started to call me Jockey. Well that was ok for a time or two, but I really didn’t want the kids in the school to pick up the nickname and start calling me Jockey.

I didn’t know what to do about it so I complained to mom about what he was doing. She thought a while and came up with the solution. You see, Mr Hetrick had a nickname that people had hung on him. People referred to him as Skinny Hetrick. Mom said that the next time he called me Jockey I should say “ok Skinny.” I wasn’t sure what would happen, but it worked and he never called me Jockey again.

CLARION AIRPORT

Clarion Airport was named for pioneer pilot Parker D. Cramer, shown beside one of the planes he flew in and out of the original airport, in the shadow of the hangar built there under joint federal and community auspices. The flying field (the first municipally-owned one in the United States) was later named in Cramer's honor after he and his crew were lost on a route-mapping flight over the North Sea. Cramer once flew a plane through this hangar, from end to end.

Air planes and power boat

Sometime in the summer when I was 5 or 6 years old dad and I went to the old Parker Cramer airport at Clarion to meet Bill Culbertson. Bill was the son of Oliver (Twisty) Culbertson who was a contractor in the gas fields in the county. Dad worked for Twisty, off and on, as a driller. Anyhow, Bill owned an airplane and Dad and I got to go for a ride. That was really a big deal for me. We flew down over the farm and back to the airport. At that time there weren’t many kids, or grownups for that matter, who got to fly in a plane.

Bill also owned a power boat that he kept on the Clarion River. It was a big wooden boat with an inboard engine. At that time there weren’t any outboard engines and power boating was for those who had money. One Sunday afternoon dad and I met Bill at the river and went for a ride. That was really “cool.

Cherry Coke and Old Oak

When I was too small to do many chores on the farm I got to travel around with mom when she went to town. I mostly enjoyed going to town because there was lots to see. Mom knew everyone in town and in all of the shops. Mom really liked to go into the drugstore where she had worked before she was married. She would get a cherry coke that they made from coke syrup, cherry syrup, and soda water. She would buy a chocolate milk for me. If we were in town over lunch we would sit at one of the booths instead of at the fountain and get grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate milk.

The druggist’s office was in the back of the store and you talked to him through a little window. The place was something like you would expect to see in a little Irish village. The druggist was a little old gnome with wire rim glasses on the bridge of his nose. He wore a white shirt and a vest and looked to me like he was ancient. He was probably 45 or 50.

Sometimes we would visit mom's cousin who worked in the lawyers office. It was a kind of Dickens establishment. There was a lot of oak paneling and railing. The lawyers desk was up on a platform at the rear of the office and he had a big safe up there beside the desk. Helen, mom’s cousin, was the typist and receptionist. Her desk was behind a railing that had a gate near the desk. On the wall behind her desk was a big clock in an oak case with a pendulum. Since the office was mostly quite the ticking of the clock seemed to echo off of the walls. It seemed to make the office a kind of scary place especially when the old lawyer was sitting at his desk peering over his glasses at you.

Helen’s typewriter was a big old mechanical one that made a lot of noise when she typed. She was really good to me she always had a few pennies that she would give to me so I could get some candy at the drugstore.

Gas wells

After I was 5 or 6 years old, until I was about 10 or eleven, I got to go to work with dad at least one day in the summer time. Mom was not really happy about me going out to the rig, but dad would take me along anyway. The drilling rig was really an impressive and dangerous place, especially for a curious kid. By the time I got to go to the rig they had quit using steam engines to run the machinery and were using natural gas (from another well), diesel or gasoline as fuel.

The rigs that dad worked on were standard rigs that used a bit, attached to a set of jars, on a stem on the end of a long cable. Rotary rigs were not used in our part of the country until after dad quit drilling. The rig consisted of an engine house, the main derrick, a samson post (a big post that held the walking arm), a jack stand, forge, bull wheels, screw, dog house and lazy bench. There was also an assortment of tools; drill bits stems, wrenches, bailers, rope, cable and sledges. When they were drilling the cable was attached to the walking arm by a large screw. As the drill went deeper the driller let out more screw so the drill would contact the bottom of the hole.

Two men worked on the rig: the driller and the tool dresser. It was the tool dressers job to make sure that everything was oiled and greased, the engine was in good repair, help sharpen the bits and help run the tools in and out of the whole when it was time to bail out the mud from the whole or to change bits. The tool dresser was a busy man. The driller was responsible for the entire operation. He had to know when the bit was actually drilling and had to maintain the size and sharpness of the drill bit. If the driller didn’t gage the bits right the hole would get too small and the tools would get stuck. That was not a good thing.

One thing that always excited me was when they sharpened the bit. They would put the bit in the forge and get it red hot then swing it out using a chain block and lay the end of the bit to be sharpened over an anvil. One man would stand on each side with a sledge and strike the face of the bit on his side. They would hammer until the gage was right and then temper the bit in a tub of water.

I had to stay out of the way when they were doing anything other than straight drilling because there was too much stuff that was happening when they pulled the tools or let them back down the hole: belts running ,ropes running, bull wheel turning, etc. It would have been easy to get killed. A lot of the time I just sat on the lazy bench (it was really a big tool box) and watched what was happening.

I have really strong memories of the smell of gas, and grease and oil from around the rig, the thump of the walking arm, the whir of the bull wheel when they let the tools down the hole. I also remember dad baking potatoes for lunch in the forge

Queen, Logan and Sister Jane

A picture of the Ford 9N

Horses and the tractor.

Horses and the tractor.
We had a team of horses on the farm until 1942 when dad bought the tractor. The mare was named Queen and the horse (a gelding) was named Logan. Queen was a Belgian bay and Logan was a Percheron. Queen was a fairly gentle beast but Logan was mean, particularly with kids. I remember walking into the feeding room and having Logan snap his jaws at me over the manger. I was never allow to walk behind the hoses in their stalls. My sister did walk behind Logan and he kicked her up against the wall behind the stall.

One day my dad sent my brother down into the pasture field to bring the horses up to the barn. When Logan saw my brother he charged at him at full gallop. My brother ran back toward the barn and dad got between him and Logan who came to a skidding stop right in front of dad.. The horse respected dad but I think he would have killed my brother.

When dad was working in the field with the horses my mother would send a jar of water out to him with one of us kids. I often got to carry the water and if dad was plowing he would sometimes set me on Queen’s back and I would get to ride around the field. If I was sent out to call him in for supper I usually got a ride home.

In April 1942 dad bought his first tractor for $600. It was a little Ford 9N. The Ford-Ferguson 9N tractor began with a gentleman handshake agreement between Henry Ford and Harry Ferguson in October of 1938. Ford manufactured the tractor using Ferguson's 3-point hitch system. The 9N was known as a Ford tractor with the Ferguson system. Ferguson designed the first 3-point hitch system that is used on farm tractors today. His ingenious system combined with his inventive 3-point implements, was a replacement for the horse and the horse-drawn implements. The model 9N was first demonstrated in Dearborn, Michigan, on June 29, 1939. By 1942 they had 25 percent of the tractor market. During the war tractors were not available. In 1949 Dad replaced the tractor with a Ford 8N.

Electricity and Telephone

During the 1930s and 1940s much of the country did not have either electric or telephone service. The private power and telephone companies did not provide service to areas outside of towns if the consumers were off the main link to the next town, because the cost of running the lines was much greater than they could recover from the expected revenue. Anyway, they said, most farmers, were too poor to be able to afford electricity.

Rural Electric and Telephone Cooperative were established by the Rural Electric Administration (REA), in the Department of Agriculture, in 1935 under the Roosevelt Administration. At that time only 10 percent of the farms had electricity. By 1939 the REA had helped to establish 417 rural electric cooperatives which, at that time, served 288,000 households. However there were roughly 5.5 million farms and an uncounted number of rural households that weren’t on farms. The work of the REA “encouraged” private companies to electrify the countryside as well. And, by 1939 rural households with electricity had risen to 25 percent.

With the start of WWII copper production was diverted from making cable for electric and phone line to supplying the war industries. New electric and phone lines to rural areas were not built until 1946.

Our farm was one of those that had to wait until the end of the war. No electricity meant no indoor pluming, no electric lights, and a dry cell powered radio. We did have one advantage over a lot of people. We had free natural gas from the well on our farm. The gas lights worked fine as long as you kept enough mantels on hand, they broke easily.

Dad bought an natural gas refrigerator in 1941 so we didn’t have to walk to the spring when we wanted to keep food cold.

The West Penn Electric Co. finely strung wire to our farm in 1946 and Dad hired Bill Clinger to wire the house and barn. I used to hold the flash light for him when he was working in some dark place like under the eves in the attic. Once we had electric we put in a bathroom and remodeled the kitchen with a new sink. Wow!

We also got telephone service, but dad had to pay for the wire and the poles to string the line from the neighbors to our house. Of course the line was a party line with a crank type phone. Our ring was 3 longs and a short. You knew when anyone on the line was getting a call and which family it was by the number of rings. Our neighbor, Helen, had the bad habit of listening to everyone’s calls and that used to really get Dad upset, angry even. He would answer the phone when it was our ring and then say, “OK HELEN, YOU CAN HANG UP NOW.”

To make a call to someone on your line you just used the right number of rings. To call someone of the party line you rang one long to get the operator, then you told here who you wanted to call and where they lived. She would call the operator in the town you were calling and that operator would call the person on her system. Sometimes, if the call was to a distant city, you would have to talk to 2 or 3 operators before you got to right town.

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.