The Circus Train

My Grandfather And His Dray Wagon circa 1895 to Early 1900s

   
     Trains were the lifeblood of towns situated along the railroad tracks during the early 1900s.  By the time Daddy was a teenager, the rail lines extended throughout much of the Midwest, often positioned close to major roads that connected towns large and small.
     Benville, a small village of only a few hundred town residents (the same population as today) was the source of supplies and social activities for a wide radius of farms and farm families surrounding it.  The steam trains,

Four Eyes: A Whole New World

Modern Shuron Ronwinne Glasses (http://www.eyeglasses.com)
 - very similar to the first glasses I wore 50+ years ago 

     I'm not certain when it became apparent that my eyesight was very poor, probably shortly after I entered first grade.  I'm sure it was obvious the very first day that I could not read the black boards, maps, or charts hanging on the classroom walls even from the front row of desks.   Not knowing what things were supposed to look like, I had no frame of reference.  I vaguely remember bringing home a note from the teacher that set me on the path toward glasses.

From My Mother's Cookbook: Cottage Pudding with Lemon Sauce

My Mother's Cookbook circa 1950

     Mommy was a good cook.  Her little accounting book where she wrote or pasted her favorite recipes certainly wasn't fancy but it contained many of the good things I remember from our supper table. Our meals in those days were breakfast, dinner at noon, and supper at night.  The largest meal of the day was usually at noon.  Farming is hard physical labor.  By midday, everyone had already been working for 5 or 6 hours and appetites were hearty.  If we had a smaller meal, it was at night, but often we had two good sized meals.  The breakfast, lunch, dinner regime was clearly for city living, the way Aunt Opal and Uncle Frank lived.

Midwestern Blizzards

Our One-Room Country Schoolhouse

     The winters of 1948-49 and 1949-50 were absolutely brutal in the Midwest.  Some regions had over 100 inches of snow each winter.  The Great Blizzard of 1949 occurred the first week of January.  Much has been written about that record-breaking storm, but there were many blizzards those years and I cannot separate them in my mind.

     As one storm was followed by another with no melting in between, the snow packed solid, deeper and deeper.  The snowdrifts around our farm became so high that the cattle could literally walk across the fences.  The water tanks for the animals froze solid and tank heaters had to be used to make drinking water available for the livestock.  It was always a worry that we would lose electric power because then no water could be pumped from the well to the tanks.

The Watkins Man

J.R. Watkins Pain Relieving
Liniment, the original first product

     After Mommy and Grammy died, Daddy and Uncle Frank decided to sell the milk cows.  Our weekly income from selling cream stopped.  Until then, Daddy sold the cream at the creamery in town, took the cream check to the IGA grocery store, and bought food and supplies for the coming week.  Daddy could not boil water without burning it so given his limited sense of what was needed for cooking, we sometimes had a humorous variety of things to eat.  But we did have food.

    Daddy had chosen to stay on the farm with us children in order to keep our small family together.  Financially, it probably would have been easier for him to move to town where he could have found a day job.  But he rejected that idea because we children would have been alone at home for long periods of time while he worked.  Alternatively, he could have given us up totally to Mommy's relatives in New England, but he did not want to part with us permanently or to have the three of us split up among relatives.