‘Those were the days’ ...

by Julia Cocoa

     I was 11 when we moved to the farm, but I remember well before then walking to Mr. Walter Mentley’s house on Beech Street, which later served as the home for the Louis Andolsek family. Mr. Mentley was a trustee of our school district.

     Mrs. Crozier had told me that she needed someone to clean her classroom each day. And she thought that would be a good job for me. So there I stood, awaiting his answer to my rapping on his door. He answered, and after talking with me, he gave me the job.

     Daily, for $5 per month, I washed the blackboards, dusted the erasers, and swept the floor with oiled sawdust. During recess and lunch, I filled the drinking fountain for some 30 children with water from a pipe suspended over a watering trough, originally meant to water horses. This was several hundred yards from our school, down Point Peter Road. During winter this was hard, but fortunately for me, the children were less thirsty then. The next year I cleaned both rooms for $10.

     Then in 1926, my father bought a farm of 90-plus acres on Broadway Road just above the gravel pit. We moved one dreary, rainy April day. Broadway then was not paved, and that spring it was a muddy mess. The next year it was paved. I watched the horses, the wagons, and the scoop shovels working all that summer.

     The once-beautiful 15-room house had been built right after the Civil War. Denver Ackley, a really old man who lived up the road a piece, told my father that as a boy, he helped plant the maple trees along both sides of the road as that house was being built. Some maples, over 100 years old, had passed their prime and had to be cut down. Those surviving succumbed to the "revamping" of Broadway in recent years.

     Once we moved and settled in with two cows in the barn, my brother George began his delivery of milk in two-quart containers at 10 cents a quart to families in Hidi. He hung the containers on the bike handlebars by their bails. One time he lost control on Crandal Hill. That spilled him and the milk. Father repaired the bike and the dented milk containers, and George, with scraped elbows and knees, was back in business. I never did learn the financial arrangements between the two Georges, father and son.

     While Broadway was closed to traffic during the paving from our house down to the village line, I peddled garden produce in Hidi by pulling my red wagon up above what today is Vogtli’s Gravel Works, over Skubi’s farm, now a housing development on Crestwood Drive, and down onto Beech Street. Polish people, particularly the Kotas, and those living in the Maulbetch houses on Miller Street, bought cucumbers of all sizes for pickling. In spring, Mother loaded my wagon with hundreds of cabbage plants that sold for 50 cents a hundred.

     That house had been abused and neglected in those recent years and required much work to make it livable. I particularly marveled at the triangular, serrated glass inserts in the corners of the stairs. Out back, a three-holer outhouse, in the style of the farmhouse, had plastered walls and beautiful wallpaper. When electricity was extended up Broadway, we purchased an electric stove to replace the kerosene one. My ingenious father built Mother a washing machine. We retired the kerosene lamps and the candles. No more sadirons heated over the stove burner to iron clothes. I, whose job it was to iron the clothes, simply plugged In the electric iron, and let it glide.

     By this move, we acquired new neighbors. Although I was familiar with the children through school, we were the only Slovenes on Broadway then. There were the Chmiels, whose mother wheezed terribly from asthma. She ran a small grocery and school supply store in a little building near the road. Their oldest son, Walter, became a dentist. Chester (Chet) often joined us in our tobogganing in Hansen’s pasture, and Henry built his family a house on land that once pastured their horses. If I remember correctly, one or both were killed by lightning out in that pasture during one terrible electric storm that also destroyed a barn up the road a bit.