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By Ethel Hand Armstrong |
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Ethel, Clara, Hester & Goldie
No one can change even one second of the past but a lifetime is built of the things that happened in the past. I am writing about all of the little everyday things that happened in my childhood because every one, no matter how small had some influence on my adult life. When I started to write this, I intended to have Goldie read it and tell me if it was good because she shared so much with me but I waited too long and she, like the rest, has gone beyond recall and now I am the only one left of the Hand family. When I am gone, there will he no one to remember. If I live long enough, I will have copies made so that my children may read it. It will help them to understand their mother. This is a true story and it’s all in my lifetime. When I started, I was going to call it “Yesterday and the day before" but it came to me that there is only one thing that I can call it, A FAMILY NAMED HAND because that is what it is all about.
There really was a family named Hand. A father, John, and a mother, Frances, and the nine children born to them. This is a story of their dreams, their hardships and their love. I wanted to get it down on paper and have my sister, Goldie, read it first because we shared so much but I waited too long and she has slipped away forever and I am the only one of the Hand family left. If I live long enough, I want to give each of my children a copy of this story. There will be lots of mistakes in the typing because my old fingers are stiff and won’t cooperate and my typewriter doesn’t spell well either but the thoughts will come through, I am sure.
In order to understand me you must have a picture of my childhood and also of my parents because they shaped my life and without them I could never have become the person that I am. They gave me a true sense of values that have kept me in good stead all of my life and without them I could never have become the person that I am. I had a hard but happy childhood. I was raised in poverty but I didn’t know it, so it never bothered me any. My parents were very hard working people. My father was a very clever man. He could learn and apply himself to anything that he wanted to. He had an ear for music and could play any instrument by ear. He had a beautiful tenor voice and sometimes sang. He was fantastic with numbers. He had never known his father and had been “farmed out” since he was two and had been on his own since he was twelve. He had very little education and he could barely read and write his name. He was stern, stubborn, superstitious, and disagreeable and had a terrible temper. He was very jealous of Mother but I am sure he had no reason to be. I guess that I haven’t painted a very attractive picture of him but this is a true story. He could be very nice and he was very nice looking man with his black curly hair and his blue eyes. He always wore a mustache. He was not a large man. I think that he was five feet eight inches.
Mother was a gentle, loving woman with a world of patience. She worshiped my father. She was not clever like Father, but she was anything but stupid. She was half Indian, short, plump, black haired and left handed. They were married a day after her sixteenth birthday. (Marcia’s note: They were married 1 Mar 1894, Sturgis, St. Joseph County, Michigan) He was nine years older than she. I think that they were mostly happy and they loved each other, I know. Their life was made harder for them because the children came along so fast.
As this is a true story of a family, I must start with some things that happened before I was born. Just about the turn of the century, our parents left the Indiana farm where my Father had been born and where their three oldest children had also been born and came to Michigan, why and how I don’t know. They came to a homestead in Austin Township of Mecosta County, in the rolling sand hills southwest of tiny Burden Lake. (Marcia’s note: John Hand’s property is shown on the 1900 plat map for Austin Twp.) I mention the lake because it is about the only thing left to mark the area. Before the lumber companies came through, the land was covered with giant white pines but they had all been cut for lumber and later the hills covered themselves with second growth pines, scrub oak, named “the slashing.” The cabin has long ago burned down, the fruit trees Father tended so carefully have died and only the sand hills remain to remember a family named Hand.
The house was made of logs. The downstairs was one room and there was a room above. There was a lean-to in the back that served as a kitchen and it had a dirt floor. The front yard had a well there. I don’t know if Father built the house but I think that he put the well down. Everyone had a well in the front yard, maybe as a status symbol or maybe for convenience. Certainly passers by were glad to stop and refresh and water the thirsty horses in the summer.
It must have been an uphill struggle all the way for our parents. They had two girls and a boy and were expecting again. The oldest of the Hand children was an auburn haired, green-eyed girl named Sylvia Aurilla. The name Sylvia was for a great-aunt of father’s but I don’t know where they found the name of Aurilla. I have never heard it anywhere else. She must have been about four and looking back, I know that she never had a childhood. She had to grow up fast. She had to learn very early to care for her younger brother and sister and even help with the work of keeping the house. I hope that somewhere God made a special place for her because she earned it if anyone ever did. Her life sure was never easy.
The second born was a sturdy brown haired boy and they named him Harvey E. Newton. The Harvey was for father’s middle name and the Newton was for Father’s half-brother but no one seemed to know just why the initial E. came to be there. Of course, he was father’s pride and joy because he was a son to carry the Hand name he was always a spoiled one and always had his way and got almost anything that he wanted.
The third child was a red haired, green-eyed girl. She had a fragile look about her but really wasn’t. She was named Hester Elizabeth. Mother’s mother’s name was Elizabeth but the Hester was just because it had a pretty sound to it, I guess.
In April of nineteen hundred, another little girl joined the Hand family. She had blue eyes, a dark complexion and lots of straight black hair. She had a personality all of her own. She suffered from colic and was often in real pain so she cried a lot. Father was very disappointed because he had been hoping for another son. She was given the name of Clara May. (Marcia’s note: Her birth record says her name was Clara Mae. She was born on 22 Apr 1900, Austin Twp., Mecosta Co., MI.)
Father and Mother struggled to make ends meet on the sandy, eighty acres. He planted the cleared land and worked at removing the huge pine stumps and clearing more land. He bought a team of horses and a cow for milk and butter. There was a flock of chickens for eggs and meat. A pig was raised for meat. He worked for and with other farmers. In the spring, the dandelion greens furnished a welcome addition to the diets as did the wild mushrooms, called morels that grew in the woods everywhere. Later there were the wild strawberries and juneberries. Then there were long sweet wild blackberries, and wild raspberries and the hills were blue with the wild blue berries known as huckleberries. Wild cranberries could be gathered from the marshy bogs in fall and there were a variety of nuts to gather. Mother canned as much as she could get cans for. There were wild game and fish to put meat on the table. In late summer, there were bushels of the huge flat harvest mushrooms around the old stumps.
During the first winter of Clara’s life a near tragedy happened. (Marcia’s note: 1900-1901) She had cried a lot with colic and it irritated Father until he could stand no more of it. He grabbed her up in his arms, opened the door and threw her into a steep snow bank in the yard. Mother jumped up to go to her and he roughly knocked her into a chair and held her there with both hands. She struggled and screamed for him to let her go to the baby but he only held her harder and shouted, “Let the brat cry out there,” with a lot of choice words mixed in. The other children were terrified. They huddled in a corner not understanding what was going on. After a time, Father calmed down somewhat and released Mother and she dashed outside and picked up the now silent baby. She was half-frozen but alive. Mother bathed her in lukewarm water to start her circulation going and rubbed and moved her arms and legs. She recovered with no ill effects. Mother refused to let the children mention it at any time and I heard about it years later. When I asked Mother about it, she said that she didn’t even want to think about it much less talk about it but I heard the older children discuss it when they were alone.
About two years later (Marcia’s note: 1903), Mother gave birth to a darling baby girl, another disappointment for Father. She was a blond doll with a very fair skin. They named her Florence Ellen.
In the fall, Sylvia and Harvey were enrolled in the tiny one room school near Burden Lake. It must have been quite a task for them to get to school in the winter. It was a mile and a half and the road was not traveled often and there often was not even a track through the deep snow. Once when Harvey had stayed home and Sylvia was walking home alone, a lynx followed her all of the way slinking along behind her, stopping when she stopped and going on when she did but always there. She stopped and broke off a red willow switch and walked on home bravely carrying it. Mother and Father were quite shaken up when she told them about the big dark cat that followed her all of the way home. Father went gunning for it and found the tracks but the animal had disappeared.
In the second summer of her life, Florence became ill with the summer colic called summer complaint. The correct name was cholera infantum, I think. Home remedies seemed to do little for it and she got worse. Mother asked Father to take her to a doctor but he refused. It was haying time and he was busy and the nearest doctor was in Big Rapids, about twelve miles away. Mother asked him to let her take one of the horses and go but he refused to do that. He probably did not realize how sick his little girl was and he was so very busy. Mother grew desperate. Telling Sylvia to take care of the other children and to not tell her father where she was going, she took the sick baby in her arms and started for the nearest neighbor about a mile away. It was very hot. Florence was heavy and Mother was pregnant again too and that didn’t help. She hurried along as fast as she could. Father came to the house and found her gone. He forced Sylvia to tell him where Mother had gone and he hitched the fastest of the team to Buddy and hurried after her. He caught up to her just as she got to the neighbors’ so he put her in the buggy and started for the doctor’s. The August sun was terribly hot and poor little Florence was so sick and before they reached the edge of town she died in Mother’s arms. Instead of to the doctor, they took her to the undertaker’s. (Marcia’s note: She died 24 Aug 1905 in Austin Twp., Mecosta Co., MI.)
Arrangements were made for them to meet him at the cemetery the next day for the burial and they sadly returned home. The next day, she was quietly buried in a little pine box near the fence in Pine Plains Cemetery. (Marcia’s note: Pine Plains Cemetery is located in Colfax Twp., Mecosta County, Michigan.) It left a deep scar in mother’s heart. When she left the cemetery, a part of her heart stayed there. They never had a picture of her and only a lock of blond hair in the family bible and a tombstone in the cemetery is all that shows she was ever there. Years later Mother found a picture in a magazine and said it looked just like baby Florence and she always kept it. Many times I have seen the quick rush of tears when she looked at it. I think that I hated Father at such times. But who knows, she may have died in spite of anything they could have done.
On the last Thursday of November, which happened to be the last day, I came into the world. There was no doctor of course, only a neighbor lady to help the event happen. I was named Ethel Frances. I am glad that they gave me her name. I have often wondered why the first son is usually named after the father but it takes several girls before the mother gets a namesake. The Ethel was for a neighbor’s child who had died recently. Mother always said that I was born on Thanksgiving Day, just in time for supper. About sixty years later, I found an old calendar and found that November 21 was Thanksgiving in nineteen hundred and five. My folks must have celebrated Thanksgiving on the last Thursday instead of the fourth Thursday. I suppose I must have been another blow to Father. All he needed was another girl.
Father’s mother was a tough old lady, who had been married four times. Her first husband (Marcia’s note: Enoch Hand) died and she married his brother (Marcia note: Jonathan Hand), who was my grandfather and after he died she married again and had two children by him. (Marcia’s note: The two children were Newton and Nancy Freemans.) Later she was again widowed and married again but she had no children by him because they were both old. She visited us once at the homestead and brought her stepson with her. I guess he must have been her stepson. His name was Bill Brown and we were taught to call him Uncle Bill. He was a young man of eighteen or so.
Harvey had saved up his pennies to buy a present for Grandma Brown and when Father went to town he went along to get his gift. Grandma always smoked a clay pipe so he bought her a new clay pipe. When they came back, grandma was sitting on the steps. Harvey could not wait, so he gave her the pipe. She put it in her mouth and then took it out again and taking the bowl in her hand, she hit the stem on the edge of the steps and broke it. Harvey was almost ready to cry because he thought that she didn’t like his gift. She put it back into her mouth and patted him on the shoulder with a smile and then he realized that she had no teeth and could not hold the pipe by its long stem but with a short stem she could. He was happy.
It was probably the next winter (Marcia’s note: about 1906) that Father went to work at a Creosote factory in Cadillac. Cadillac was about sixty miles from home so he boarded there and only came home once in a while. Uncle Bill got a job there too so they roomed together. When they came home, they took the train from Cadillac to Big Rapids and either took another train to Rodney and walked from there or walked from Big Rapids. It must have been rough for Mother too, with animals to take care of, the kids to get to school and wood to cut. Somehow we made it and the money Father made must have come in handy. Father had somehow gotten an advertisement from a real estate dealer in Missouri. Of course, it painted a rosy picture of life in the Ozarks. Father decided that it sounded good to him. The seasons were longer, and the winters milder and they were bound to make for easier living. I am sure Mother must have done her very best to talk him out of it but once he had made up his mind there was no changing it. I am sure that a trip across five states in a covered wagon with five kids and expecting another could not have had much appeal for her. She surely could not have wanted to give up all that they had worked so hard for to go to some unknown place and start all over again. She would also have to leave behind her darling baby’s grave.
Father began to plan, however. He made an arrangement with a neighbor to take over the homestead. He sold all the animals except the horses and everything else that he could. He bought a heavy wagon and put canvas on it. The barest of clothes and other things were packed. The day before they were to leave, Mother made him take her to the little cemetery and she placed a little glass or ceramic lamb beside the stone and said her goodbyes to the tiny grave. I am sure that the grass was watered by her tears that day. Poor Mother, it might be the last time she would ever visit it.
On a very chilly April morning (Marcia’s note: 1908) we said goodbye to the log house that had been home to us and to our neighbors and started out for the long trip to the unknown state of Missouri.
The roads were dirt roads. There were no road maps and Father asked directions from the people we met on the road. By the second week, we were in Indiana. If Father was glad to be in his native state, he made no mention of it. Bill had decided to join us so he joined us near the state line. The land was level and good and spring was just beginning to show. It was beautiful but every rain turned the road into mud. The grass was getting higher and Father was able to cut down on the ration of grain that he fed the horses every day. We were more comfortable too.
By May we were in Illinois with rain and more rain. It rained twenty-seven days in the month of May. The heavy black soil turned to a sea of mud, that the horses sank in up to their knees and the wagon wheels went in up to the hubs. Every few miles we came to a huge mud hole known as quagmires. It was impossible for the horses to pull the wagon through them with a load. Usually there were other wagons trying to make it through too. Everyone who could walk got out of the wagon and went into the mud up to their knees or deeper. When other rigs were stalled too, the men unhitched the teams and hitched several teams to the first wagon in the line and pulled it through the mud hole and then went back and hitched to the next until all rigs at the spot were through. Then each team was put on the proper wagon and everyone went their way. If no other wagon was in sight, the wagon had to be unloaded and then reloaded on the other side of the hole. Father and Uncle Bill carried the heavy trunks across or around and set them on the least muddy spot and everyone got out of the wagon and the teams would do their struggling best to pull the partly unloaded wagon through. Everyone was covered with mud and it was usually raining and everyone was wet and miserable. Bill was a great help in helping Father carry the heavy trunks and boxes. All of the other children had to help too. Mother being quite pregnant could only help us a limited amount and I was only about two and a half years old so I was the only one in the wagon a lot of the time. It must have been a very discouraging time. Everyone was covered with mud and our shoes were just blobs of mud and always there was the rain. Father, Uncle Bill, Sylvia and Harvey walked most of the time. Sometimes Hester and Clara did too. Harvey tried to act just like his hero, Uncle Bill. He would tramp along proudly no matter how tired he got. Nights were even worse. Anything dry enough to burn was hard to find and it took a while to get the fire burning enough to make any heat. The girls slept on the trunks in the back of the wagon but they were rounded on top and were never comfortable no matter how they were padded. Quite often the rain found a way in under the edges of the canvas. Bill and Harvey slept under the wagon but the ground was always wet, even with hay or straw on it. No one got dried out. I was the only comfortable one.
I must have been a real problem for my mother on that trip. I was extremely bashful and if strangers even stopped by to pass the time of day I was terrified and ran and jumped into mother’s lap or tried to. She was very pregnant and it must have been uncomfortable to have a forty-five-pound girl come jumping into your lap or trying to. I can still remember my terror of strangers. As outgoing as I grew up to be, it doesn’t seem possible now. Roaming bands of gypsies were common. They traveled in closed wagons that must have been the forerunners of the modern vans. One or more teams pulled each wagon and the sides were brightly painted. Besides the horses that pulled the wagons several other horses were tied to the back of each wagon and led along. From three to eight wagons would be traveling together and as many as twenty-five horses might be included. They stopped at night near a river or stream and let the horses graze along the road while they cooked their meals on a bonfire. If possible, they liked to camp near a small town or village. The women scattered out and told fortunes for anyone who would let them. Of course, they wanted money for the service. The men tried to sell or trade horses or with farmers or anyone. They had a reputation for stealing anything that they could get their hands on. They were reported to steal small children and later to sell them. I don’t know if it was true or not. The menfolk traded, gambled, stole or did anything but work for money. Farmers turned all the dogs loose and locked everything up that they could whenever word came that a band of Gypsies had been seen.
One time a band of Gypsies camped near us by a river. One of the men took a liking to me and offered my father four horses for me. Of course, Father would never think of anything like that and refused to even talk about it but it didn’t help my peace of mind any. Although I was very young, I had heard of children being stolen by Gypsies and never found again and I worried about one of them stealing me in the night. I slept between the older girls and I clung to one of them as tight as I could all night and for several nights after we saw gypsies.
Everything comes to an end sometime and so did Illinois and the rain. We crossed the big Mississippi river and were in Missouri. We crossed at or near Hanibal, Missouri. Bridges were few and far between so we crossed on a ferry boat. They were mostly little flat barges and were pushed by dirty, little, smoke belching tug boats. Some had steel cable that ran thru a pulley attached to the side of the barge to keep it from drifting too far downstream during the crossing. The ferry we crossed on had a bar across one end with stools along it. I think that drinks were served there. Mother sat down on one of the stools, seeking whatever comfort she could. Before I could climb up on the stool beside her, it was taken by a rather plump lady. I felt that it should be mine and I made a fuss about it until a slap across the mouth from Mother shut me up. I can still remember the resentment that I felt for her and I can picture her in my mind still. She had brown hair pinned in a high bun on top of her head and her blouse was white with tiny black figures in it. It had long sleeves with gathers at the cuffs and a round collar with lace on the collar and cuffs. She had a full, long, black skirt.
Almost at once, the landscape changed from the flat muddy fields of Illinois to the hills of Missouri. As we worked our way westward, the hills became the steep rocky winding Ozarks. The roads were rocky and uphill and down and quite often I was the only one in the wagon. Even Mother found it easier to walk than to ride in the wagon over the rough roads. Father or Uncle Bill walked beside the team and drove or led them with the rest strung out behind the wagon.
Food must have been a problem because we could only carry a limited supply in the wagon because it was loaded heavy anyway. Sometimes we traveled several days without passing a store. Father or Uncle Bill shot rabbits and squirrels for food and if we were near a river they caught fish. Sometimes we bought eggs and vegetables from farmers along the way. Uncle Bill had a unique way of obtaining food in emergencies. He had a fishing rod in the wagon and we would search in the grain sack for kernel of corn and put it on the hook and toss it into a field or along the fence row where chickens were feeding and sooner or later some chicken searching for food would see the corn and swallow it. Uncle Bill would wind in the line and the chicken was forced to come struggling and flopping through the fence or weeds and with the hook in its throat, it made it impossible for it to make any noise. The farmer never saw the flopping chicken and didn’t even know he had lost one. Uncle Bill would wring its neck and put it into the wagon. Mother scolded him for it and said it was stealing, which it was, but hungry children had to be fed so we had a nourishing meal that night.
Somewhere in Missouri a farmer gave Father a large, ugly looking mongrel dog. His name was Buckus. He proved to be very useful to us. We children were delighted with him, of course. He trotted along under the wagon and minded his own business unless someone or something came too close. One look at him would discourage almost anything.
The Missouri farmers had their own way of raising hogs. Most of the winter and all summer they were allowed to run loose, foraging for food wherever they could find it. Acorns furnished a large part of their diet. They were always lean and poorly fed and their spine made a ridge the length of their back giving them the common name of razorbacks. In autumn the farmers banded together and cornered the wild pigs and took any with their mark on them and any young pigs running with their sows. Whatever was needed for meat was penned up and fattened. The rest were turned loose again after first marking the little ones. There were usually marked by cutting slits in their ears. Each farmer had a certain number and a certain way of making the slits. The pigs were more wild than tame and could be really mean, especially the sows with young pigs.
Sometimes at night, the pigs wandered into our camp site searching for food. I don’t know how it got started but when anything bothered us, Mother would say “Parade camp, Buckus” and whatever was there left in a hurry. The meanest of the wild pigs left after Buckus nipped them a time or two. His sharp teeth always found their rear ends and their tails and they left in a hurry. He would go back to his spot under the wagon, pleased with himself and with an eye for anything that might try to return.
Once it had been several days since we had passed any village or store of any kind and our supplies were at a low ebb. Mother had begun to worry because her flour was almost gone as were other needed things. Father said there was bound to be something ahead of us soon so when they saw a rough board sign saying, Gass City 14 miles they were glad. It was late in the day and they might not reach it that afternoon but it would be close the next day. As we went along, they saw other signs shortening the distance. Daylight stayed a long time so Father decided to make it to Gass City even if darkness caught us and we would make camp just at the edge of town and be there in the morning. We came at last to a cross road. On one corner stood a large square clapboarded building and on the other side was an old sign that said Gass City. The only building besides it was a barn and some sheds that belonged to it. Mother and Father climbed down and started for the building but when they reached the door it was opened by a woman who told them that the store has been shut up years before and it was used as a dwelling by the woman and her husband. Our parents were so disappointed they could have cried. Father asked if they might camp nearby and get water from them and they were glad to have them do that. They were very nice people and when they found out how much in need we were, the woman divided her flour, coffee and a few other things with Mother so that we would be able to eat until we reached the next store on the second day from there. They were very reluctant to take the money Father forced on them. Later when anything didn’t turn out like we expected, we referred to it as a Gass City.
As we traveled south and west through Missouri, the hills became steeper and the roads more crooked and rockier. The Ozarks were formidable after the rolling hills of Michigan with their gentle sandy slopes. When we finally arrived at our destination, the name of which I don’t even remember, Father took one look at the steep, stony land and decided it was not for him. The pot of gold just wasn’t at the end of the rainbow. On the way out, we had seen a lot of covered wagons with the slogan “Colorado or Bust” painted on the side. Some said, “Pike’s Peak or Bust.” One disillusioned man had crossed out the “Colorado or Bust” sign and under it had painted “Busted by GOD” and he was headed back east. My folks got a chuckle out of it.
Father decided to join the Colorado seekers. Why not? I don’t know what they hoped to find out there. The gold rush was over but it seemed to be the thing to do, so we went on across the rest of Missouri, headed west by north now with no real goal, I guess. We came in time to the hot flat fields of Kansas. Water was scarce so we camped near ranches or farms whenever possible to do so. The grass became withered and dry and the horses ate it because there was nothing else to eat. They each received a measure of grain too, because they had to be kept up. The heat was terrible. The wind blows all the time in Kansas but it brings no coolness, only more heat. The dust from approaching teams could be seen for miles and we left a train of dust that blew off across the country. Grasshoppers flew in swarms.
Each day of our journey, brought Mother closer to her date with the stork. It began to be a race to see if we made Colorado or the stork caught us before then. Of course the subject was never mentioned in our presence because there were things children should not hear or even know about.
The first hills we found in Kansas were the stony Flint Hills. They are in eastern Kansas and were hot and stony and dry but we plodded on. Everyone was tired and the horses lost weight every day. One night we made camp near shallow, muddy Kansas. There was a large stone quarry nearby. Father must have been having a lot of misgivings for a long time. He had a very pregnant wife, five hungry children, a tired, worn out team and a fast dwindling supply of cash. He said that we would stay over for a day or two and let the horses rest. The next morning he went to the quarry and asked for a job and was hired on the spot. The foreman was the only English speaking help there. The rest were all Spanish or Mexican. Maybe he welcomed another American laborer. At any rate, Father went right to work. Most of the workmen lived in quarters nearby. The building most of them lived in had been a barn originally but had been converted into something somewhat like the motels we know now. Rooms had been added on in a row with no connecting doors. Each unit contained one or more families. Each unit had an outside door in the front and a window in back. Water was carried from a well nearby. After we had been there for a week or two, the foreman told Father that a Mexican family had left and gone back to their homeland and that if we wanted the room we could have it. It was on the end of the row. He told Father that the Mexicans fought a lot with each other but that we would be perfectly safe there. So we had a roof over our heads and one room was a lot better than one wagon. Because our room was on the end, we had a little more privacy than most, I guess. The Mexicans did not bother us any except for the noise and all the dogs but Buckus quickly established the bare spot of ground in front of our room as his domain and no other dogs ever came into it.
Uncle Bill soon tired of staying in one place and he seemed to have no interest in going to work so one morning he rolled up his clothes and his other possessions into a blanket roll and climbed aboard a train going west. “Hoboing” was a popular means of travel for males. You simply climbed into a car of a train going the way you wanted to travel. If the railroad detective, or Dicks as they were called, caught you they made you get off at the next stop, no matter where it was but you tried again as soon as another train went by. Every town had a hobo jungle where the hobos stopped off to await the next train and made a fire to cook any vegetables they had been able to steal from some garden patch. Any tin can would do as a stew pan. Sometimes they went from house to house asking for a sandwich or anything edible. Trains were switching almost every day at the quarry, trading empty cars for the full ones so it was easy for Bill to hop a ride. He said his goodbyes and left for Colorado alone and it was about ten years before Father saw him again.
I was soon playing with the other kids my age and as they spoke very little English, I was soon speaking Spanish. I guess, when you are just learning to talk any language is as good as another. I was not quite three. (Marcia’s notes: 1908), I soon forgot all my bashfulness and paid no attention to the dark strangers so nearby.
Father was a good worker and was very dependable and it wasn’t long before the foreman asked him if he had ever had any experience with explosives. Father said that he had some experience with dynamite while blasting stumps in Michigan so the foreman asked him to take over the blasting at the quarry. The foreman had been doing it himself but with someone else doing that he would have more time for other things. Due to the language barrier, he had never tried to teach one of the others to do it. Father said he would try it. The solid rock in the quarry was broken into pieces and put through a crusher and reduced to gravel for road building. Holes were drilled into the rock ledges and dynamite was placed in the holes to break up the rock. A detonator or cap was inserted into the end of a stick of dynamite and a rope like fuse was also attached to the same stick. Several other sticks were put in the same hole and clay was packed over them tightly leaving the fuse hanging out. When all was ready, the blast man gave a warning shout, which was a cry of “fire in the hole.” Each man repeated the shout until it had gone around to each man and as they shouted it, each man took cover. Then the blast man lit the fuse with a match and took cover quickly. The time between the lighting of the fuse and the blast was determined by the length of the fuse. The fire went sputtering along the fuse until it reached the buried cap and then the cap exploded setting off all the sticks of dynamite. The earth shook, and pieces of rock flew into the air and a great cloud of white dust drifted off in the wind. The men got back to work again. The caps came in little square blue boxes of probably forty-eight caps. When they were empty, Father brought them home for us to play with and they made the best toys. They could be stacked in all kinds of formations and made the nicest containers for everything small. We children were fascinated by the “fire in the hole” bit.
Sometimes during our stay there, the dog Buckus came up missing and we never knew just what became of him. Our parents always thought that he became bored after we stopped traveling and went back to his former owner in Missouri. Maybe he did. Early in September of that year, Mother gave birth to another girl. Poor Father. Another girl! She was named Goldie Lenora. (Marcia’s note: Goldie was born 8 Sep 1908, El Dorado, Butler County, Kansas.) I don’t know where either name came from but I don’t think they were family names. She was a baby doll with brown hair, blue eyes and two teeth. Father said he was a rich man because he had gold (Goldie) and silver (Sylvia). When anyone asked him about the new baby, he told them that she had three hands and two teeth. When they came to see her, they saw the teeth but not the third hand and when they asked about it, he laughed and said that her name was Hand therefore she had three hands. One Saturday night a young Mexican from one of the other units knocked on our door and when Father opened it, he asked a question in Spanish. When Father seemed puzzled, he repeated it again and again. The word lend came out in English but no other. When Father still was at a loss the young man stepped inside and pointed to father’s guitar, which had been packed in one of the trunks but now was hanging on a nail on the wall. He pointed to it and made a motion to himself and repeated the sentence over and over and Father got the idea that he wanted the guitar. Whether as a gift or loan Father was not sure but he handed it to him and he bowed from the waist and with a white tooth big smile he said, “Muchas gracias, muchas gracias.” I think that it is Spanish for many thanks. After he had gone Mother said, “John, I don’t think I would have done that” but Father said, “I didn’t really know what to do. I don’t want to lose my guitar but I don’t want to make enemies of them either as long as we have to live here. Those greasers can be mean, if they get it in for anyone. We will just have to wait and see what happens.” Later we heard guitar music and rich voices singing in Spanish from down the line of rooms. They really can sing and it was beautiful even if you couldn’t understand it. It went on until nearly morning and we went to sleep to the sound of it. The next morning the young man appeared at our door and handed Father the guitar with the same big smile and the same muchas gracias. Around the neck of the guitar under the strings was the most beautiful red satin ribbon I have ever seen. It was about six inches wide and was knotted into a big bow on the back. When Father made a move toward it with his hand, the man caught his hand and shook his head and said something in Spanish. Plainly he meant that the ribbon stayed. As long as I can remember, it was on the guitar. We found out later that there had been a birthday to celebrate but no one had any musical instruments and they had heard Father play it and knew he had one. The one word lend was as near as they could get to the word borrow.
Father sometimes sang while playing the guitar and sometimes he sang love songs to Mother. My favorite was Molly Darling.
Lyrics added by Marcia:
Molly Darling Lyrics
Won't you tell me Molly darling that you love none else but me
For I love you Molly darling you are all the world to me
Tell me darling that you love me put your little hand in mine
Take my heart sweet Molly darling say that you will give me thine
Molly fairest you're sweetest and dearest won't you look up darling tell me this
Do you love me Molly darling let your answer be a kiss
[ strings ]
Molly fairest sweetest dearest look up darling tell me this
Do you love me Molly darling let your answer be a kiss
Sometimes he sang “I wish I was single again” to tease her.
Lyrics added by Marcia:
I Wish I Was Single Again Lyrics
When I was single, Oh then, Oh then,
When I was single, Oh then,
When I was single,
My money did jingle,
I wish I was single again, again,
I wish I was single again.
I married me a wife, Oh then, Oh then,
I married me a wife, Oh then,
I married me a wife,
She's the plague of my Life,
And I wished I was single again, again,
I wished I was single again.
My wife she died, Oh then, Oh then,
My wife she died, Oh then,
My wife she died,
I laughed and I cried,
To think I was single again, again,
To think I was single again.
I married another, Oh then, Oh then,
I married another, Oh then,
I married another,
The devil's grandmother,And I wished I was single again, again,
I wished I was single again.
He sometimes sang a funny ditty called “On tee rad???.” (Marcia’s note: unreadable) We used to tease him to sing and sometimes when he was in a good mood he would. If you have read all of this you will notice that I mention Goldie more that anyone else but she and I grew up together. I was not quite three when she was born and Clara was five years older than I was, so we never shared the same things like Goldie and I did. That is why her passing hit me hard. We shared so much.
Sometime that fall (Marcia’s note: 1908) the quarry shut down for a week or so and Father was still dreaming of Colorado so he took off alone and hoboed his way to Colorado and climbed Pike’s Peak and came back. I guess, that he got it out of his system. Letters had arrived from time to time from Michigan and things were not going as planned there. I am not sure what went wrong but early the next spring Father said, we were going back to Michigan. (Marcia’s note: They arrived back in Austin Twp., Mecosta County, Michigan in April 1909 but they stayed in Howe, LaGrange County, Indiana for a while before returning.) He sold the horses that a neighbor had let pasture in his field. He also sold the wagon and whatever he could dispose of. Mother again packed the old trunks and boxes and made arrangements to get to the station in El Dorado and we boarded a train headed east. The foreman tried to talk Father out of leaving because he hated to lose a good man but there was never any changing father’s mind. I think that even he was glad to be returning to Michigan.
I don’t remember how long it took us to arrive home but it was long enough for the novelty of the clickety-clack of the wheels and passing landscape to wear off. We had a huge basket of lunch and there was water on the train. Of course, the lunch was rationed because it had to last until we got off the train. Once the conductor came through the cars selling apples. They were red and polished and they look so good. He held a plate of them in front of every seat and I reached and took one but before I could bite it, Father took it away from me and put it back. When I started to cry, Father explained that the conductor was not just passing them around like I had thought but was selling them for five cents a piece and he could not afford to buy one for all of us, so no one got one. It was a blow to me but I got over it.
We got off the train at Howe, Indiana. I think that father’s mother still lived there and mother’s parents lived there and her only brother, Lewellyn, lived nearby. I can just remember Grandpa Green. His once red hair was grey and he had a long grey beard. He wore a red and black plaid Mackinaw jacket, the first one that I had ever seen. Grandma Green was short and chubby and was very wrinkly and had sharp dark eyes. Lewellyn had a large family and was cutting logs for a living at that time. He liked to be called Walter, his middle name, because he didn’t like Lewellyn. Father needed money too so we stayed there a while and Father helped Uncle Walter cut logs. It was a two-man job because they had to be cut with a crosscut saw. I suppose we stayed with Grandpa and Grandma Green, but I don’t remember.
As soon as spring started to show, we boarded a train and returned to the homestead. It was just a year to the day that we had been gone. (Marcia’s note: They arrived back in Austin Twp. in April 1909). Father exchanged work with neighbors and got the fields planted and a garden in and before long he owned a team of horses and a cow. As soon as she could, Mother visited Florence’s grave but was disappointed to find that someone had taken the little lamb that she had placed on it.
By fall we were well established again and it seemed like we had never been gone. The older children were in school at Burden Lake School again, after missing a year. Hester and Clara were old enough to go now too.
There was one queer little incident connected with the school that I must tell you about. All of the children carried their lunch in a dinner pail and almost every day some part of a lunch was missing. Some child would be missing a sandwich, a boiled egg, a piece of cheese or something when the noon hour came. Everyone tried to watch but no one was seen touching the lunches. Clara’s lunch seemed to be robbed more often than the others. Maybe it was handier to get to where it sat on the shelf. On one of their trips to town, Mother bought a really strong laxative powder. It was called epicake or some such name. She also bought some peanut butter, which was a luxury. The next day she baited a peanut butter sandwich, with the powder and put it in Clara’s lunch. She told Clara that if there were two sandwiches at noon to eat only the bottom one and bring the other one home untouched but if only one remained she could eat it. She also told her to brag about the fact that she had peanut butter sandwiches that day. At noon she found that she had only one sandwich so she ate it. During the afternoon, the teacher got up and asked one of the older girls to take charge while she went to the outside bathroom. After the second time, the Hand kids looked at each other and then began to snicker. After the next time out, they giggled so hard that the other kids began to ask what the joke was and they told them. When the teacher came in, she was greeted with so much giggling and laughing that she dismissed the school and told the kids to go home. I think that she knew that she had fallen into a trap. My parents could hardly believe that the teacher was the guilty one. She boarded at a nice place and could not have been really that hungry. At any rate, it stopped the lunch stealing for good.
Sometime during the homestead years, Father had bought a magic lantern. It was the grandpa of the slide projectors. It was a square tin box with a hole in the front, slots in each side and a place in back where a small kerosene lamp sat. It had pictures of far away places on glass sheets that slid into the slots on the sides and were projected on a sheet put up in front of it. The pictures were of Niagara Falls, The Empire State Building, Grand Canyon etc. There was a card that matched each picture that told about it. One slide was not a picture at all but a swirl of color on a glass with a very thin frame around it. The magic lantern had a tiny crank on the side and when the crank was turned one way the swirls of colors all went to the center and when it was cranked the other way they went out. It was my favorite and Father always showed it last. It always made me dizzy to watch the swirls go to the center.
Sometimes there were social gatherings at the school house and once Father was asked to bring his magic lantern to entertain the people. He was glad to show them the pictures and Mother had read the cards to him so much that he knew them all by heart and could tell about each one almost as if he had been there. The last one was the whirly-gig one and it brought ohs and ahs from the crowd. We children felt almost like celebrities as our Father talked about all the wonderful places he had pictures of. We enjoyed it, the people enjoyed it and the Hand children were very proud.
There was a Fourth of July that all the business places in the little town of Rodney and most of the neighbors purchased a large amount of fireworks and build a sturdy raft on Burden Lake and three men including Father were to shoot them off at the lake, while the people watched from shore. It was a beautiful sight with all of them reflecting in the still water of the lake. The people sat on blankets and watched. It was the first fireworks we had ever seen. Now I wonder just where we sat because the lake seems to be surrounded by swampy ground but maybe we sat farther away from the lake.
My folks always ate anything that didn’t eat them first so when Harvey found a big mud turtle in the road he picked it up to carry it home. As he carried it along by the tail, he somehow got the finger of his other hand too close and the turtle grabbed it and hung on. He was forced to carry it home with his finger in its mouth. It must have been very painful because Mother heard him crying while he was still a long way down the road. She and Sylvia ran to meet him to see what was the matter. Sylvia helped to carry it home and Father had to cut the muscle in its jaw to release his finger. He always said that he didn’t cry but Sylvia and Mother said that they heard him from a long way away. I don’t know how I rated it but as far back as I can remember, I owned a B.B. gun. The walls of the log house were papered with newspapers in the inside and I was always shooting the pictures. At age three, I could hit a nail head across the room every time. When we had stopped at Grandma Green’s on the way to Michigan, she had been astonished that one so young was allowed to even touch a gun, much less own one. She made some remark about him raising his girls like savages. When I was nearly four, they had a picture taken of me with my gun and my hair hanging down. They tore my jumper to pieces and I posed barefoot. Father had one sent to Grandma Green. I think that it was intended to make her mad but she loved it. There must have been a lot of friction between Father and Grandma for him to spend good money on a picture just to make her angry.
Harvey was becoming a good sized boy by now. He was thirteen (Marcia’s note: About 1910). He had been allowed to go hunting any time he wanted to. If he didn’t want to go to school, he didn’t. He always got first pick of everything. If he came home from hunting tired, Sylvia had to do his chores for him.
Our parents went to Big Rapids one day with the horses and wagon and Sylvia was left in charge at home. Harvey went off hunting and he sat his shotgun down by a stump while he climbed through a fence and it must have been cocked because it went off and the shot stuck him in the back of the head. Several pellets hit him and if it had been one inch closer it would have been fatal. He managed to get to his feet and staggered home. It must have been a frightening thing for Sylvia. He was covered all over with blood. The blood had run down his back and he had touched his head and his hands were all bloody too. He was in a lot of pain and only half conscious. As soon as she found the wound, she made him lay flat on the floor on his stomach and she washed his head as best she could with a basin of cold water and a clean cloth. It was hard to tell how bad it was because of the bleeding. She sat on the floor beside him, pressing the cold cloth to his head until our folks came home. Clara and Hester were frightened and kept asking her, “Is he going to die?” and she would say bravely, “Of course not.” but afraid that he would before Mother and Father got home. They arrived after a time and Mother took over but she said that she could not have done a better job of caring for him than Sylvia had. He recovered but had a scar on the back of his head for the rest of his life.
Father made improvements as time went by. He put in a rough board floor in the kitchen to replace the dirt floor. He made a cement chick coop. No one had ever heard of one but he made one. It was still there the last time I visited the place. It is about the only thing that remains there.
I said that Father was clever. He learned to weave baskets and sold them to help make a living. He cut straight grained ash trees and with a draw shave cut paper thin stripes from them. These were placed in boiling water and they became very pliable. He rolled them into a roll like adding machine tape and later dyed them. We children loved to hold them while he dyed them. We put a finger in the hole in each side of the roll and held it while Father unwound it and dyed each side with a rag dipped in dye. When we got to the ends, we held it by a tiny corner and dyed our fingers as he did the ends. Of course, it took several days for the dye to wear off. Then Father wove the brightly colored strips into baskets, bushels, half bushels, market baskets and several kinds of smaller fancier ones. Once he made a half basket, weaving it as tight as possible and some of the water put in it at night would remain in the morning. A man bought it from Father and later we learned that he had exhibited it at the county fair. He also did a lot of whittling in the long winters. He made chains from a piece of wood. He got so clever that he could make them with hooks on both ends and a swivel in the middle. He made a fancy picture frame from hundreds of square pegs about two inches long made of wood. They were sharp on one end and flat on the other and had notches cut in the sides. Each piece held the next in place and there were no nails, tacks or glue to hold them. He made one to fit their marriage license. He made one for Sylvia after she was married too. I don’t know if he created them or if he saw one and copied it. There is one in the museum at Greenfield Village and I saw it and wondered if it could be one he made. I have never seen any like it anywhere else. They were very unique.
I had a nickname all of my childhood. It was “Bump”. I was playing near where Father was cutting wood one time and I climbed up on a stump and sat there and he said that I looked just like a bump on a stump. I was always chubby and the name stuck and my parents always called me that. Harvey was always “The old man” and they called Sylvia “Puss” but I don’t know why.
It the early nineteen hundreds, it was against the law to let milkweeds mature on your land and if the land owner didn’t cut them down before they seeded, the township or the county hired someone to cut them and the cost was added to the taxes on that parcel of land. Mother contracted to cut them on some of the nearby lands and while the seed pods were still green, before they were ready to burst and send forth their silvery parachute seeds, she and Harvey took corn knives and cut them. They covered the whole parcel and were paid by the acre. I don’t know how much they were paid but I am sure the money helped out a lot.
Father’s mother visited us once. She always drank hot chocolate and she brought her own pot to make it in. The pot was a sort of crockery pot and was the color of chocolate and it was years before I found out that chocolate could be made in some other color pot. Father’s half-brother, Newton, also visited us at least once on the homestead. He was fun and he was married to a fat, jolly woman and they lived in Findley, Ohio and had twin boys and another boy. They really enjoyed the rusticness of our lives and I think we enjoyed them too. The only full brother my father had was a twin. He died shortly after birth so he liked Uncle Newt. Once Uncle Newt stood on his head in a sand bank just to prove he could and he had his good hat on too. Aunt Maggie scolded him for that but he said he didn’t want to get sand in his hair and that made sense, I guess. The boys had lots of fun playing hide and go seek with us. There were so many interesting places to hide and they never had a chance to play with girls before and of course we all played. Even Uncle Newt and Aunt Maggie played. Newton was Grandma Hand’s son by her third husband. Father’s father’s name was Jonathan so when twin boys were born to grandma she named them John and Jonathan but one only lived a short time and she never was sure which one survived but as John was shorter she called the living one John.
Two neighbor boys visited us often. Their names were Charles and Ralph Martin. The oldest, Charlie, was a good natured happy-go-lucky boy. He had a little tune that he sang all the time. It wasn’t really a song it was just “Diddley dee dee dee, Diddley dee.” My parents nicknamed him Diddley Dee. On one of their visits, the older children were all playing outside and darkness had come but they were still playing. Diddley Dee ran across the yard and forgot that the cloth line was there and ran into it. The line had been spliced and had a sharp end and it was just at the right height to hit him right in the face. His cheek was cut badly. Mother took care of it as best as she could and sent Harvey to walk home with him to see that he was all right. She felt terrible about it. She felt that she was to blame but it healed up nicely. Once when the Martin boys and we were sitting under a tree, Charlie wanted to impress us with the fact that he had learned to smoke a pipe. He was sixteen or so. He casually lit his pipe and sat smoking it. We could smell something that smelled like cloth burning. We all looked but there didn’t seem to be anything afire. Charlie started to say that we would find it when it burned to the skin and he said “Oh you will find it when it get to the — Oh God” because right then it got through to his leg and burned him. We teased him for a long time about the spark getting to the Oh God.
We lived on the homestead about three years that time. It seems longer but I guess that you live a lot in three years. My father’s feet began to be itchy again and he started to talk of Kansas. Mother tried her best to talk him out of it. He had paid up the homestead at it was free and clear. They were just getting a good start. They had horses, three or four cows, pigs and chickens. The trees father had planted were starting to bear fruit. The children were getting bigger and were able to help more and everything was looking good.
Father had Mother write to the man who was the foreman at the quarry in Kansas and ask about the conditions there and if there were any jobs to be had. A letter arrived saying that the owner had lost his sight when a blast had gone off prematurely and his son was now running the quarry. He said that Father could have a job anytime that he wanted one. I guess that did it.
Early in nineteen and twelve, Father sold the team, the cows, the furniture, tools and everything he could. What couldn’t be sold was given away. He even sold the homestead. It would never be ours again. We said goodbyes to all of our friends and neighbors and left. There must have been a lot of tears because we had been happy there and it was home. I can go back to the old place but I can never go back to my childhood years there. The sand hills of Mecosta County are still there but the Hand family has left them.
The train trip was very much like the last one except we were going west. We got bored after a while because were confined to a limited space. Goldie and I sat with Mother and took turns sitting next to the window. Sylvia, Hester and Clara set behind us and Father and Harvey had a seat ahead but spent a lot of time walking through the rest of the train. We were all glad to reach our destination. The boss at the quarry had secured an empty house for us and his son met our train and took us to the place. We had no furniture. We had suitcases and the two old battered trunks. Some things had been shipped in barrels but they hadn’t arrived yet. We slept on the floor with grass under us and our coats over us. The next morning Mother, Father and Harvey walked to town and carried the groceries home. Then the next day Father went to work. He had to work just as a common laborer at first. It was very different from what it had been when he worked there before. The Mexicans had left for the most part and all the personnel were different. The man who took it over was a poor manager and things were not rosy. But at least Father had money coming in. We were about two miles from the quarry so Father walked four miles a day. Soon Harvey was hired as a water boy. He carried water in a pail from the boss’ house and offered every man a drink about every two hours.
Father hired a man to plow us a garden spot. He had a black horse and a grey one. I petted the horses while they were taking a rest and the man asked me which one I liked best. I said the black one and when he asked why I said the other one was too old. He got a laugh out of that and explained to me that some horses were one color and some another and that age had nothing to do with it.
Father ordered a set of golden oak dining chairs from a mail order catalog. When he got a card saying they had arrived, he took a half-day off from work and he, Sylvia, Harvey and Hester all walked to El Dorado to bring them home. I wanted to go badly but I was refused. I guess, they knew they had enough to carry without bothering with me. Darkness had come before they got home. Each child had carried one chair and Father had carried two. The chairs were quite heavy and they were awkward to carry and they had carried them five miles. We sure were proud of those chairs. They were probably the only brand new pieces of furniture we had ever had. They were so shiny and beautiful.
Little by little we gained furniture. Some was given to us, some was bought at second hand furniture shops and some Father made. We children were still sleeping on the floor. One morning Harvey came downstairs and said there was a snake in his bed. Mother didn’t believe him but she went with him to look and there was a brown snake curled up in the side of his bed enjoying the warmth, I guess. Mother was quite shaken up but Harvey only picked it up and took it outside and turned it loose.
Of course, Father carried his lunch to work. His sandwiches were made of homemade bread and as we never had butter or even oleo, it was spread with lard and sprinkled with salt and pepper and sometimes with sugar for a change. Goldie and I and sometimes Clara walked to meet him and carried his dinner pail to the house. We always looked to see if he had left us a bit and he always managed to leave a part of a sandwich for us and those sandwiches tasted better than any that I can buy or make today. Even if there was only a quarter of one, we divided it if more than one of us had walked across the field to meet him. I think, that he was pleased that we always came to meet him.
One summer day, a peddler came by with his enclosed buggy and a team of horses. Peddlers were just like a mobile department store. They carried everything from pots and pans to yard goods, harness repair to silverware and tools. Anything that a housewife might want, they could dig into their stock and come up with. He stopped in front of the house and called for Mother to come out to see his wares. Clara and I were playing in the backyard so we ran to the road as fast as we could go to see what the peddler had. Clara had a wart on the side of her heel and it bothered her a lot when she had to wear shoes but of course she was barefoot that day. When she reached the roadside she stopped but I didn’t and I ran into her and somehow my toenail hit the wart and cut it off as cleanly as any doctor could have done it. It must have hurt a lot and she screamed and jumped around and at first Mother and I didn’t know what was going on until we saw the blood and then it was hard to tell because it bled heavily and must have hurt a lot too. Mother was busy for a while trying to stop the bleeding and get Clara calmed down. The peddler finally became impatient and left and Mother had never gotten to look at his things. Mother told me that at least I had saved them some money because there were planning to have the wart taken off before school started because it bothered her when she wore shoes. It never did grow back either and it wasn’t really painful after the first few hours.
After a while, Father bought a horse. It belonged to one of the neighbors and had been a pet of his children’s but his children had grown up and left home. She was a small black mare and had a bad foot at some point in her life and it had never been properly taken care of and she had a limp. The man sold her to us cheap. The children that she belonged to had named her Chickababe but we shortened it to Chick. She was a faithful little beast but she had a will of her own too.
Father took several junked buggies and built one out of the pieces so we had some inspiration at least. After that Mother hitched up the horse and buggy and one of the children went to meet Father so he would not have to walk home after work. Instead of hiking across the fields he would take the road and he would be met before he came very far. Harvey had bought a bicycle and rode it to work. Usually Clara was sent to meet Father because Sylvia and Hester were busy but Clara and Chick never got along very well. Sometimes Chick went fine but if she wasn’t in the mood she would stop and Clara could not get her to go on no matter what she did. Eventually Father walked to where they had stopped and he would get in and turn the buggy around and Chick would come on home fine. After a few times of that, Mother decided to try sending me to meet Father. I was only six but Chick and I were real friends and she behaved well for me so it was my job to go to meet Father. Later he rode a bicycle to work too.
All of our water had to be brought from a windmill in a field about a quarter mile away. We had to go up the road, past the school house and through a fence into a pasture field. One day all the children were busy and were not handy so Mother got two pails and started for the well and Goldie and I tagged along with her. The fence was a barbed wire fence and we had to crawl between the wires or underneath them and I usually laid down on the ground and rolled under the bottom wire. There was a huge devil’s tongue just inside the fence and Mother called our attention to it and said to be careful. I went under the fence as usual and Goldie did too but she never paid much attention to anything she was told so as she went under the fence she rolled into the cactus, back end first. She was like a pin cushion, especially her butt. She could not walk because of stickers in the backs of her legs. Mother tried to remove them but it was almost hopeless so she went to the windmill and got a half pail of water and I had to carry it home while she carried Goldie. She laid her on her belly on the table and started pulling out the stickers. As soon as she got the longest ones out, she undressed her and spent the next hour pulling out stickers. Of course, it was a week before she located all of them and removed them with a sharp needle.
The school house sat on the cross roads just up the road from our house. It was called Prospect and was the typical one room school with the teacher’s desk in front and coat rooms at the back and outside toilets, one on each back corner of the yard. There was a pole fence around the yard with a small gate in front and a wider gate along the back. I started school in the fall and of course the others were going too. That meant there were five Hands going. The teacher was a man named Harold Sproal. He was skinny man and he had no discipline at all. I think he tried but several of the students were big and knew they could bluff him so they did about as they pleased. He came to school with a horse and buggy and unhitched the horse and tied it in a shed back of the school provided for that purpose. It was open on three sides but had a ?wall on the back side as a wind breaker and a roof on it so it provided shade in summer and some shelter in winter. The older boys took turns seeing that his horse had a pail of water every noon and grain or hay that he brought in the back of the buggy.
I soon had a very special friend, who I chummed around with at school. We noticed that every morning there were spider webs in the doorway to the girl’s bathroom and that one or more of the huge bodied spiders that lived in Kansas would be in them. Sometimes they had webs in the fences too. My friend and I took it upon ourselves to kill the huge, ugly spiders every morning and tear out the webs. Next morning they were replaced by other webs and other spiders. One day we decided to check to see if there were any on the boy’s bathroom door and there were so we killed them too. First, we did the girl’s bathroom and then the boy’s. We never went in, we only killed the ones in the doorway. It would have been strictly off limits to have gone in.
After a few mornings, we noticed that the other girls were avoiding us and would not talk to us and when we came up they walked away and there was a lot of whispering. We were told that they couldn’t have anything to do with us because we were bad girls. We had been seen near the boy’s bathroom and no nice girl would ever be near it. We gave up the spider hunts and were soon back in good graces.
There was no kindergarten so I had to start in first grade or primary as it was called. No one had told me that you had to make good grades in order to pass on to the next grade so I never put any special effort in learning anything. I thought that you were in one grade one year and another the next and it was as simple as that. I found out too late that it didn’t work like that I was in primary two years but it never happened to me again.
There were great patches of wild sunflowers growing along the roads everywhere in Kansas. Huge grasshoppers clung to the undersides of the big wide leaves to take advantage of the shade from the hot sun. One of Goldie and my favorite pass times was catching them. We put them into tin tobacco cans but I don’t remember what we did with them, turned them loose again probably.
Kansas has huge fireflies too. We used to go after dark and catch them and put them in a glass jar. We took them to our room and turned them loose after we got into bed. They flew around the room like tiny elves with lanterns and we loved to watch them until we went to sleep. No matter how many we turned loose at night we never could find a one in the morning. I don’t know what became of them.
In order to try to keep the crow population in check, the county paid a bonus of twenty-five cents for each crow head brought in. We knew where a pair of crows was nesting and we knew there were baby crows in the nest because we could hear them. One day we went to the huge cottonwood tree where the nest was and Clara decided to get the birds for bounty. Harvey wouldn’t climb up after them but Clara was somewhat of a tomboy and was not afraid of anything, so she climbed up and robbed the nest. She tied a string around the necks of all five baby birds and dropped them to the ground. If the string had not choked them the fall would have killed them and while she made her way down Harvey cut off their heads. The next trip into town Clara went along and took the crow heads into the clerk’s office. He looked at them and then he said, “Young lady, I think that you have a bargain there but the law says nothing about size and they definitely are crows so here is your money.” One dollar and a quarter. She was rich!
A few cars were beginning to be seen on the roads. Most horses were frightened by them and most drivers stopped and held the bridles and talked to the horses as the cars passed by. You could usually see them long before they got to you. Of course, they went at the speed of fifteen or twenty miles an hour but they were impressive as they went chugging by.
One day after school had started a man drove into the school yard and asked the teacher if he could take a picture of the school. I am sure that the teacher knew that he was coming because his wife had come to visit school that day. He drove the car up near the front of the school house and as many as could get in or on it did. It was a touring car with a top that folded down and rested behind the back seat. I and three of the littlest girls sat on the folded top. Four of the others got into the back seat and three boys took the front seat. Of course, Harvey was under the steering wheel making like he was driving. A recitation bench was placed between the car and the school house and several of the pupils stood on it to be high enough to be seen over the car. Sylvia, Hester and Clara were there. Mr. and Mrs. Sproal and the taller kids stood on the ground. It wasn’t the first car we had seen but it was the first we had been near let alone sat in. No king in history has ever been prouder than I that day as I sat on the folded top of that car. That picture is one of my proudest possessions.
Kaffir corn was a big crop in Kansas and every fall there was a Kaffir Corn Carnival that was like a fair in Butler County. There was always a parade and Prospect School was going to enter a float. A big hay wagon was fixed for a float. Several tiers of seats were built grandstand style and wagon and all was covered with red, white and blue bunting and the edges and ends were all trimmed with springs of kaffir corn. It would be drawn by two teams of matched horses and they would be brushed and the harnesses all polished up until they shown and each buckle had a sprig of kaffir corn. All the children could ride into town in the parade on the float. Prizes were to be given for costumes using kaffir corn. Father made Harvey an Indian costume with feathers made of sprigs of kaffir corn. He made Sylvia an umbrella out of kaffir corn. They both won prizes. I don’t remember what the prizes were. We stood on the corner by the school waiting for the float to come. We were so excited. We were so proud to be riding on a beautiful float. We could hardly stand it. Some of the pupils road into town with their folks and got on the wagon just before the parade but not the Hand kids.
I remember the first funeral that I went to. A kindly old man about a mile down the road passed away. His name was Kimball. I don’t know how old he was because when you are a child, everyone is old. His hair was white anyway. Funerals were held in the homes and Mother went and took Goldie and I with her, probably because no one was at home right then to look after us. I thought the old man looked so nice with his good clothes on. As I stood by the coffin a small insect, like a fruit fly, crawled around on the cuff of his shirt. It was so out of place. I always remembered it. His cuff was starched and so white and the tiny black insect crawling on it.
Our house had an upstairs and Mother papered the rooms up there and the stairway walls with pages from magazines. Most of them had colored advertisements on them and we enjoyed the pictures. One that I will always remember advertised Jap-O-Lac varnish. It had a picture of a very pretty young lady varnishing a stair rail and it said, I have to Jap-O-Laced the front room, I have Jap-O-Laced the hall, please help me Jap-O-Lac the stairs. I made a little tune to fit the words and I sang them to myself over and over. I still think of them sometimes.
I think that we lived there for about a year and then we moved. I am not sure why. The place we moved to was about a mile and a half from where we had lived. It was farther from the quarry, farther from town and farther from school. The house was a half basement type with the bottom floor about half above ground and four or five steps that led down to the door. There was an upper floor with two large rooms up there. We named it “Basement Hall”. Several large catalpa trees grew near it and there was an old neglected peach orchard that no one had trimmed for years and it also had a regular thicket of plum trees that had been tamed but had more or less grown wild. It also had a well. The shallow wells in that area were made of galvanized metal. They were rectangular and were about four feet high with a crank on the side. The crank brought up an endless rope with shallow metal troughs fastened on it every eighteen inches or so. The troughs brought up water and as it went over the top the water spilled into a spout and ran into the pail. The deep wells had a windmill and the wind always blows in Kansas.
There was also a cyclone cellar. The word tornado was not in use. The severe wind storms were cyclones. The cellar was in the ground and was several rods from the house. It was round, walled up with stone and had a roof just slightly above the round and sturdy door as the bottom of the stone steps that led to it. My father was very much afraid of storms. There were no radios or TVs to give warnings. Whenever bad storms threatened to turn into a cyclone, my father herded us all into the storm cellar. Quite often it was in the middle of the night. We would be wakened and told to head for the cellar. Mother followed with quilts and Father came last with a kerosine lantern and an axe. We sat on stones or boards laid on stone. Sometimes there was smelly, slimy water on the floor. We sat huddled together wrapped in quilts because it was wet and cold and we had only night clothes on. We kept our feet up if we could. The cellar was not big and it was crowded. There were spiders, toads, lizards and even once in a while, a snake. Mother and we children hated it. Sometimes we were down there for hours. We sat listening to thunder crashing and downpours of rain and wondered what might be happening up in the world. After a time, Father would open the door and step up the steps and look at the sky and decide the storm was over and we could go in and go back to bed.
On the hot breathless nights in summer, we slept outside under the catalpa trees. The heat in the house would be unbearable. We had some old rusty bed springs that we had quilts on and slept on. Sometimes a sudden shower made us grab our bedding and run for the house but if it was only a hard sprinkle we stayed, knowing that the fat catalpa leaves would soak up the drops before they got to us.
Father bought another horse. I think his name was Prince. He was much bigger that Chick but they made a team of sorts. He cleared out the plum thicket and left only a row of the best. The peach trees had lots of peaches the first summer we lived there. Goldie and I made playhouses under the trees. We outlined the rooms with stones and we used broken crockery and dishes for dishes. We made all kinds of things from the huge catalpa leaves.
We pinned them together with little sticks and made belts, skirts, aprons and lots of things.
When the peaches started to ripen, Goldie could always be found in the orchard. She loved peaches. Once when she had not been seen for some time, we started looking for her and Mother and Father had begun to get upset thinking she may have wandered away. Finally Harvey discovered her sound asleep, under a peach tree. She was laying on the ground surrounded by peaches.
Jack rabbits were so thick that they were presenting a problem to farmers so a date was set for a jack rabbit hunt. The menfolk all came with shotguns and the older children came to walk through the thickets and fields in a row and flush out the rabbits so the men could shoot them. We all wanted to play dog but of course only Harvey got to go. Father said that it was too dangerous. Someone might get careless with a gun. They killed more than a hundred jack rabbits that day.
The mail came by on the next cross road and we had to put our box there as we were the only house on that road. Several families had boxes at the corner and the names on the boxes read “Walls Hand Hart Denneses Keys”. We thought that was cute. Father was still working at the quarry and riding his bicycle to work but it was farther and the road was stony and rough so he quit and started to work here and there for farmers, anything to earn an honest dollar.
Father was what is known as a “water witch”. He could take a forked twig from a willow or peach tree and walk over the ground and tell where water ran near the surface and a well could be put down. He almost never failed and people came sometimes from quite a distance to get him to witch them a well. I don’t know how it works, I only know it does. I think that you have to have a special faith to do it. It never worked for mother and never worked for me. Hester could do it after she grew up.
The young men had begun to notice Sylvia. She had green eyes and long heavy auburn braids of hair and while not really pretty, she had a nice wholesome look about her. One young chap by the name of Fred Mitchener started calling on her. He had a matched team of tan colored horses and a shiny buggy and when he came into the yard there was always in a cloud of dust and he came right up to the door and skidded the horses to a stop. He called the horses Boy and Button. He was a teller of tall tales and he usually ended by saying, “me and George”. George was his brother. One day Father said to him, Is George any meaner than you are?” and he said, “No, Why?” and Father said, “Oh I just wondered, you always say Mean George”. He laughed about it but he tried not to say it anymore. Hundreds of acres of wheat were grown in Kansas and in late August and September the thrashing crews came. All of the neighbors helped each other and there were men who followed the harvest every year. The thrashing job took at least twenty men to handle it. They went from place to place and the ladies banded together to help feed the hungry men wherever they happened to be at meal time. We children liked to go out by the road to watch in awe as the big steam engine went rumbling along making the earth tremble. It towed the thrashing machine, a huge iron giant. Behind it came a parade of wagons and the water wagon last with its huge tank to carry water for the boiler of the engine. Sometime after we moved there, the telephone company ran a line by our house. All of the poles were set by hand and all the holes dug the hard way. There were about five men on the crew. They ate their lunch in front of our house and sat under one of our big trees. Of course, we kept them company. One of the crew had an eye on Sylvia and a day or so later I found a jack knife under one of the poles they had set. Sylvia remembered that she had seen him use that knife so she took it to him and it was not long before he was coming to see her. He didn’t have a matched team and a shiny buggy. He had a motorcycle.
It was an old Yale and the only way to start it was pushing it until it started. He was a short man and it was something to watch him push it until the motor started then jump on with his short legs.
Later we had a phone put in. It was wonderful. It was a party line with several people on it. Each ring came in all of the houses but each party had their own ring. You were supposed to just answer that one ring. Our ring was one short, one long and three short rings. Our number was 9 on 390. It was a long time before my mother would touch the phone or talk on it. She was scared of it or something.
During the summer Sylvia worked for one of the neighbors, cutting milk weeds out of the cornfield with a hoe. She got fifty cents a day for that. Just before school started she went to work as a mother’s helper for a family who lived several miles away. She was to go to school there with their children but it would be a different school. She was in the eighth grade, I think.
Father bought a bunch of sweet potato plants and gave Goldie and I each a row to tend and said that he would give a quarter to the one growing the biggest sweet potato. Of course it was just a gimmick to get us to take care of a row, but it worked. We worked hard with our sweet potatoes and in the end it was a tie, so we each got a quarter. Father had bought or traded for or somehow got an old octagon barreles rifle. It had a long barrel and it was heavy. He and Harvey were out in the orchard trying out the gun and I came out there with Goldie and I asked if I could shoot it but Father said it was too heavy for me. He said that I wouldn’t be able to hold it up long enough to shoot it. I teased to shoot it until he finally put a shell in it and handed it to me. It was heavy all right. I called Goldie to come to me and when she came, I told her to stand still and I walked up behind her and placed the barrel of the gun on her shoulder, aimed and fired it. I guess the shot so near her ears, almost deafened her for a little while but I hadn’t thought of that. Father sure got a kick out of it. He thought that was really clever of me and told all the neighbors how I found a way to hold up the gun and shoot it. While we lived at Basement Hall, Father learned to make brooms. The man who had been the boss at the quarry when Father worked there before was now blind and as there was no Social Security or Disability or anything on that order, everyone had to make a living as best as he could. The man had learned to make brooms for sale to help out with his keep. Father watched him make a couple and he knew that he could make them too, so it wasn’t long before he had planted a field of broom corn and had bought the necessary things for making brooms. The main item was an upright base with a vise on the top that held the handle and the broom corn while it was being sewed together with heavy waxed string threaded into a big slender needle. The handles, wire, thread and a tin collar were brought from a mail order house.
The broom corn was grown like any other crop. It had to be thrashed to remove the seeds before it could be dyed and used in brooms. The machine to thrash it was a round wooden cylinder set in a frame with a crank to turn the cylinder. The cylinder had hundreds of sharp spikes sticking out of it and as the crank was turned the broom corn stakes were held against the drum so that the spikes ripped out the seeds and the loose straw. On days when Father thrashed out the straw, we had to take turns turning the crank while he held the straw. We didn’t mind the cranking so much but the straw had to be dry and it gave off a dry powder that got everywhere and whenever it came in contact with your skin it set up a terrible itching. It got down our necks and in the creases of our arms and all over us and almost drove us wild until Father decided we had enough and we could get into a wash tub of water to get rid of the dust.
Whenever Father had made two or three dozen brooms, Mother sold them house to house. She would load them into the buggy, take me and sometimes Goldie too and go as far as she could in one day and stay overnight at some farm house and come home by a different road the next day. She stopped at each house and asked if they would like to buy a broom. The brooms were well made and sold well and there was never a problem in finding a place to stay. The farm families were usually glad to have company and someone new to talk to. Usually when she went to a house I sat in the buggy and held the reins. Sometimes the lady of the house came out to the buggy to pick out a broom. Some were heavy, some lighter and the handles came in several colors. Sometimes the man of the house came out to buy a barn broom, which was heavy duty one and sold for much more. I loved the trips to sell brooms. Usually she traded a barn broom for a night’s lodging and a stall for chick. Sometimes Hester or Clara went but mostly it was I and once in a while Goldie went along too. Father was too jealous to let her go alone.
One day I sat in the buggy while Mother went into a house in a little town, a team of runaway horses came galloping down the street headed right at me. Runaway horses have no sense at all while they are running and will run into or over anything in their path. Mother was just coming out of the house and was rooted to the spot in fright, unable to even call out but luckily some man stopped the horses before they got to me and the buggy. I was not frightened at all. I was fascinated watching the horses run. Mother was really shaken up though.
One time Mother went to the back door of a farm house and came back as white as a sheet. I asked her what was the matter and for a little while she couldn’t even tell me and then she told me that someone at the house had told her that the man of the house had just shot himself in the head. A suicide. As we drove out of the yard, I looked back and saw two pillow cases hanging on the line. There was water dripping from them and one had a huge brown stain in the center. I realized that it must be blood. I don’t know if Mother saw it or not. She probably did, but neither of us ever mentioned it. It was horrible sight. Just before school started, Sylvia started working for a family that lived about seven miles to the east of us. When school started she went to the school nearest them, where the children of the family went. It was called Pontiac School. Sometimes on weekends, she came home to visit us. She usually walked home and someone took her back on Sunday afternoon.
Her telephone repairman boyfriend took her out sometimes and quite often he was at our house for Sunday dinner. He had been married and his wife had divorced him. His name was Bill Dale. (Marcia’s note: William Dale.)
The Pontiac School had a team. I think that it must have been a basketball team. They had a cheer leader and a school yell. Sylvia had the team spirit and could give the yell as well as the leaders. We children at home kept her busy giving the cheers. Our favorite one went like this, Boom boom dee aye, Boom boom dee aye, Pontiac, Pontiac, Jaywalker Jay. It probably drove Mother crazy but we liked it.
At Christmas, Pontiac put on a very nice program and Sylvia wanted her folks to be sure to come to it. For some reason, Father refused to go. Sylvia was very disappointed. Mother finally got Father’s permission for her and some of us children to go. We went with the buggy and old Chick. It was a very cold night but there was no snow on the ground. We bundled up with quilts and took the lantern for light. The program was beautiful. On our way home, it became very foggy and the lantern light was very feeble in the thick fog. Mother could not see much so she was letting Chick take her own lead. Usually horses will go home without any supervision but after a time Chick stopped and refused to go any farther. Mother climbed out of the buggy and took the lantern and went to Chick’s head to see what was wrong. About a mile from home there was a field with a stone fence on three sides of it and Chick had missed the road and went into the field and came to the corner where two fences met and could go no farther. She had her head right in the corner of the stone fence. Mother recognized the fence and knew where we were. She turned Chick about and led her back to the road and we headed for home. We made it home all right from there. Mother told us never to tell Father about it because he would be very angry and give her a bad time about it. We never told and I don’t think that he ever knew about it. Of course our school had a program too and it was about Christmas at sea. Harvey played Santa Claus and he was supposed to give the captain a pair of binoculars for Christmas but his pack was made from a mesh bag and the holes were quite large and the binoculars fell out before he got to the captain and he had to come back down the aisle looking for them. Of course, everyone laughed. It ended with everyone singing “But Santa come to the sailor boys and Christmas cheers us with all its joys as sailing on to port we go with a hoo ya hoo ya hoo! Funny how some rhymes can stick in your mind all these years.
At some point during that school year, I took Goldie to school to visit. It was a regular custom for children to bring a younger brother or sister to visit to get some idea of what school was like. That day one of the older girls came to school ill. She wanted to keep her perfect attendance record and she was one of teacher’s pets so she was not sent home. Later in the day, she broke out with a good case of chicken pox. I don’t know how many of the others contacted them from her. My older brother and sisters already had them but I hadn’t. I have never had them but Goldie sure got them from her. I am either immune to them or else I had them so light that no one knew I ever had them. I have been exposed to them a lot of times but to my knowledge, I have never had them.
It was about a mile and a half to school, if we followed the road but it was only a mile if we cut through the big pasture field. If the cattle were pasturing in that field, we could not go there because every herd had one or more big bulls running the herd and they were mean. They would attack anyone on foot. We cut through the pasture when we could. In spring, it could be full of water. A spring rain would turn it into a raging river for a few hours. In winter, it might be full of snow. The Kansas wind can be bitterly cold in winter. I remember lots of winter days when the older children pulled my tam-o-chanter cap down over my face and led me with one on each side holding hands. Later, I helped lead Goldie in the same way.
Harvey was still going to school that first year at Basement Hall. The bell was in the belfry above the back of the school where the cloak rooms were. It was rung by pulling on the rope attached to the bell frame. One end hung down and ended about five feet from the floor. The bigger boys all liked to be the one whose turn it was to ring the bell. Harvey had his share of turns and maybe even more than his share. One day as he started to ring the bell a heavy knife of the sort called butcher knives fell from the belfry and hit him with a glancing blow to his shoulder. It had been rigged to drop when the rope was pulled and hit whoever was ringing the bell. Had it hit him in the head, it would have been serious or even fatal. It cut a gash in his arm and made a hole in this shirt sleeve. There was quite a fuss made about it. No one admitted doing it and it was never traced to anyone. The sheriff was called and each pupil was questioned but no clues came to light. No one had seen anyone in the belfry or at least no one admitted seeing anyone there. Some thought it was meant for the teacher but most of the people thought that it had been meant for Harvey. It had been propped in such a way that it would fall, point down when the rope was pulled. If anyone ever found out who was guilty, we never heard of it. My folks were quite shaken up about it, as was the school board. The board felt that it was meant for the teacher but he hardly ever rang the bell.
One day one of the other boys fell from a tree in the corner of the school yard and broke his arm. He was taken into town by the teacher with his horse and buggy and one of the older girls was put in charge of the school for the rest of the day. Word was sent to his parent that the teacher would bring him home as soon as the extent of his injuries was known. It turned out to be only a broken arm. He was a hero for a while. The fad of autographing casts was still in the future or he would really have been a hero.
The years at Basement Hall were busy ones but they were happy ones, at least for me. The older children had a lot of work and I had things that I was required to do but Goldie and I had a lot of time to play too. If I mention her the most is because we are nearer the same age. There were not quite three years between us and there was more than five between Clara and I. Of course, little Florence had been between Clara and I. By then Mother was pregnant again and one June day we had a little brother. There were some complications. Before Mother had bore all of her children without a doctor but this time she wanted one. My father had refused. No doctor was going to handle his wife but later after he learned that there was a woman doctor in El Dorado he consented to having her tend Mother. There apparently was some kind of trouble and Father refused to let her do what she felt was necessary and she ran out of patience with the whole thing and packed her bag and was leaving but Father conceded for once in his life and called her back and she delivered him a son. I am sure that made up for everything for all. After five girls, he finally got another son. They named him George Jonathan. I don’t know where the George came from but the Jonathan was after father’s father, of course. Looking back it seems to me now that George was a little retarded but I asked Harvey about him many years later and he said, “NO WAY”, so maybe it only seemed so to me. It doesn’t matter because he never grew up.
I had gathered a few rumors here and there about the birth of a baby but they were so incredible that I couldn’t believe them. After George’s birth, I tried to get some information from Mother but failed badly. She pushed my questions away. I know now that I being a little shy, modest Mother would never have known how to tell me even if she wanted to. I must have embarrassed her terribly.
That summer Father was cutting hay in a field some distance from the house and Mother sent Goldie and me out to take him a tin syrup pail of cold water so he could have a fresh drink. He sat under a tree in the fence row and relaxed for a few minutes, while Goldie and I played around. Goldie spied a baby rabbit sitting in some tall grass and asked Father if she might catch it. She wanted it for a pet. He was sure that she could not catch it, so he said yes. She slipped over very carefully and grabbed the little rabbit with both hands. It was so frighted that it squealed and squealed but she held onto it. Fathers let her hold it until it quieted down for a while and then he asked her to let it go again. He told her how miserable it would be without its brothers and sisters and its mother. She finally let it go and it lost no time in getting out of sight. Summers are long and hot in Kansas. The ever blowing wind brings heat and dust to you. The sun beats down on you hard. The locusts start their droning in late afternoon, and the cottonwoods come alive with their whirring noise. The buzzards circle endlessly in the clear blue sky. Goldie and I spent hours under the catalpa tree and later in the day we would hunt grasshoppers under the sunflower leaves. We had a special place to play too. It was down the road a bit and out in the field. A natural sheet of rock came even with the ground and it was about as big as our house and almost as smooth as the floor. We built stone castles. We chased the prairie dogs who lived nearby into their holes. We chased the lizards over the rocks and lived in a world of our own. A bit on down the road was one of the ponds that a farmer had made by damming up the lower end of a draw to catch rainwater as it ran off. It didn’t have water in it all summer but even after it dried up, we could catch great huge crabs under the rocks. They made deep holes under the stones and we sometimes spent hours digging out one crab and putting it in a little prison we made for it for a little while and later turning it loose to go its way. Early in the spring the field had daisies, some white and some blue. We picked bouquets that we took home to Mother. I get a feeling of nostalgia just thinking about those golden days and there are tears in my eyes.
I guess that a lot of childhood is going to school. A lot of my memories are of Prospect school, district number 8 and all the things that went on there. The first three years I went there, Mr. Sproal was the teacher. He never had much control over the older students, especially the boys. They did whatever they wanted to and the older girls could get anything they wanted just by buttering up the teacher. After the third year, the school board decided to let him go. They hired a Mrs. or maybe it was Miss Jornagan. She was about five feet tall and weighted about ninety pounds. All the parents were very skeptical and said the kids would run her out in six weeks. On the first day of school, she laid down her rules and told them she expected them to be obeyed. That was that and she never had any trouble.
By my third year, Harvey had quit. He didn’t care for school and my folks didn’t think it was very important so he quit. Hester and Clara were still going and Sylvia finished at Pontiac.
Each desk had an ink well in the upper right-hand corner. They consisted of a small glass jar that fit into an iron frame and was covered by a lid. Hardly anyone ever had ink in the ink well. The younger children were not allowed to use ink and the older ones were mostly too poor to buy pens and ink and if they had ink it was kept in the bottle it came in. The pens were wooden handles that metal points slipped into. There were no fountain pens or ball points either. The Hand children never had any extras and we suppose to make a tablet of paper last for a long time. I was quite an artist and liked to draw pictures but if my parents knew that I had used a sheet of tablet paper to draw pictures on, I was in trouble. I drew them anyway but usually some of my friends would want the picture and trade me two or three sheets of paper for it so I did all right.
While Mr. Sproal was teaching sometimes at recess or noon, some of the boys would catch one of the big bumble bees that came to the wild flowers and bring it in and put it in some ink well and close the lid. The bees got very angry at being confined in such a little space and they set up a very loud buzzing sound. The buzzing sound in the little glass jars would be very loud but almost impossible to trace. As soon as school was called and the children quieted down, there would be this huge angry buzzing. Mr. Sproal would ask whose ink well it was in and no one knew except the boy who put it there and maybe his best friend but no one ever told. Mr. Sproal would stride up one aisle and down another trying to locate the sound but it always seemed to come from somewhere else. Mr. Sproal would become very angry and threatened to whip everyone if no one would tell where it was. No one worried about him doing it. It was usually good for almost a half hour before the bee would tire out and be still for a while and then one by one the children would get up enough nerve to open their ink well to see if the bee was there. Sooner or later someone let it out and it usually escaped out the door but sometimes it flew around the room and turned it into a panic with the girls screaming and the boys chasing it and it delayed class again.
When Mr. Sproal was angry, he had a habit of sitting down in his chair really hard. One day someone discovered that there was a loose splinter in the seat of his chair and that a bent pin could be slipped under it and be almost invisible. So someone placed a pin in the proper way and with the point up, of course. Just as school took up someone did something to anger the teacher and the results satisfied everybody. He sat down hard, rose fast and looked in the chair, saw nothing and sat down again. By then school was entirely disrupted and all the pupils were laughing. It was only after he turned his chair upside down that the pin fell out. It happened that Harvey was still in school and he always claimed that his buddy placed the pin in the chair that had made the teacher mad. I don’t know if that is true, but I know all the kids enjoyed it a lot.
One of the neighbors had a girl who was fourteen or fifteen but she was very fat. She was unable to walk to school. I think that she must have weighted three hundred pounds. She rode a pony to school every day. When she got off, she put the reins up over the pummel of the saddle and told the horse to go home. At home her mother put the pony in the barn yard until it was time for him to return and get her then she saddled him up and went back to school to get his mistress. We got accustomed to it but strangers often got upset to see a riderless horse along the way. He was as faithful as any dog could have been. In all kinds of weather, he plodded the mile and a half and waited if he arrived before she got out. Her name was Hazel Irwin and she had a little brother but by the time he had started we had moved but we often wondered how he got to school. We heard later that Hazel had died before she was twenty. I suppose that she must have had a condition that accounted for her weight. She was a very nice girl and her family was very nice also. When George was only a few months old, Mother went to one of the neighbors to visit for a little while and Goldie and I went along. They were an old couple who lived alone. Their name was Hart and Mr. Hart was out in the field working. Mother and Mrs. Hart were having a nice visit. Goldie and I grew bored, so we took several of George’s diapers and made us a tent under the dining table. We hung the diapers from the edge of the table and we were having lots of fun. I went to hang a diaper over the board under the top of table and saw a very worn but bulging billfold laying there. It was a very sturdy oak table and had a little shelf around the edge. Being a child I took it down and opened it. It had the biggest roll of bills that I had ever seen. I have no idea how much was there but it was a lot. I closed it up and replaced it just like it was. Goldie saw it but didn’t touch it. On the way home, I told Mother about it. She questioned me about it and made sure that I had left it just as it was and had only opened it but had not taken anything out. She scolded me for touching it at all but said that she could see no harm done as long as I left it as I found it. If Mrs. Hart knew it was there she didn’t seem to worry any about it with us playing under there and I have often wondered if perhaps it was a secret place he had and she didn’t know about it. I am sure that their life savings were in it. One time when we went to the corner to get our mail we used to dally along and watch the hard-working doodle bugs. They were hard shelled beetles and they gathered fresh horse manure in the road and made it into perfectly round balls. They rolled the balls along the ruts made by the wheels of passing vehicles until it was even with the round deep holes they dug just outside of the wagon tracks. With great effort and at times help from other bugs they rolled the balls out of the track and into the hole. I always wondered what they made them for and we also wondered how they knew just how to make them but they always seemed to be just the right size to go down the holes. A few times we tried to dig out a hole to see what was at the bottom but the holes were deep and the ground was hard and we never dug one out.
Also along the road were ants that were the brightest red color and looked like they were velvet. We used to watch them too. They were not in groups and seemed to be always alone. One day, I scooped up a handful of dust with an ant in it because I wanted to see it closer and knew if I tried to just scoop up the ant I would injure it. The ant bit or stung me or whatever they do, right on the outside of my little finger. It was very painful and stung for a long time. It left a tiny red pin point of a spot on my finger and it remained for months before it faded off and it was exactly the same color as the ants were. I showed it to Mother and she said that it was what I got for bothering the ant when it was minding its own business.
After Father quit working at the stone quarry, he started doing blacksmith work shoeing horses. At first it was just something to make a few extra dollars but he kept busy most of the time with it. He finally decided that he would build a shop and really go into the business. I don’t know how he got the money for the lumber but he always seemed to get what he needed. He built a shop out next to the road and north of the house. Someone had to pump the bellows of the forge when he was busy and keep the metal hot and I was the one for that most of the time. The older children had other things to do and we each had to do what we were able to, so I pumped the bellows. It was a tiring job and an unpleasant one too. Father was never satisfied. If I pumped too fast, it burned the coal up too fast and if I pumped too slow, the metal was not ready when he was. There was never any pleasing him. Once in a while, Goldie had to spell me off for a bit so that I could rest. I liked the days when he was shoeing horses. I could find a few spare minutes to pet and talk to the horses. Father hated mules and almost never shod them.
A big black and white tom cat came and adopted us and stayed. He always greeted Father whenever he came out of the house and especially in the morning. Father said he always said “howdy” to him so he named him Howdy. No one ever said Hello or Hi or any of the greetings in use now. It was always “Howdy” when you met anyone on the road or anywhere. I guess it was shorted from “How do you do?”.
We had a dog too. Goldie and I had to keep the wood box by the kitchen stove filled and we taught the dog to carry wood too. He would pick up a stick and carry it and drop it at the bottom of the steps that led to the kitchen door. Mother used to say that some morning when we got up he would have the space filled with wood and we wouldn’t be able to open the door but it never happened. He only carried wood when we did.
Not all of my memories are happy ones. There were a few sad ones and they belong in this too. Mother used to set the hens and raise baby chicks. One time one of the chicks was crippled when it came out of the shell. Mother took it into the house and tried to treat it but it showed no improvement so she asked Father to dispose of it. He took it just outside of the door and picked up a root with a sort of knot on it and killed the chick with it. It always stuck in my mind. I knew the chick was better off dead but somehow the callous way he killed it made me sick. Every time I went out and saw the root, I shuddered so I brought it in and burned it the next day.
Father had a large field of kaffer corn and when the heads were starting to ripen the black birds came in flocks like a black cloud and lit on the corn and ate it. Sometimes he went out with his shotgun and bird shot and killed as many as twenty in one shot. We ate them. Mother made a stew with them and it was very good. We skinned them and what there was of them was very tasty. Then Father started setting steel traps on the fence post around the field. It was my job to go around the field every morning and remove the birds and reset the traps. Some black birds were caught but there were always several meadow larks in the traps and it broke my heart to find them with both legs broken. I couldn’t kill them so I turned them loose knowing that they would die of starvation but I couldn’t kill them. I tried to find excuses for not tending the traps but they never worked. After a few days, I only reset the traps that were right near the house where Father could see them. The rest I set on the post but they were sprung but from the house you couldn’t tell. After a time, Father gave up on trapping.
There was a row of big mulberry trees along the road down at the corner where we got our mail. The lady who lived there told Mother that she was welcome to come pick them at any time because they did not care much for the berries. Sometimes Mother and some of us picked there and sometimes some of us children picked a pail of berries there for Mother. One day she wanted berries for a pie and Goldie and I offered to pick them for her. We soon tired of picking the ones we could reach from the ground so we climbed the tree to pick. There was an oriole’s nest in the tree. We watched it all the time we were there and no birds ever went to it so we thought that it must be an abandoned nest from last year. I wanted the nest very badly. The oriole builds a nest like a pouch with a very small opening at the top. When we were ready to go home, I climbed out on a very risky little limb and broke off the twig that the nest was attached to and dropped it down to Goldie on the ground. We played around for a few minutes and started to go home. When I picked up my prize, I was amazed to hear the chatter of baby birds in the nest. There was no way that I could replace the nest because I had broken the limb it was attached to and we had nothing to tie it up with. We knew the mother would never find it on the ground. We held a council and decided the humane things to do was to kill the baby birds to save them from starving so I took them from the nest and killed them one by one, crying my heart out as I did it. We dug a grave and buried them nest and all and placed a little cross made with sticks tied with vines on it and said a little prayer over them. We never told anyone but for years I felt like a murderer every time I heard the golden liquid song of an oriole.
One more bad memory is my one and only venture in stealing. One of my schoolmates had a lot of things that I could not have because her folks were better off than we were and sometimes I envied her. She had good clothes, all the tablets she could use, paints, crayons and anything else she wanted. She had her own scissors so that she never had to wait for her turn for the school scissors when we made paper chains or anything. I wanted a pair so badly and had even asked Mother if someday I might have a pair. She asked Father but he said no so that ended it. One day after school was dismissed, I remembered a paper that I had forgotten to turn in and went back into the school. As I took the paper up to the teacher’s desk, I walked by her desk and right on the corner of her desk laid the scissors. The other children were outdoors or in the cloak room and no one was in sight so as I walked back from the front of the room I very quickly slid the scissors into my pocket. I took them home and told my mother that I had found them in the road. I think that was the only lie that I ever told my mother. But I dared not tell her the truth. I don’t think that she really believed it and so she said it was odd that they should be so shiny after laying in the road. I thought that I would keep them at home for a week or two and later take them to school. They weighed on mind all night and I realized that I could never enjoy them. After two days I took them back and slipped them onto her desk where I had taken them from. She had been sure they had been stolen but I don’t think that she had any idea who had them. She was glad to get them back but not half as glad as I was to return them. I never told anyone and no one ever knew it but me.
Once Mother asked me where they were and I told her that I hadn’t seen them for a long time.
There were lots of snakes in Kansas but they never gave us any problems. Mostly they were harmless garden snakes or the big king snakes that fought the prairie rattlers but the rattlers were not thick and we only saw one once in awhile. There were water moccasins but they were only near the river or streams. There were lots of lizards but they always scurried away from us.
I think that I have mentioned that Chick the horse, had a personality all of her own. She had one habit that my folks could not get used to at first. Whoever had trained her in the first place, sure did a good job. If you left her with the reins loose and hanging on the ground she would stand for hours and not move from that spot. It was called ground tying. If the halter rope or the reins were tied to a hitch rail or tree she would work at the knot with her teeth until she untied it. She was very clever with those sharp little teeth of hers. Usually she stayed right there anyway but she hated to be tied. Whenever Mother drove her to town to get groceries, she left her standing at the hitch rail in front of her favorite store but left the reins lying on the ground. Goldie and I went with her on one of her trips and that day she had to pick up some heavy bags of seed at the feed store further down the street. She passed by the store where she usually traded and went on to the next block where the feed store was and planned to get her groceries at a store next door and then get the seed so she drove to the hitching rail in front of the feed store. She debated about tying Chick because it was an unfamiliar place and decided that perhaps it was best to tie her. She expected to be in the store only a short while. She tied her to the rail went in the grocery store and when she came out Chick and the buggy were gone. Mother thought of Chick plodding toward home with the empty buggy and her stranded in town with two children and of father’s wrath about her letting it happen. She went to the store and asked the man if Goldie and I might stay there for a while and she told us to be good and stay quietly out of the way and she started off to find a telephone to alert Father that Chick had left for home without us. As she went toward the next block and the store where she usually traded, there stood Chick at the hitch right in the usual spot. I think that Mother was so happy that she could have kissed Chick. She drove back, picked up the groceries and us and left me to hold the reins while she bought the seed and then we went home.
Everyone in Kansas seemed to ride horses except us. Father said that the horses had to do enough work to earn their keep without toting people around on their backs and he rarely let us ride any horse. During the long hot summers, the pasture got pretty dry and brown and Father used to tie Chick along the fence row so that she might eat the good grass along the road. At first he tried tying her with a rope, but she always got loose and followed the next team that went along and someone would have to go catch her and bring her back. Then he got an idea and he tried a big log chain. The metal links on the chain confused her or her teeth would not hold or something because she did not untie that. It got to be my job to bring her to the yard every night and pump a tub of water so she could drink and then turn her loose in the little fenced in lot. I asked Father if it was all right if I rode her up to the yard and he absently mindedly said he guessed so. Every evening I first untied the chain from the fence and then put it in long loops over her shoulders so that it wouldn’t drag. That was quite a job because the chain was heavy and I was short. Next I led her alongside the fence so I could climb on the fence. I had to climb next to a post so as not to damage the fence. Then I would try to straddle my leg over her back but always just as I was all set to slip over to her back she would step away just far enough so that I couldn’t. I would lead her up to the fence and try again. Sometimes it took me twenty tries before she grew tired of the game and let me climb on her. She was a small horse but I was only nine or so. (Marcia’s note: About 1914) It never was more than a quarter mile to the house but I sure did enjoy it.
A family named Marley lived about a mile from us. They had several children and one little girl about seven had rheumatic fever and was confined to bed and was not allowed to set up or hold a book or anything heavy in the least. My mother used the old wooden clothes’ pins and one day she took one and covered the top with cloth, drew a face on it, sewed thread hair on top, made cloth arms and turned it into a tiny doll. She made cloths for it, several different ones and took the cardboard box that our kitchen matches came in and converted it into a tiny bed complete with a blanket and pillow. Then we went to visit the little girl and Mother gave her the tiny little doll. It was so light that she could play with it and it made her long days much more bearable. After she recovered and was well again, her mother told my mother that of all the things that folks had done and all the gifts that they had brought there was nothing that gave her as much pleasure as the clothes pin doll.
As the months flew by, the Hand family was growing like weeds. Sylvia was a young lady and had finished the eighth grade at Pontiac School and came home for a little while. Teachers were in demand that year and her teacher had told her of a county program where by an eighth grade graduate could go to Teachers Normal for six weeks and earn a certificate enabling them to teach any grade school in the country. Sylvia came home to talk it over with her parents to see if there was a way that she might go. She was given permission to go if she could make her own expenses. There was a small tuition and some supplies that she would need. Of course, there was a matter of getting into El Dorado where the school was held.
The blacksmith shop was keeping Father busy and he told Sylvia that he would manage enough money for her tuition but that books and clothes would be entirely up to her. A restaurant in town offered her a part-time job waiting tables and said they would fit it into her school classes but of course there was still the matter of getting there. She was still going with the telephone lineman. My folks liked him but he was about nine years older than she was. Of course, Father was nine years older than Mother. Bill was a divorced man and they were not really pleased about that but on the whole they liked him. His mother lived in a big house in town and she offered Sylvia a room at her house for almost nothing while she went to school. She had been married several times but was a widow and was raising two boys by her last husband. My folks consented to Sylvia staying at her house because she was a good woman and would allow no foolishness. The restaurant job would buy her supplies so she went in and enrolled in the teachers normal.
Hester was also growing up and she had taken a job as a sort of governess to the little son of a famous opera singer named Garoldine Ferrer. When she wasn’t on a singing tour, she lived with her mother on her mother’s ranch. She had been married but I don’t know what happened to her husband but she and her son lived in seclusion. Very few people knew that she had a son. Of course, famous people didn’t air their private lives like they do now. Hester’s duties consisted mostly of playing with the boy and keeping watch of him at all times. She taught him how to catch the big fire flies and put them in a jar and turn them loose in his room at night. He got a big kick out of that. In the evening, he would watch outside until it was beginning to grow dark then he would say to her. “Hester, I ’spect’ the bugs are out.” My folks said that working for Mrs. Ferrer gave Hester airs and made her uppity pupity. I don’t know but it might be true. Certainly their life style was a long way above ours and she was treated as one of the family. At least, they taught her a lot about clothes and they taught her that lunch was the noon meal and that dinner was the evening meal and how to use silverware. She was encouraged to read too. She was always learning. She learned to say Sylvia instead of Sylvy and Clara instead of Clary like we always did. Hester was entirely different from Sylvia. Sylvia was a down to earth person, Hester was a dreamer. She was slim and dainty and gave an impression of being fragile.
Hester made very good grades in school and her attendance record was perfect so she had been allowed to skip a grade and had caught up with Sylvia. She wanted to go Teachers Normal too so she quit working for Mrs. Ferrer with her blessing. Bill’s mother let her share Sylvia’s room too and the restaurant also hired her.
Shortly after she finished Normal, Sylvia asked for permission to marry Bill. Our parents had a few misgivings because he was older, had been married before and had two sons and his former wife had divorced him. They liked him though, so they consented. His mother had offered to let them live with her until they could make a home of their own. Hester went back to work for Mrs. Ferrer while waiting to get a school. She never got one, probably because of her youth and inexperience. Sylvia did not apply because of her marriage coming up.
When Hester quit the restaurant and Sylvia was going to quit the manager asked if they had any sisters, who could be hired. Clara was only fifteen but the labor laws were very lax so she was hired to replace Hester. About the second day that she waited on tables, a man named Frank Griffith walked in and sat down and she waited on him and it was love at first sight. He ate there every day for a week and by then they were madly in love and planning to elope. Clara confided in Sylvia and asked her to tell Mother after they were gone but Sylvia promptly called Mother on the phone and told her they were eloping. It really shook things up at our house. Of course, Goldie and I only got it in bits and pieces that we overheard from one end of the phone conversation. Father hitched the horse to the buggy and they took off for town in a big hurry but by the time they got there, Clara and Frank had been to the Justice of the Peace and were man and wife. Things were very up in the air for a while. Father said that the marriage would be annulled because of Clara’s age but she said that if it was she would run away and they would never see or hear from her again. She probably would have done it too. There were several very hectic days with tears and cussing but in the end things calmed down and they stayed married. If Clara ever regretted getting married so young, I never heard of it and they were married for more than forty years and marriage only ended in her death.
Our parents had acquired two sons-in-law in less than a month. At that time, I could not know that Bill’s sister’s son would become my son-in-law in time. (Marcia’s note: Ethel’s daughter, Reva L. Armstrong married Richard Rudolph Slyter 27 Nov 1947 in Stanwood, Mecosta Co., MI.)
Our family was reduced to Goldie and I and baby George and sometimes Hester on weekends. Harvey was nearly always gone.
Some of our old Michigan friends had kept in touch and that summer the son of one came through Kansas and hunted us up. He had been just a boy when we left but now he had struck out on his own. He was using a different last name (Marcia’s note: Lewis Henry Barnum was the name he was using, Lysher was his birth surname according to census records and information from other Lysher descendants.) and when my mother asked him about it, he said that his mother had been married to a man by that name for a short time and that the name was his legally. My parents never accepted that but I don’t know. At any rate, he had an eye for Hester and started dating her.
After going to live with Bill’s mother, Sylvia grew homesick. She was a country girl and even a small town was different for her. She wanted me to come and spend a few days with her so I did. The house was a big old monstrosity and had a lot of rooms. It had a hall running from the front door to the back with rooms opening off of it on either side. Bill always rode his motorcycle right into the house and parked it in the hall. There was plenty of room to walk by it, because the hall was wide. I got a kick out of him riding in at the front door and parking it near the wall in the hall. The door was usually open and there was no screen so he just rode in.
His mother had two boys by a later marriage and they were at home. One was about my age and the other was slightly younger and was between Goldie and my age. I enjoyed them both, never hav