A Personal History

I was born before the first atomic bomb was detonated. Roosevelt was still alive and Hitler had four months to live.

Until I was eight months old we had lived in the Big City. World War II was still on in Europe and the Pacific. After the war, my parents returned to live in a small, rural central Kentucky town . We lived in duplexes or apartments. In the summer after I had turned four, we moved to a small farmstead on fifteen acres just outside of town. There was no running water, no electric, and there was an out door toilet. It was primitive. By this time my youngest sister was just turning one year old and my second sister was eleven months older. My mother had two in diapers and me. Fortunately for my mom, my dads friend had a wash, fold, and dry laundry in town. He did the heavy stuff for a couple of years. My mom paid him in kind.

I was near unmanageable in my new country world. My dad fenced the yard to slow me down. It worked after a fashion. I was a climber and adventurer though, and I was a handful to keep up with.

From the time I four years old , I was up-to-date on science and technology. I did not believe a thing until it came with accumulated data with words and pictures. I was all about jets, dinosaurs and robots. I was interested in WWII because my uncle, and many other men in my town had participated. Some of the ones that returned had suffered a range of wounds from very minor to grievous. I absorbed all their stories and first hand accounts of the war from the invasion of North Africa to the final stroll into Berlin. I also was acquainted with the World War II - Pacific Theater. There were quite a few men that I knew who had flown off aircraft carriers, had strafed convoys in P-38 Lightnings or had climbed Mt. Suribaci on Iwo Jima. I was a sponge for all the facts and details. In the summer of 1952, my dad and my uncle, who lived next door, bought Motorola table top television sets. They were the hottest new style. Every TV that I had seem before was a console model with a tiny screen. Ours had 19" screens. With that came the daily televised war news from Korea, cartoons and Arthur Godfrey. I was seven.

My uncle was a paratroops vet. He had made five combat jumps from North Africa to a "A Bridge too Far" in Holland. My uncle was a trained electrician, as was my dad. They were not so much home or commercial electricians but rather electrical stuff, like vacuum tube radios, to complicated traffic light systems and switch control boxes..

My dad had been a systems installer in a defense plant production line that turned out B-24 Liberator bombers. Needless to say I was very enthusiastic about aircraft, especially B-24 Liberators. After the war my dad went back to work for an undertaker and did that job until he and my grandmother opened a homestyle meal cafe.

I grew up on the small farm to which we had moved, when I was in my fourth summer. It was 1948. I grew up tending cows, hogs, chickens and a big garden. My dad taught me how to milk a cow, tend hogs, and gather eggs. I had to carry in wood and coal for a kitchen heating stove. I also had to carry in coal oil for the two space heaters placed in two other rooms in the house. I did that chore until I was ten. In my tenth summer, we had a gas line run from the highway to our house. All of the oil and solid fuel burners were replaced with natural gas space heaters. I thereafter became a child of some leisure except for tending the cows, hogs, and chickens. In summer, I had to add pushing a lawn mower to my duties.

My dad built and equipped a restaurant building on the frontage of our fifteen acre farmstead that we shared with my uncle. I was not allowed to participate in that building project. We lived in the existing house set further back from the road and my uncle soon built a house about three hundred feet away. I was allowed to participate in my uncles building project. I learned to read a tape measure in fractions and how to properly hammer a nail. At first we had no power tools on that job. When the cutting jobs became heavier, my uncle bought a worm drive rotary saw from Sears. It weighed all most as much as I did. I was not allowed to operate it. I could measure and mark but some one else did the cutting. I was allowed to use a hand saw on scraps and dunnage that may have gone in as filler somewhere.

My mom, was an Irish Catholic lady who had been in convent boarding school from the time she was eight years old. Just after she turned seventeen she graduated from a business and secretarial course that was considered very advanced and practical. She left rural Kentucky very shortly after that and traveled to New York City. She worked in Manhattan and took classes at night. She returned to rural Kentucky after seven years in the city. It was 1940.

My mother was a strong reader, an accomplished seamstress, a talented cook and an all round small farm wife along with her other accomplishments.

On the farm we had milk cows. My mother processed the fresh milk daily. In the days when we had no natural gas line or electric, that job was done in primitive but sanitary ways on a bottle gas stove. My mother was a nurse. She knew sanitary.

My mother strained the milk through a muslin and cheese cloth filter. She Pasteurized it in a large Army surplus pot on the bottle gas stove top. She had a set of thermometers and testers that were in her kit for hospital cookery and sanitary service supervision. She skimmed the cream when the milk had been allowed to separate. She churn milk for butter , made farmers cheese, and fed the waste whey to the hogs.

My mother also canned, fruits and vegetables and made pickles out of every piece of surplus vegetable or fruit. She also canned certain cuts of meat. She made her own V8 like vegatable juice. Nothing was wasted. Boiled potato water became the medium for scrap vegetables and meats to stew in for broth or stock she then canned or put in the home freezer. The surplus milk and eggs went into pies and cakes that were sold bartered or given as gifts. My mother also baked pies for our family restaurants and for special order customers. My mother also baked bread and biscuits. Every meal was a touch point. We all sat down together and started eating when given permission. It was a different time and a different consciousness. It was the 1950s, the cusp of an age.