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I was born and raised in Claremont, Minnesota. That's a little town
between Owatona and Rochester. My folks were good Catholics and so they had a lot of kids. I was the sixth child and
I was born April 24, 1914. There were nine kids in the family. I should say my mother
was a good Catholic, but my father was not. It was our mother who kept us on the straight and narrow.
The first memory I have is of when my folks had to have an outside
lady come in and be with us because my mother was laid up in some way. I don't know if it was cildbirth or not. I
remember that lady, Mrs. Robley, coming in and taking care of us children. Another early memory I recall is
from the first house we lived in. There were quite a few of us sleeping in one room and it was really cramped. I
was very small, only three or four years old, and there was a little access opening to the attic in the bedroom. My
older sister Martha used to tease me and say that the boogie man was up there, and
then she would giggle. She was quite a tease. Even to this day, she still giggles, and she's in marvelous shape
for being ninety-one years old.
Another memory is that during WWI many people in our town died of a flu
epidemic. On one particular occasion, I remember sitting and watching the horse drawn hearse go by our house after a
neighbor lady had died of the flu. My mother was a very conscientious type of person and she spent a lot of time nursing
people who were sick during that time. She'd go to their homes to help them by keeping house for them and things of that
nature.
My sister Frances was like a
second mother to all of us kids. As the oldest girl, she was the disciplinarian, and she took that responsibility
seriously. She kept us in line and was really tough on us, and really good for us, too. We always looked up to her
with respect. I remember she used to coach me in catechism. I couldn't go to the movies on Saturdays if I didn't
go to catechism first. She often got upset with us kids. Not really mad, but exasperated. Her characteristic way
of expressing her feelings on those occasions was stamping her foot, snapping her fingers, and blinking her eyes. Of course,
this impressed us a good deal, so we usually straightened up after that. Education was very important to Frances, and
she always emphasized that to us as we were growing up. She went away to Winona State Teacher's College when I was
still a young boy, but all her life she was there for anyone in the family who needed her.
I took going to church very seriously as a child and believed everything I
was told. Like my mother, I was a very devout Catholic. My dad didn't go to church. The Bishop used to come for
confirmation, but our parish wasn't too highly regarded in the district, so he didn't come very often. I think he
came about once every four years. I had my first communion and confirmation at the same time. I remember making my
first confession. I confessed and I went out and fifteen minutes later, I swore. So I had to go back in to confession
again. I was determined I was going to be in a state of grace when I went to communion. I knew you couldn't have any
sin on your soul. I turned around and went back in. I can imagine that priest must have snickered to himself.
All the kids went to church with Mother.
In addition to Sunday services, we always went to church on Christmas Eve and on the Saint's Days. I recall that Lent
was a big event and we were very strict about observing it. I think that training was very good for me. Even though
they had a lot of ritual which ended up having no meaning, I do think there was a discipline involved that was very good.
It stayed with me all my life. I've always been a disciplined person because of it. Today, if they had more of that,
I believe the world would be a better place.
My dad was a blacksmith and we lived
in town. Claremont was a typical small town in that everybody knew everybody else and what was going on. One chief
occupation of my mother's was to sit and visit with the neighbor ladies. They would come over and sit and gossip about
other people in the town. That was all there was to do in those days. They sat in the kitchen. That was the place to
gather then. If you had company, usually you sat in the kitchen.
We lived on the main street in town. There were two main streets that
ran the length of the town. They were probably each a mile long, and there were a lot of gaps in between the houses.
Next door to us was a place where they sold farm machinery. Then there was a filing station and across from that a
garage building, then a vacant lot. Next to that was the Claremont News printing office and next was a building they
called the Opera House. Various events took place there. It was the only entertainment facility in town.
The Opera House had a projector upstairs. It was one with a carbon light
which consisted of two pieces of carbon, one on each side of the electrodes and you would touch them and they would
spark and create a gas and then you could move the electrodes apart, and this gas would carry the charge from one to the
other and create a really strong light. This was used in the projection machine. The movie machine was primitive and
the film would break once in awhile, and they'd flash on the screen, "One moment, please!" They spliced the film with
banana oil, and that smell was always present in the room. The movies they showed in those days were mostly westerns.
They had a young girl who played the piano for the movies. She played mood music. If there was excitement or the
Indians were chasing someone, the music would get real fast and create the mood for the scene.
We used to have what they called "Chatauquas" that would come to town.
They were groups of entertainers who put on various kinds of shows. They were usually variety shows with singing and
dancing. I remember an Indian who put on a demonstration of Indian dances. The shows also involved a lot of fast talkers
who sold junk to the audience. In the middle of the show, they'd stop and sell things, usually something worth a nickel and
they'd sell it for a quarter. You could tell they were con people. They would have somebody planted in the audience and
say they had a mind reader, and that sort of thing. This person would be from out of town. I attended one of those shows
one time in a neighboring town which had been in Claremont. They went through the same procedure and the same person was
picked from the audience.
The opera never came there. They just called it the Opera House. They
also used it for high school basketball even though it was a crackerbox of a place, but it was all we had. We played our
high school basketball there.
On the other side of the Opera House was the barber shop and a grocery
store and a hotel.
One story about the hotel I remember concerned a hired hand of my dad's.
He was a huge, big, tall fellow, and strong as a bull. He stayed at that hotel, and he was a heavy drinker. He'd go on
a binge once in awhile and wouldn't show up for work for a long time. When he was drinking, one time he was trying to sleep
it off in the hotel and they were playing a phonograph in the dining room. He came down and said, "Shut that damn thing
off. It's keeping me awake." But they didn't do it, and kept playing it. So he went down there and broke every record
in the place. He also had a peg leg. He kicked the chairs with the peg leg and broke the chairs. He was really on quite
a rampage. I guess they called the policeman, whoever it was -- usually the policeman was somebody who was on welfare and
needed a job. So they called the policeman and a couple of people tried to put handcuffs on this guy but he was so strong
they had two people on each arm and he'd swing them around like they were nothing. I don't think they ever did get the
handcuffs on him. There was a town jail, but I don't think it was ever used. An occasional bum would come through town
and sleep there, but that's about all. The population at that time was about 300 which I think is about the same as it is
today.
The grocery stores all accepted produce from the farmers, particularly
eggs. They candled the eggs. The farmers would bring their case of eggs in from the farm to the grocery store and
the grocer would usually take them into the basement where he had a little box with a light in it, and a hole that the egg
fit in. They'd candle it to see if the egg was fertilized, and if it was, it was rejected. Or, if it was rotten, they
could tell. They could see through the shell.
We had chickens, of course. My dad
would get a batch of chicks every year. As they grew up, the chickens were very good eating. They didn't cull out
the roosters then like they do now. Then, you took them as they came. You didn't know until they started to feather
out and get a comb on them if they were roosters or hens. We used to eat all the roosters. It was my job to catch
them and kill them and clean them. It was always my mother's responsiblity to do things of that sort, and I was
helping her. She would clean game for my dad when he went hunting. He'd come in with ducks and pheasants or fish
when he went fishing. He'd dump them on the porch and expect Mother to clean
them. So I would help Mother, and it eventually became my job. I was pretty adept at a lot of things most kids
didn't get exposed to, and still don't.
To kill the chickens, we usually took an axe and a little piece of firewood
and put them up against the firewood and chopped their head off. One time I was going to catch a rooster for dinner, and my
sister Frances was coming back from normal school at Winona on the train, which
came in at 6:30 p.m. Her coming home was a big event. When the train came, I was in the process of catching this rooster
and I took him out in the front of the house to watch the train come in, and the rooster was squawking, so I choked it to keep
him quiet. By the time Frances got there, I realized that I had choked him to death. When you did those things as a kid,
it was such a common thing, you didn't realize it was anything out of the ordinary. This day and age, if you saw
something like that, it would be kind of disagreeable. In those days it was just a matter of the way it was.
Every Thursday was cream day. The farmers would come to town in wagons
with a five gallon can or two of cream and take it to the creamery. The butter-maker would test the cream for fat content
and give the farmer credit for it. They would also bring their horses in for shoeing at
my father's blacksmith's shop. Early in the 1920's, they still used a lot of horses.
Tractors didn't come in until the 1930's. The customers would often form a line about a block long for shoeing outside
the shop. My dad had a hired man and one would work at the forge shaping the shoes. The other would be working with the
horses putting the shoes on. There was also a harness shop in town. The guy who owned it made and repaired harnesses,
repaired shoes, and did other kinds of leather work. He did a few saddles, too.
I remember very clearly when my folks bought another house and moved the
one we lived in right off the lot. They bought a house that was owned by the local grain elevator operator which was
probably one of the nicest houses around. But this fellow wanted to build a nicer one for himself on his property. So
my dad purchased that house from him and moved it onto our lot. The moving process was something I'll never forget. I
was about nine years old. They jacked the house up and put big timbers under it to use as rollers. To move it, they
used a winch, and horses to wind the winch up. It had a rope on it about 200 yards long, and they anchored it to
some big trees and winched the house along the street. They moved it about three blocks to our lot. It was a big house,
and my dad had dug quite a sizable basement to go under it. The way they did that in those days was with horses and a
scoop. It was actually the forerunner of bulldozers, I think. They scooped the basement out by the horses going down
one side and up the other with the scoop to get the dirt out. Then it was finished and the corners squared off by hand.
In those days instead of building with cement blocks like they do today in a basement, they put up forms and poured
concrete in the forms, so it was solid concrete. There was also a cistern for rainwater. When it came off the house, water
was directed into the cistern. Those were a few innovations that were new in those days. That was in 1923.
We had a pressure system for getting soft water out of the cistern.
The water would be pumped out of the cistern into the tank under pressure and run throughout the house.
Dad also had coils put into the furnace. Central heating was a new thing in those
days. We had a one register furnace in the middle of the house and mostly used wood in it. Once in awhile when it got
real cold and we couldn't keep warm with wood, we'd buy some coal. This furnace had coils in it that the water would
run through, and we had hot running water in the wintertime. The rest of the time, we drew the water from the cistern.
I was a sleepyhead and my dad always had trouble getting me out of bed.
When he'd come and wake me, I'd get up and put my feet on the floor and grab my socks and put them on, and then he'd
go back down, and I'd crawl back in bed. Then I'd hear him stamping up the stairs and I'd jump out of bed again.
It was my job to milk the cows before I went to school. I'd have to rush
and almost be late. I had a pair of coveralls that I'd slip over the top of my school clothes, and they were never washed.
They could stand up by themselves most of the time. I'm sure I smelled of manure when I went to school. The teachers
must have had a time trying to put up with that, but everybody was all in the same boat. All the kids who went to
school worked in the barns and didn't change clothes. I put the coveralls on for working, and then took them off, but
I'm sure it contaminated my clothes underneath.
We used to have a few customers who bought milk from us. I'd milk the
cows, and process the milk, strain it and clean it, and take it out and deliver it. Usually we used gallon or two-quart
syrup pails to deliver it to the customers. We also had bottles, the kind with the wax paper stopper. In processing
the milk, it was common practice in those days to strain it through a cloth, usually a flour sack. That milk would
really spoil your appetite these days, if you could see the stuff that we strained out of it. There was a lot of
foreign material, manure and everything. There again, I was used to it, born and raised that way, and I was a
milk drinker. When I finished milking, I'd drink two or three glasses of warm milk. It tasted good to me, real sweet
and nice. Today, I think it would spoil my appetite. I couldn't go near it.
In the evening, there were some kids that would come to pick up milk
and sometimes I wouldn't be done milking. So they'd stand around out in the barn talking while I milked. I saw one
of them recently. She was a cute little squirt in those days, a giggly little kid. I saw her at a family reunion recently
and remembered that, but I'm not too sure she enjoyed hearing about it.
I was sick a lot as a child. With the sanitation and milk and so forth,
it's a wonder I even lived. Our house was pretty cold with just one register. The heat would drift upstairs. Our
teachers told us in class that we were supposed to keep our windows open and get fresh air when we slept. So I kept
my window open, and many times there would actually be snow on the floor of the bedroom.
I usually had a brother I slept with, mostly my brother Gene
who is ten years younger. Gene was a little rascal when he was small. It seemed that I was the serious one in the
family. I always worried about people and things. I worried about my little brother Gene because he was always
running around town and getting lost. It seemed like I was the only one concerned about it. So I would go out and
comb the town for that kid. Then, when I found him, many times it was difficult to get him to come home.
Thinking of that bedroom, I recall that my brother Ed
bought us one of the first radios that came out. This was in the 1920's. It was a tube radio with a half dozen
dials on it, and you had to fix all those dials before you could get a station on it. Then there was a horn speaker,
which was used for the voice. I used to like to sit up with my folks in the evening and listen to the radio. One
of my favorite programs was on late and my folks would send me to bed. I decided I would outfox them. I got some
baling wire and wired up that radio so that the wire was next to the window and they couldn't see it. I put the wires
on the radio out the window and upstairs into the bedroom window. I had an old speaker that I picked up, and I hooked
it up to that radio, and believe it or not, it worked! I could hear the radio when they would have it on downstairs.
There were three bedrooms upstairs. The front bedroom was a big room
with three beds in it. My bedroom was smaller and had one bed. My sisters and mother slept in the front bedrooms.
My dad slept in the back bedroom by himself. Usually the youngest child always slept with my mother when they were small.
George and Ed had both left home and gone out to live
on their own by then.
Later on my brother George bought my
mother a gasoline stove. He meant to be nice to her, but as anyone can imagine today, it was extremely dangerous. We
had it in a kind of lean-to kitchen area that was used as a summer kitchen in the back of the house. One day, my
mother went to fill the tank. The stove was hot and it had run out of gas. As
she filled it, a drop of gasoline dropped onto the burner. She had the gasoline can in her hands, and it went up in flames.
She threw it, of course, but the fire spread from the stove and the back of the house burned up. That was one of my
worst memories. My mother was injured, and that just seemed like the world coming to an end. But the worst part of it was
that she went into shock afterwards which resulted in a gall bladder attack and she had to go to the hospital in
Rochester to be operated on. Of course, this was really the last straw as far as we children were concerned, it was just
terrible. Our dad was not a very understanding person, and consequently, our mother was the one that we doted on. I
lived with the neighbors for a few weeks and then came home and lived with my dad while she recuperated.
I can't remember exactly what happened to the rest of the kids during
that time. We eventually came back to the house with our dad. My mother, after she got out of the hospital, came back
and stayed with some neighbors for awhile until she recovered. In those days, convalescence was longer than it is now.
Today it seems like a matter of weeks or days. Then a gall bladder operation was a very serious thing. I don't think
being burned was a big problem, though I don't know for sure. But her going into shock was very serious. Especially for
us. I remember standing outside the house and seeing it burn. A neighbor lady came up to me, and I was very rude to her,
saying, "Leave me alone, you old fool." I don't know what caused me to say that, because I was not normally that kind of
a kid. I guess it was just too much for me. I remember when it happened, it was in the summertime, and I was taking an
afternoon nap. I was lying down on the couch and I woke up and the house was on fire.
Within a short time, my father had
the back half of the house that had burned completely rebuilt with many improvements. He added a bedroom upstairs and
a clothes shoot from the second floor to the basement. There were now built-in cabinets, a work bench and an ironing
board that folded up into the wall. Later, when the gas pipe line came through town, we had a gas plate installed. This
was for cooking in summer when it was too warm to fire up the wood-burning stove.
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