Growing up on the acerage

We just had our grandkids from Michigan for a few days. We throughly enjoyed them and we definately needed a kid fix as only they can provide. After they left this afternoon I got to thinking about when Jerry and I were their ages. First of all, we had no living Grandparents. We had no family car. We had a few aunts and uncles but none who lived in town. When we were a little older we would go to Fairbury on the bus to visit aunt Nell when her grand daughters were visiting at her house. We thought that was exciting. Aunt Nell was married to a banker. She always seemed to have a lot of class. Funny when they talk it just sounds so elegant compared to the talk in a poorer family. I used to envy them but as I got older and got a family of my own I actually felt sorry for them. They had one son. Sent him to the University, and got married himself and moved to McCook and then Colorado. Im sure it was a treat when the two grand daughters came to visit. Meanwhile Jerry and I had a whole acerage to play on. The older ones didn't see the acerage as a great place to live. Heaven forbid, it was on the other side of the tracks from the rest of the town. I guess that was embarresing to some of them. The acerage had an outhouse, no indoor facilities. It would embarass the girls who were dating when they were parked in the drive way and Jerry and I would come out of the house at night and stand on the steps and pee. That was when we had time to come down stairs to relieve ourselves. Many times during the summer when the windows were open we would pee through the screen in our bedroom window. I dont remember us fighting too much when we were little. We didn't have anything to fight over. We made our own toys out of wood scraps. We would shoot canning jar rubbers from our home made pistols. These jar rubber were also great for holding the sole of your shoes when the glue didn't hold anymore. Dad could usually fix our shoes but when he couldn't we would go to George Athos' shoe repair shop and he would put half soles on them. During the war good shoe soles were hard to come by as everything was in demand for the war effort. One toy we never tired of was made by sticking two chicken feathers int the end of half a corn cob with each feather curving out. We would throw them as high as we could and they would spin around on their way down like a helicopter, only helicopters werent invented yet so we didn't call them helicopters. Our friends always liked to come out to our house to play. Often we would entertain ourselves by having clod fights. I dont remember anyone getting mad from being hit with a clod. It was expected. I'm sure some of us cried when we got hit but we soon got over it and got back in the battle. One day when some friends were over Jerry shinnied up a catalpa tree. Robby decided to play Paul Bunyan and try to cut down the tree with an axe. Jerry slid down the tree while Robby was swinging and the axe caught him on the ankle. All of a sudden Robby said he had to go cause his Mom said he had to be home by four. Mom called Dad at work and he rushed home and took Jerry to the docter. I remember it was a pretty deep gash but it healed up good. Back then we were always stepping on boards with nails in them or getting cut with broken glass or barbed wire or something. They didn't have tetanus shots back then. We would soak our feet in hot water and lyesol. We had mercuracomb for cuts and wrapped our wounds with torn strips of rags. Dont remember when I first saw a bandaid. I know they werent in our budget. We didn't eat gourmet food at our house. We ate the cheap cuts of meat. Lots of liver and thin cut pork chops. And soup beans. Lots of soup beans with or without ham hocks. We always raised chickens and would have fried chicken regularly. When the hens were too old for laying eggs we had chicken soup with home made noodles. We had potatoes and gravy at all the noon meals. Some how we always managed to get season passes for the swimming pool. I think Dad knew how important it was for us kids to know how to swim. When he was a kid he would walk upstream from his farm home and get in the floodwater and always manage to get back to his house. My brother Gene was working at the swimming pool when I learned to swim. He tossed me into the deep water and I managed to get back to the side of the pool. The first time I jumped off of the diving board it looked like the water was a mile below. It wasn't long before I was diving, belly flopping, and canon balling with the best of them. When we were in high school and into young adulthood Jerry and I and a couple of friends would entertain some of the local folks with crazy made up dives from the board. Some would drive down to the pool and park along the fence just to watch our shenanegans. These are all good memories of living across the tracks. The best thing is on the town side of the tracks the first block was what everyone referred to as "dog town". I was always proud that we didn't live there!

Old Irish