Uncle Benny's House in
Saratoga Springs
We moved to Uncle Benny's house in Saratoga for a while.
I don't know where they were living then, maybe with Aunt Jeannette's people.
Aunt Jeannette was deaf and talked funny. She was always yelling at the kids who
ran wild.
When we lived there, I think it was a yellow house with white trim but maybe not. I really loved the freedom of walking in the woods but we had to watch out for snakes.
We had a huge wooden dining room table but it was out in
the yard and all weather beaten. Us kids loved it. I remember Mom making us
macaroni and tuna fish salad and we ate it out there at the table.
We used to go in the woods following paths to pick
wildflowers. I can see them in my mind, deep purple violets and brown throated
ones. In the sand hills grew huge groupings of something called snake grass.
That's what it looked like.
I've always loved the wild things that grew in the fields and woods around us. Mom taught us what was edible and what we could use for different things.
Not my photo. I found it on the Ohio State page but its the same flower I think.
Often when it was summer we would play with the timothy hay in the fields. It grew wild in a lot of places.
One of us would take a piece of this and ask the younger one if they wanted to play "horsie" We put the stem sideways in their mouth and tell them to shut it up and hold it tight. Then we would yank the stem and all that green stuff you see there would break off in the gullible ones mouth. Yes, we were sometimes mean.
It was all built on a huge sand hill. The drive up to the
house was long and steep.
The first Christmas we were there I got to go to the
school Christmas party even though I didn't go to school yet. Dad cut down the
Christmas tree and we dragged it through the snow to school. I got a little box
with hard candy in it and got to taste of ice cream in a little paper cup. The
kids in school decorated the tree. We got to take it home afterwards and it
still had tinsel on it and some paper chains and white snowflakes the kids made.
I thought it was lovely. We had some colored paper that the teacher sent home
with us. We made more chains and mom made flour paste so we could glue them
together and put them on the tree.
Dad wasn’t working except for running a trap line. We
were on public assistance, I think. It wasn’t much in those days. It was just a
few bucks and it was doled out in an office. It was nothing like what folks get
now. You really had to beg them and it all depended on whomever you talked to
when you went in the office. They were all mean and didn’t like poor people.
One time we stayed there most of the day and the man
kept telling us he couldn’t give us anything. Mom refused to leave because we
had nothing at home to eat. Sue had to pee and the woman said there wasn’t any
toilet we could use so she peed her pants. In my mind I can see the pee streaming down the
floor now. Mom was really angry but not at Sue. She was really glad that Sue
peed on the floor. I think the man finally gave her five dollars which even
then wasn’t much.
Mom had gone out that morning to try to find edible
weeds. It was early spring and not much was growing yet. She found one scraggly
milkweed. She cooked that and fed it to whoever was the baby at the time. I
think it must have been Enid.
That Christmas we got packages from the Welfare. They
said we’d get something nice. Each one of us got a pair of brown rubber boots.
That was all. Boy was that a disappointment. It wasn’t that we didn’t need the
boots because we must have really needed them. It was just a letdown to think
all over the world kids got toys and we got brown boots. I don’t know why, maybe
because brown is cheaper but throughout the years we always ended up with brown
boots somehow, even when Mom bought the boots herself.
The next year at Christmas time I was in on the name
exchange thing. I got the boy who sat next to me. I think he got me. In any
case, when we unwrapped our gifts, we each had the same thing, color book and
crayons. It's funny, as I write this I can smell the crayons. Crayons used to
smell nice. I don’t think they do anymore.
That summer something on the other side of the woods
caught on fire. Fire trucks stormed up our hill followed by a whole bunch of
strangers that Ma told us were "rubber neckers" We'd never heard that term
before.
The firemen went through the woods to stop the fire from
coming our way and I suppose to just fight it from a different angle.
Mom made us all stay in the house with her but Dad was
outside. People were running up trying to get in the woods to see the fire
better. One blonde lady got out of her car and grabbed her teenage son by the
ear and twisted it hard yelling at him to get back in the car. I remember
feeling bad for the boy but glad too that his mom stopped him. People were just
acting like idiots.
Finally the fire was out and folks went back down the
hill. There was no place for them to turn around and the firemen were ticked off
that the cars were even there and they couldn't get the truck out till all of
them went back down the hill.
One hot summer day Dad was
driving us in an old car along the road to home. We stopped at a little store to
buy groceries. I remember they bought Pepsi in glass bottles by the 6 pack.
Pepsi in those days came with paper straws.
Pepsi today in plastic bottles or metal cans doesn't taste the same. I don't
know if it was the paper straws, the glass bottles or the recipe but Pepsi just
does not taste like it did back then. Normally, we would drink this in the car
on the way to where ever we were going but we were only minutes from home this
time so we didn't.
We had other groceries too. There was a half-gallon box
of ice cream. When Dad had money he always bought, hot dogs, cottage cheese and
Campbell's beans. I still like good cottage cheese today but I detest hot dogs
and beans. Its funny how sometimes the foods from childhood are comfort foods
while others become nightmares.
We were still pretty far from home unless you counted it
in the minutes it would take us to drive, when the car stalled. Dad got out and
worked on it for a while but whatever was wrong must have been major because he
couldn't get it going again. We all helped push it to the side of the road.
I remember the road was made from that yellowish cement
not tarmac like you see now in most places. I think that memory stuck with me
because we had to hike the rest of the way home. We took what we could in
groceries. Most of us had to carry something but still we left stuff behind,
including the soda pop.
Mom used paper she had with her in her purse to make
origami cups. She used a knife I think to cut up chunks of the already melting
ice cream and stuff a chunk in each of our “bowls”. We scarfed it down quick and
started trudging.
I kept looking back imagining how good that cold soda
tasted, but soon the car disappeared and we trudged onward.
The next day Dad had a friend take him back to the car
and somehow during the day they got it working enough to get it home.
Dad was always good at fixing those old cars. They
weren't made like today. Dad could take a carburetor apart and clean it all with
kerosene or gasoline and replace parts and build parts and then put it back in
the car and it worked. Well, at least for a while till something else broke.
Most
of what I know about cars, I learned by watching him. Dad taught us all growing
up how to do the basic things, even how to re-line the brakes, but the memory
fades when you get older and the cars changed and now I would find it hard to do
more than change a tire or change the oil. I think it was also all the years of
not being allowed to touch anything when I was married for fear I would mess it
up. When someone tells you that you can't do something enough times it begins to
make you think you can't.
When the car got home or should I say when the Pepsi got
home because you know that's all I was thinking about, Mom put the bottles in a
tub of well water to cool down. We didn't have electric so there was no
refrigerator.
Dad ran trap lines. He caught a lot of animals and we
learned the names and what they looked like. Mink always had a nice smell to
them. Dad said it was because they had some glands that secreted the scent. We
just loved to pet them even though we knew they were dead. One day one of us put
a doll dress on a dead muskrat and pushed it around the yard in a doll carriage
till Dad saw us and yelled for Mom to get us hellions inside and leave the dead
critters alone. Then he just stood there and laughed.
We didn't try that again. We were always trying
something.
We had homemade swings of wood or tires and rope,
whatever we could find we used.
It was while we lived here that I experienced a memorable
car ride. I really don't know why some memories stayed with me and in such
clarity when you think that really not much happened this day.
We were expecting Pearl and Dick to come. Dad said that
Pearl liked to have sweetened condensed milk in her coffee so we were going
shopping to find some. It wasn't Eagle Brand like we are used to finding
everywhere today. Basically the same product but not with that label. I think it
was Borden's but I'm not sure.
I just remember, riding along
and listening to the radio.
Everyone seemed happy. The day was bright and
breezy. Of course the car windows were down.
I think it was late summer but not fall yet. A
song came on the radio and Mom was singing along with it. The song was
"Mockingbird Hill" Whenever I hear this song that scene comes back to my mind so
clearly.
We had to walk to school. I started school the second
year we lived there. There wasn't any kindergarten so I was put in the first
grade. There were 2 other kids in the first grade. It was a one room school
house. I've told all this part before but I'll tell it again.
Miss Sparling was the teacher for all of us. I think she
wasn't a miss but we all called her that. Maybe she was. I was too young to
know.
I'm not sure if we got those little bottles of milk there at lunch time. Those bottles were tiny glass ones with card like paper stoppers. Milk wasn’t homogenized so you got a tiny bit of cream on the bottom of the paper lid to lick off.
We all carried our lunches.
Sometimes we had potted meat sandwiches and if we were lucky we got peanut
butter but other times when we didn't have much money, Mom gave us the same
things she got when she was a kid. It was either bread with some sugar sprinkled
on it or what she called "lard sandwiches". It was really oleomargarine with a
little salt and they were spread real thin. When times improved we would take
stuff like cheese wiz or bologna sandwiches. I liked the cheese best.
The school was heated with a coal stove in the back of
the room. Beside it was a sign hanging on a string on the door. The toilet was
an outhouse out in the back. The sign said "in" and "out" and you turned it when
you went out and again when you came back.
Our drinking water came from a spring in a field nearby.
The big boys would take a sled and drag it out there to fill up the big ceramic
container with water. The jug was painted in a Blue Delft pattern. I thought it
was beautiful. Once I got to go with the boys when they filled it. I just sat
and watched but it was still fun to be away from the school room.
We had an aluminum dipper that we all drank out of
without washing it between times. If there was a germ there, I'm sure we all got
it.
One special day Miss Sparling said we were going to do
something different. She got the whole class to stand up and form a circle. She
taught us to do a kind of dance something like a square dance but a little
different. She played music and we all danced together, large and small, it
didn't matter.
Mom was pregnant. I can remember sitting in the car
outside of the Warehouse Outlet while Dad went in to shop. Mom sat with us
because she wouldn't leave us alone out there. She sewed while we waited in the
car. She made little white and blue and yellow flannel nighties that she
embroidered "Dan'l" on the front. Dan'l was a character in Tarzan. Mom loved the
Tarzan books.
Around Christmas we would take whatever pennies we had
saved up to go shopping. I think our parents must have given us a few extra. I
know we got "paid" for chores we did, like washing and wiping dishes and
sweeping floors and helping to bring in the firewood, the eggs, whatever needed
doing.
I remember buying a small Christmas candle of a choirboy
for Mom. I think it cost a lot to me, a whole five cents.
This one is from the 1960's but it looks similar but not the same.
Once we were riding in the car and coming up a hill into
Hudson Falls I think when some guy backed out of his driveway fast and hit our
car right where Mom was sitting. She went to the doctors and got checked out and
they said she was fine. We were all scared.
Then
in the winter a terrible thing happened. One
night Mom started to bleed. There was a girl that used to come to the house to
talk with Mom. I don't think the girl got along with her own folks. She was a
little blonde whose last name was Brownlee but I don't remember her first name.
I think she was there at the time and Dad was out with his trap line at first.
Somehow, and I don't remember all the facts exactly but
during the evening Dad went down the hill to the neighbors. The man brought his
new car up the hill to take Mom to the hospital. She was bleeding bad and bled
all over his car seat. The Brownlee girl stayed with us to take care of us while
Dad went with Mom.
Mom would tell us later that she heard the doctor say he
had tickets to the show and he was going out with his wife. He had the nurse
give Mom a shot to stop her labor. In the morning, our only little brother was
born dead. They said he drowned inside her in the blood. I don't know if that
part is true but she thought it was.
The next morning the neighbor brought us up a basket of
food from his wife and a cake that she made with big blue sugar roses on it. She
said they couldn't eat it and she thought us kids might like it.
I remember driving along to the Union Cemetery. They
buried him in a pine box at the foot of either Grandma Baker or Dad's younger
brother James who was blown up in Burma. Mom said not much of James came back to
bury.
Mom was sick for a long time after that.
This is Uncle Benny in later years. somewhere I have one of some of his boys and me. When I find it I will put that one here as well.
Behind him is part of the hill. It goes much farther up. They were always going to tear down the old house and build a new and much bigger one. They did manage to tear the old one down but they built a small one in much later years about a half or maybe a third way up the hill. They put in two trailers as well. It looks much worse today than it did way back when.
The hill doesn't even look as steep but I think as you go up farther it gets to be more of an incline. I remember trudging up it with bare feet in hot sand. Mom was always afraid of the snakes.
I think I took this photo at an earlier time than the one above this. I just liked the artisticness of the derelict truck with vines and wildflowers growing in it. It was beyond the top of the hill stuck in some sand dunes. It wasn't there when we lived there. I imagine it was a much brighter blue when it was new but I doubt they ever owned any new vehicle.
This one did not keep well but its one of the boys with me and I'm not quite sure who the other one is. Would I have taken Helen with me? Because that looks like a blonde girl but maybe its one of them. I think this was taken just before I went to Basic. That's the first car I bought with my own money and in my name. Before that I'd driven cars Dad had in his name. It looks like we are pushing it and it is possible. It was a Maverick. I think it didn't want to go up the hill even backwards. It wasn't the motor because it did run.
I bought it from some place in Glens Falls. When I had only had it a day, I had a big problem with it. I was coming home to Kingsbury from Hudson Falls when white smoke started pouring out from under the hood. We were right beside that place on the Vaughn road that used to be run by an old lady who sold pets from her home. She had nasty monkeys that I hated, but she let us use her phone to call dad.
The hose to the water pump had a hole in it. It wasn't smoke but steam I'd seen. Somehow we got it home. I think we filled it with water. I also think that the place we got it from fixed the pump for free which was lucky because most places won't do that.