The following was in Mom's journal. I did edit it a bit and added a note
about Blister Rust.:
Living At Saratoga
We were living at Gibson Avenue in Fort Edward and the
owners said we had to move. We couldn’t pay the rent and Cliff was out of work.
Millie was very sick with rheumatic fever and we had to have a place to live. Ben
said we could live in his place. Cliff still didn’t have a job but the welfare
put him on the blister rust program (blister rust is a plant disease that
attacked white pines).
When fall came it closed down because one could not work in the woods in the snow. We tried to get on welfare. Sometime before the frost hit we ran out of food. Five little girls and me pregnant and no job.
It was so bad that the kids and I went searching along the highway looking for greens that were edible. We found a few milkweed greens and some very old dandelion greens. I cleaned and cooked them, took them and fed them to Enid for she was the baby then and the other girls stood around and watched. They were all so very hungry.
Cliff finally had to take me to Schuylerville to the welfare office. The man was a beast. He said Cliff drank and hung out in bars and I was a bad woman and the kids should be in a home. I took Sue in there with me and she wet on the floor and we kept arguing and the man got mad and I still sat there waiting. Sue wet again on the floor and we waited some more.
Finally he said he was going home to dinner. I told him I’d wait for him in there. It was winter by the way and Cliff and the baby Enid was waiting in the cold car because the heater didn’t work. The man was so angry because I wouldn’t leave. He finally gave in and told the clerk to write me out a check and I thanked him and went and bought groceries.
The next month they sent a check to me and when Christmas came they got the American Legion to come to my house. I couldn’t get out of bed. I was so sick so it was brought to me.
A check I was to sign to get warm clothes for the kids. What a mess they got! Four of the kids got an out of date cotton dress, some very cheap panties and Anna got a woman’s red silk dress from the cleaners. No one came back for the dress so it was donated to us. They expected a girl of ten or eleven to wear that fast sexy dress to school! I threw it away.
They also brought about a dozen pair of brown cotton gloves. It seems anything the stores couldn’t sell is what the legion got with that check. It was almost worthless. The dresses shrunk and fell apart when washed, the panties all went to one side when washed-short and wide- cheap cotton things.
(She later got this next story mixed up in her mind because over and over she told me that other story. Its confusing. I was too young to remember it like Millie did and I would only remember some things and get some things wrong. For years I believed the story she told me about the doctor taking his wife to the show. She left out the brown boots, too.)
In February, I started bleeding and went to the hospital. They said I was OK and sent me home. Next morning they asked me where my coat was. I told them I didn’t have any. I said the next time I came they will carry me. I was so right.
One week of bleeding and a few pains and one morning I burst. The blood ran everywhere. I got downstairs and lay on the floor and the afterbirth came out. Cliff waded through high snowdrifts to get to a neighbor’s. They called the police for help, but the police couldn’t come.
They had no ambulance, the snow was too deep for their cars so the neighbor said "I’ll bring her." and he and Cliff helped me through the snow down to the road. When we got to the hospital the car was soaked in blood. They carried me inside and put me in a bed and left me.
Finally two women came and shaved me and finally Dr. Esposito came and listened to my baby. He said, "We'll wait to let nature take its course." In ten minutes he checked again and said prepare her for a section. Before I got sent to the OR my baby died inside me. He drowned in the blood of my womb. They cut him out and called Cliff to come get him with a funeral car.
The damn doctor was cold-blooded thing. He didn’t have only two practical nurses helping him. He said he only had two hands and couldn’t save us both. Well, where in Hell were his helpers? I was just a welfare case. I didn’t matter to him.
When I came to I was in the nut ward. That’s where they put me. All were old white haired women, some climbing the walls, hanging from lamps. One beside me was eating a roll of toilet paper and smelling her fingers and saying that’s shit.
The neighbors sent me a basket of fruit and one old girl said I stole her oranges and she had the nurse believing her until the sister came and said she didn’t have any. I sent the basket home to the kids to eat.
When cliff came in the ward crying I knew the baby was gone. It took me until spring to get over it. I never saw the baby. The doctor said, "No." I couldn’t see it. The funeral man said it was a boy. He was buried in the spring at the feet of James Marshall Baker in Union Cemetery in Fort Edward. James died in India during WWII on the China Burma Road. He was a nice boy.
About Blister Rust
It was brought to the US by our own government when imported tree seedlings from Germany were already infected with the disease.
"The U.S. Forest Service, by planting German-grown seedlings by the million from Maine to Minnesota, had unwittingly unleashed one of the most economically and environmentally-damaging tree pathogen in US history." Here
It was brought here first in the early nineteen hundreds and for at least half a century it was battled. It still exists here but they think they have it under control.
I don't remember Dad doing this but I probably wouldn't. I mostly remember the trapping he did.