My Three Lives: The Farmer, The Nurse, And the Pastor

By Thomas J. Fetterolf

"My Three Lives" offers a snapshot of several ways of life that have almost disappeared. Farming in 1940's and 50's rural Pennsylvania often still depended on horses and was only slowly adopting the forerunners of today's machinery. The first third of this book describes in vivid detail how farm families lived, what they ate, and how they helped each other to survive. When the author left the hard farm life, he began an almost equally difficult life as one of the first male nurses, and his hospital experiences make up the central core of the book; but his third "life" as an itinerant pastor for groups of churches in Pennsylvania mountain towns and villages provides a glimpse of life many moderns will find difficult to believe. Often traveling over remote dirt tracks, Pastor Tom drove the miles between as many as three churches on any given Sunday and delivered a different sermon to each according to its sometimes difficult principles and beliefs. He became part of these sturdy and independent families, grew to love them, and served them for 22 years before returning to his roots on a small farm just a few miles from where he started.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483572468

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Editor:

A LIFETIME - ALMOST

Thomas Joseph Fetterolf

Born: January 19, 1939

Chapter One: I am born

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born….

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

I’ve always loved those opening lines from Dickens and wish I could report the exact circumstances of my first moments as David Copperfield did, but there is no one still alive who might remember them. My own earliest memories don’t begin until about the age of three with the words You’re a big boy now accompanied by a push out the kitchen door. My sister Miriam was now the baby and it was time for me to grow up. So I was being sent to the family outhouse, that ancient building where people sat on one of two or more holes cut in a wooden bench that acted as a toilet. I knew well enough where it was, but getting there required crossing a 20ft concrete porch, climbing down 13 concrete steps, making a right turn, crossing the driveway, and passing under an archway made of bushes loaded with snow. It was January; I remember the mid-winter Pennsylvania wind moaning and wrapping itself around me while tree branches whipped back and forth over the outhouse door as if to say, Keep out! Go back! It was all too much for me. I wet my pants and caught the dickens for it. So began my memories and my third year.

The farmhouse my family lived in was ancient, but I do not know when it was built. It was concrete and stone with the inside finished in horsehair plaster; its walls were nearly 2½ft thick in places with deep window wells. Nearly every room had a fireplace and each end of the house had a stone chimney. I remember a large kitchen centered on a stove that was the warmest place in the house when its oven door was open. The backside of this stove usually held a five-gallon bucket for vegetable trimmings and other food waste that would be cooked and fed to the pigs. Mom was not always a great cook since she had never done any cooking in her parents’ home, and Dad thought some of her culinary efforts were responsible for making the pigs sick.

I don’t know if the pigs ever really suffered, but I do remember one occasion when Mom attempted to hide a baking failure by dumping the mess intended to be a cake into the coals of the kitchen stove. The smell was awful and it spread outdoors through the chimneys until Dad caught wind of it and came bursting into the kitchen to find out what was on fire. Mom finally did learn to cook - probably as a means of self-preservation - and later she was pretty good at it; but she never won any culinary prizes, as she herself would tell you if she were here.

From the kitchen, one staircase went up to the second floor bedrooms and another very narrow spiraling one went down to the cellar. I remember the narrow, worn foot treads on the cellar steps as they wound down into the darkness. There were wonders hidden in that dark cellar: shelves of bright canned fruits and vegetables, all sorts of preserved foods, a bin for wood, and a root cellar for potatoes and turnips. In the center was a huge furnace whose ashes were highly prized in winter for traction on snowy lanes. Closely attached to the kitchen was a shanty, a separate room for cooking in summer and working up meat when butchering. It was also a place to store baskets of fresh produce for cooking or canning.

Slowly, life outside the farmhouse began to take form and shape for me, most of it centered on our big old barn. I all too clearly remember the yard in front of the barn where our pigs and piglets were raised. The piglets had the run of the yard, contained only by an electric wire about one foot off the ground. I had been warned not to touch that wire but, of course, I did - only to discover that I couldn’t let go. The wire was electrified, and its shock resulted in much crying and another pair of wet pants.

On the front side of the barn was a row of hutches for the rabbits we raised both for sale and family dinners. Something must also have been done with their pelts – since nothing on the farm was ever wasted - but I have no memory of it. Our sows were kept inside the barn; their piggery was on the right side as you entered, while the left side was lined with stanchions where the cows were tied for milking. I have been told that in the morning, Mom and Dad would quickly dress me and take me to the barn with them while they did the daily milking. I was placed on a pile of straw and given a bottle filled from the first cow to be milked. I was only five when I first tried milking for myself and was very proud to just cover the bottom of the milk pail. I didn’t yet have the strong hands required to strip the udders of our big cows, but I would learn and later even become an expert.

I was also about five when I was taken to my first threshing on our neighbor Poppy Dent’s farm. A huge threshing machine, designed to separate heads of grain from wheat stalks by shaking them, sat in the middle of the barn floor. A John Deere tractor (it must have been what we called a one-lunger because it sounded as though it was gasping to breathe when it ran) was connected to the thresher by a long belt to provide power. The tractor started with a chatter-boom-chatter-boom, the belt shook the threshing machine alive, and the boards of the barn floor began to dance up and down with the shaking. The combination of all these sights, sounds, and feelings was too much for me. You guessed it: another pair of wet pants, but that was the last time I ever remember disgracing myself by having to change my trousers.

In a happier memory from around the same time, I remember Dad tried to make some wine. He prepared grape juice, bottled it, and set it in the back of the summer shanty to work. Several months later, Gene, a close friend of Dad’s, paid us a visit and he and Dad decided they should sample the wine. A bottle was brought out on the porch steps, a large dishpan was held under it while opening, and we stood around watching expectantly. As the cork was pulled, the bottle shot its contents everywhere. Dad and Gene tried to save some of the wine by aiming the bottle at the dishpan, but that just gave the wine a good surface to bounce on and it spread itself over an even wider area. As Dad and Gene tried to corral this witch’s brew, Mom, Gene’s wife Mary Ruth, and I just doubled up laughing. It felt really good to see that grown-ups could look as foolish as kids.

Dad was much better at butchering pigs than making wine, and his butchering was good eating. He was often asked to help others because of his recipes, but neither he nor I ever wrote them down. One of Dad’s close friends, Bobby George from Danville, PA, passed his recipes down to his sons who are still using Bobby’s recipes in George’s Butcher Shop, one of the very few remaining that actually does its own butchering. In the fall of 2012 I visited the shop to buy some scrapple – pon haus in the original Pennsylvania Dutch – a sort of semi-solid meatloaf made of pork scraps and liver, cornmeal or flour - wheat, rye, or buckwheat - and salt and pepper. Bobby was there and we had a chance to talk a bit. He had been in poor health the last few years but was still able to get out and watch his sons use the old skills he had passed down to them.

Meats are an important part of Pennsylvania farm culture. About 30ft from the back door of our farmhouse was an old, smoke-stained shack with hand cut shingles on the roof and all four sides. When it was in use, the air was filled with scents of cherry, maple, apple, hickory, and sassafras - perhaps mixed with some aspen wood just barely smoldering in the burn pit of the smoke house’s dirt floor. I can smell it now in my mind and remember it was stronger in the summer when the sun heated the wood shingles. To this day, I love the smell and the taste of smoked meats.

My great-grandfather Thomas Snyder and his wife Alice had purchased our farm as a gift for their granddaughter, Helen Phyllis Snyder, my mother. Of course, her new husband, Raymond Adam Fetterolf, and I, their new and first great grandson, were allowed to live there, too; but it seems that when Great-Grandpa Snyder began telling Dad how and what to do, Dad soon told him what to do with the farm. The only person happy about all this was Mom’s sister, my Aunt Rosemary. She just recently told me she had over-heard the argument and spoke up to tell Great-Grandpa, We’ll take it if they don’t want it. Take it they did, and she and her husband Jim Dent lived there until Jim died and Aunt Rosemary moved into assisted care in 2012.

I actually remember several things about my great- grandparents even though I was very young when they were most active in my life. I especially recall that each Sunday after church at the First English Baptist Church on Third Street in Bloomsburg, PA, Great-Grandpa Tommy would stand at the backdoor waiting for the kids to come out. Before church, he had stopped at Snyder’s Esso, the store he owned in the same town, and filled his pockets with mints - pink on the right, white on the left. Passing out these candies must have been a joy for both him and the kids because everyone looked forward to it. I think Edwin J. Radcliffe was the pastor then.

My great-grandparents’ store was a gas station/delicatessen on Market Street. It was one of the first places in town with a hydraulic lift, which was outside next to a pump house that enclosed the machinery to operate it. I remember the store sold General Tires as well as service for all sorts of cars and trucks. In the back of the store was a small lunch counter where Great-Grandma Alice used her baking and cooking skills to feed not only local citizens but also hobos following the near-by railroad tracks. My grandfather, Herman Snyder, claimed his mother was always an easy touch for the homeless. I have heard many stories about her pies, her generosity, and her sweet nature; but when my great-grandparents didn’t agree with each other, they switched from English to Pennsylvania Dutch and, according to Mom, included words not intended for children.

I remember hearing, too, about the time my Uncle Jim Dent, Aunt Rosemary’s husband, was helping out a bit at the station when a customer pulled up for gasoline. Uncle Jim didn’t usually work there and picked up the hose to the kerosene instead of the gasoline pump. As the customer left the station, his car belched huge clouds of black smoke so he was naturally furious; but everyone hurried to pump out the tank and refill it with gasoline – a much easier task than it would be today! The driver was pacified and all was well, except Uncle Jim got teased about the incident for the rest of his life, which is why I know and remember this story.

Chapter Two: I move to town

After the disagreement between my great-grandfather and Dad, we moved to a two-family duplex on Penn Street in Bloomsburg. Mr. Patterson, the principal of the local high school, and his family lived in the other half of our house. Across the alley behind us, a family raised pigeons for flying; I believe their name was Shuman but I remember the pigeons better than the people. A short walk down this alley led me to Mr. Harley’s barbershop. I remember him because when he died he left over a million dollars for building a new church. The Stokers (Mr. Stoker was a director at the Bloomsburg Hospital) lived across the street. Their son had a large, electric train set up in his attic, and occasionally I was allowed to go over and play at being an engineer. But most of the time I played in our back yard, which had a short stone fence where I made and dried mud pies with my sister, Miriam (Mimi or Mim, for short), who had been born while we were still on the farm. Along with a small patch of grass, we planted a few tomatoes, some lettuce, and radishes. A short distance away was a mom and pop store that sold bread, milk, and candy. To me, these were the most important details of our new home.

While we lived there, Mimi and I attended Ben Franklin Training School at the local college, which was then called Bloomsburg State Teachers College and today, many times its original size, has become Bloomsburg University. Our education was considered better than good since Ben Franklin was a practice training school for teachers, some of whom I still remember: Mrs. Woolworth, Mrs. Baker, Mrs. Scott, Mr. Gasser, and Miss Barnes, who gave me a love for languages by teaching us Spanish language, customs, and foods. I especially remember that going to Ben Franklin allowed us to use the (huge, to us) college swimming pool, which was a great treat and much looked forward to.

Each spring, tall May Poles were set up on the stepped terraces of the campus lawn, and all the Ben Franklin students and college undergraduates wove in and out around them with colorful streamers while music played and our parents beamed proudly. These May Day celebrations were typical of the many beloved European customs brought to Pennsylvania