The Ramblings of a Merry Heart: Book One: Life and Love

By Harold William Marihart

Although his earliest days were spent in a town, author Harold William Marihart had the dream of one day becoming a farmer. From very young age, he enjoyed helping his grandparents and others with the chores on their farms. In The Ramblings of a Merry Heart, Marihart narrates these and many other stories from his eighty years.

In this memoir, he shares some of the highlights of his lifehis birth in small-town Minnesota in 1931, being raised as an only child, attending school, helping with farm chores, earning money as a produce salesman at age seven, buying his first car, becoming a sailor, meeting his wife, navigating parenthood, and realizing his dream of owning a ranch.

Including photos, The Ramblings of a Merry Heart includes descriptions of true events and anecdotes from Mariharts long life. It is eighty years of love and laughter bound into one book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475997187

Harold William Marihart

Harold William Marihart grew up in rural Minnesota, where he had many adventures as an only child. He has always been a storyteller and at eighty years old he decided to put his stories into this, his first book. He still lives in Minnesota today.

Book preview

The

RAMBLINGS

of a

MERRY HEART

Book One: Life and Love

Harold William Marihart

iUniverse LLC

Bloomington

Book One: Life and Love

Copyright © 2013 Harold William Marihart.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4759-9717-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-9719-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-9718-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013911640

iUniverse rev. date: 7/2/2013

Contents

Acknowledgments:

Harold

Tiger Lilies

The Farm

School

One Farm

Farm Two

Trucking

The Farm Boy Harold

A Fire

A Hot Mass

A Wet Boy

4-H

Pigs

Beans

Chickens

Fishing

Big Boy Dreamer

The Honey Bunny

Back Home

Sea Legs

A Midshipmen Cruise

Near Blind Drunk

Cousins

My Ending as a Sailor

Start of My Dream

Pasture

A Little Bit More

Dairy and More

Acknowledgments:

To my loving wife, Irene, of 60 years, thank you for your understanding and patience as I sit at my computer and type away…morning, noon and even in the middle of the night. Thanks for listening to my ramblings as I put my thoughts together.

To my children and grandchildren who listened over the phone or in person to my memories and helped tweak a thought or two-thanks!

To Dylan for helping an old guy put it all together to make sense. Thank you.

To all of those people who I may have forgotten or who I have not met yet. Thank you.

Harold

I, HAROLD WILLIAM MARIHART, WAS born in Bruno, Minnesota on the eleventh day of April, nineteen thirty-one at about five-thirty in the morning.

The doctor was with my mother, Clara, all night. I was not in a hurry to come into a rough world. The doctor knew my mom and dad, Clara and Bill, liked playing cards, after checking Mom over, and since I was holding off my entry into the world, they played cards while they waited.

A twitch, a check over, then they played more cards, I was in no hurry to be born into this world. Another twitch, and another check over and still I was not ready to be born, so they played more cards. Then at five-thirty a.m. I decided that enough was enough and I arrived. Crying of course as all babies cry. Why not cry. It’s a rough world out there. I am sure my love of playing cards came from my mom waiting for me and playing cards with the doctor and dad.

The Doctor then went over to see my Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Vic, who lived in the same town, Bruno, to help my cousin Kenneth with his coming into the world. He was a so-called twin cousin, and we grew up, like Twins.

I was two hours older and I always let my cousin know it. Of course, now he calls me the old man and he is the young one. I cannot say that he is wrong, this is his way of getting even with me for all my teasing.

Once I was in the world, I lived for a year with my Mom and Dad in their apartment, over the feed store, on the main street of Bruno.

During my first winter, Mom kept me, when I was up and out of bed, in a large, open cardboard box, on the table. She had to do this, the floor was cold, the rest of the apartment too. While I grew, I learned to stand, and fall on a regular basis. One day, I was finally able to stand up on my own. Still a little unstable, I leaned on the side of the cardboard box. The entire box, me included, fell to the floor. The box was on top and covered me completely.

Mom rushed over, picked up the box, expecting to see the worst. However, there I sat, smiling, thinking it was fun to fall over like that.

The next winter we were living in a warm house. My grandma and grandpa’s house, my mother, had gotten sick with tuberculosis and was in a special hospital called a sanatorium, for the treatment of tuberculosis. We were hopeful that she was going to get well, and she did. However, it was about a year before she was well enough to come home.

Dad and I lived with his mother and father, (grandma and grandpa, to me), so that grandma could take care of me while Dad was working. He had three jobs. Working, many hours a day, sometimes night’s too. Grandma, being hard of hearing, could not hear me cry at night, when I needed to go to the bathroom. since there was nobody to take me to the bathroom, I started wetting the bed again and continued wetting the bed for years.

When mom came home, we rented a house and moved next door to grandma’s and grandpa’s for a couple of years. A little while later, mom and dad bought the house next door to the house in which we were renting, which just so happened to be two houses over from grandpa’s house. In fact, we were so close that we shared the same well. Mom and Dad immediately raised their house and put a basement under it. A new roof went on too. While they were doing the work, I was playing with a toy tractor by the new basement entrance and was told to get away from where the new stairway went down into the new basement. I then went to the other side of the house, cleared away a spot on the driveway, where shingles from the house had fallen (and were still falling during the roofing process) and continued to play with my toy tractor. Not paying attention, I sat down onto a recently fallen shingle. (Did I mention that the nails were still in it, pointing up?) Ouch! after that incident, and numerous tears, I could not play around the work site until the house was completed. You can guess why.

The next couple of years were quiet. I spent my time growing up and helping my Mom, she had to take it easy. She could not do any heavy work around the house and yard. I helped her to clean and polish furniture, helped her with the laundry, iron and fold the clothes and put them away neatly in the dressers. I would also run to the store whenever mom needed something and would do whatever else mom needed help with. I also kept the ten-gallon water crock full of drinking water by carrying drinking water, by pail, from the outside pump. The pump was located by grandpa’s house, and I could only carry one-half pail. It took a long time, and effort, to keep the crock full.

Mom, because of her illness, had to take it easy, and could not do any hard work. The doctor told her not to have any more children. Therefore, I grew up an only child, but not alone. A local high school girl named, Shirley, moved in with us so that she could go to school. She helped mom take care of me and do all the chores that mom could not do because of the work restrictions and that I could not do because of my young age. She worked before and after school and she was just like my big sister, a member of the family. One exception though, she was paid spending money for the work that she did. I was not, my pay was an allowance.

The reason that Shirley stayed with us was two-fold. Not only to help my mother, but there was no other way for her to get to school. There were no bus routes that ran in the winter, once it snowed, the road was closed or you shoveled yourself through, a few horses and sleighs went out on those roads when people had to get out, going to a doctor, getting supplies that had run out, or when some people got cabin fever and just had to get out of the house.

The mail carrier, using a horse and sleigh, delivered the mail the best he could in the winter. He used a horse and carriage in the summer before he was able to purchase a motorized car. He had to use skis on the front wheels and tracks on the back wheels of the car in the winter. Either way, the mail went through.

Now, the important phase of my life was to start. I was heading off to school. The year was 1936. I was still having a bed-wetting problem and my mom wanted me to stop wetting the bed before I started school. Therefore, a few weeks before Christmas, 1935, mom and dad, along with my uncles, started telling me, that if I did not stop wetting the bed, Santa Clause would bring me sticks and stones for Christmas. Being young and full of optimism, I would not believe that. Much to my surprise, at Christmas that year, Santa Clause gave me a HUGE bag. When I opened it and looked in, I started crying and immediately closed the bag. grandma, Alice who was there for the Christmas festivities, wondered what was going on. I would not tell her, it was the biggest pile of sticks and stones you could get in a bag. When she did find out what was in the bag, grandma was very mad. Who did that? Who did that? the best part about it was, that it worked. I stopped wetting the bed and never wet it again. Even with that big bag of sticks and stones, I had the best Christmas ever. My family made up for the sticks and stones in other ways, they must have had a guilty feeling.

My birthday came in April and I started making plans for school in the fall. After a fun filled summer, which included a trip to Indiana with my Dad, where he picked up a new bus body for the school bus. It was a great trip. We went down in a car with the school superintendent. He was going down there to visit family and we rode with him. Going south it was very hot. Once we got there, I think that I lived in a cold tub of water. We had to spend a week there, our bus was not ready to go. The good news was, that it was all at the expense of the bus company. I was able to drink cold chocolate milk for the first time and ‘boy was it good‘! I could not get enough of it!

We eventually returned back home and got ready for school to start in few weeks. Dad got a big job, in his dray business, which meant he was to haul a lot of sand for some construction cement work. On the days that mom went to the doctor to get a check up on her tuberculosis, I went with dad and helped him shovel sand, that was how it was moved, all by hand labor. As best, I could anyway. This was my dad’s way of baby-sitting me. My pay for the work was that the last load of sand went into my own, personal sand pile at home. needless to say, it was the biggest sand pile in town. I helped Dad a lot.

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Tiger Lilies

THIS DAY, ANOTHER TRIP TO the doctor for mom and then, some needed shopping for groceries, Mom had me stay with grandma Marihart. She lived close, the next house over from our