In One Era … and out the Other

By Bob Campbell

The Campbell family is a very wealthy family of transplanted Scotsmen and womenfolk. But they had no money! They had each other, their love of life, a big garden, a car that started most of the time, one hog, one old terrier dog, and plenty of blackberries, raspberries, and gooseberriesback in the timber.Dad would often announce at the supper table, One of these days, were going to have to get some money to go along with our wealth.Their odyssey concludes in the twenty-first century, following various degrees of financial and social success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
• Release date: Mar 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781489701541

Bob Campbell

Bob Campbell’s life has been filled with a passion for words. He is a grandfather and retired craftsman from the world of construction. Fortunately, he married a schoolteacher from Peoria, Illinois, some sixty-two years ago, and the rest is the history of his love for the written word.

Book preview

Contents

Introduction

Era #1

Chapter 1. The Backward Child

Chapter 2. Farms, Farmers & Farming

Chapter 3. Grandma's, Grandpa's, and Such

Chapter 4. Father's Day

Chapter 5. The Crabapples

Chapter 6. Beulah's Chickens vs the Studebaker

Chapter 7. Tuffy Hall

Chapter 8. The Old 1924 Dodge

Chapter 9. Make Do, Hand-Me-Downs, Turn Under, and Make It Last

Chapter 10. My Dad…Your Great Grandad

Chapter 11. Movin’, Movin’, Movin’…

Era #2

The Lamb

Buck

Run For Your Life

A Wee Cottage

Your Son, My Son

Introduction

Teenagers, young adults and the middle aged, who enjoy good health, think they will live forever. The teen-age boy or girl is especially prone to this belief — hence the reckless and carefree use of automobiles, fashions, money, and a host of other things and stuff. This is not bad. We were all there once. Seventy-five miles per hour, on old tires is not fast to the teen. It’s the pole position at the Daytona 500-mile auto race, to a person 65 or 70 years on this planet.

But — if you are one of the lucky ones who make it to the half-century mark, you know you are mortal. At age 50 you are on the other side of the mountain and it’s all down hill from there on in. With luck and a heckuva good gene pool you’ll get 25 to 35 years on the downhill slope. Your first positive proof of mortality (and the downhill slope) is when a learned gentleman, wearing a white lab coat says, the gall bladder has to come out — in a week or so after we clear up the pancreaitis and other infection. All of your life thus far you’ve been acquiring body parts or appertences. Now it is, take away time.

Remember the baby teeth and the Tooth Fairy? Second teeth were prized and wisdom teeth were usually despised. They came in or grew sideways or arrived with the cavities already in ‘em. But even more prized than second teeth (for boys, at least) was the first emergence of pubic hair. Oh! Wow! What a day!!!! You could hardly wait for summer, while swimming in the creek, or fall when showering after lightweight or heavy weight basketball practice. Here was your chance to show your known world of pals and buddies you were headed straight for manhood and/or fatherhood. Little did we know in our pubescent years that the fuzzy, furry patch was to be completely and totally removed several times in the downward journey on the other side of the mountain. It has always been thus.

Five decades, more-or-less, are spent acquiring. Of course, the last acquisitions are not always welcome and almost never prized. … Like liver spots on the hands or face or varicose veins, double chins, pot bellies, bunions, corns and baldness or thinning of the hair on the head. This common malady is equally traumatic for man or woman. But, the good Lord, in all his infinite wisdom, compensates the human male by having hair grow out of his nose or ears while it quietly falls from his head and legs. I hope I live to see barbers specialize in nose and ear hair. It is very demeaning to have to ask your wife to barber your ears. She comes at you with a bright desk lamp, a magnifying glass, a handful of Q-tips and her button hole scissors — that haven’t been sharpened since she bought ‘em at Woolworth’s before the children were born. You swallow hard and offer up a sentence prayer because you know she’ll be fighting her bifocals every snip of the way.

Take away time goes on for 25 years — more if you’re lucky — until you are relegated to giving up moles, cysts, polyps, and various other lumps, bumps or benign pieces of the body beautiful.

Then it hits you; I am indeed mortal and one of these days I’m going to die. This simple truism darts in and out of your mind for a week or so. Then one day, while perusing the local paper, for the second time, your bifocals catch a small article by some social scientist in an Ivy League university. She is urging we older folk to tell our grand children of our life with its everyday events and milestones. The sociologist knows full well our own children are much too busy paying bills, sending kids to college and paying for car insurance, to give a hoot about mom or dads childhood years.

The wannabe professor or social scientist is probably feeding us a few pages from her doctoral thesis and goes to great length to convince us of the fabric of social importance to our grandchildren. Get a tape recorder, get a video camera, or as a last resort grab a #2 pencil, a lined tablet and just start writing, she admonished us.

— and so, by golly I did!

Era #1

The Backward Child

The rain had come down hard … all night long. It was a blustery, cold rain accompanied by strong gusts of wind. The wind drove rainwater under the kitchen door, puddling in a low spot by a window. The tired and faded linoleum had experienced this numerous times in the past ten or twelve years.

Dad was outside getting a bucket of coal for the cook stove and an armload of firewood, from the cob house, for the heating stove in the living room. He had already sent word to Dr. Packer, in town, by way of two neighbors … one of which had a telephone. Mom was in early labor and right on schedule. Mid-May, Dr. Packer had said, some seven-and-a-half month’s back. It was May 16, 1931 and nobody was concerned about May flowers. They only wondered if it was ever going to warm up and, when is this confounded rain ever going to stop?

In due course, Dr. Packer came chugging up a slight hill and into our seldom graveled driveway. Truthfully, our driveway wasn’t any worse than the township roads between town and us. The bottom has gone out, old timers would say. …’ happens every time after a hard winter and a late spring.

Doc Packer was surprisingly agile for his age as he alighted from his faithful black (there was no other color choice) Ford Model-T coupe. He had bought it new in 1927 when the Model-T gave way to the new, and totally different, Model-A Ford. The good doctor was quick to admit, I just can’t get-the-hang-of that ‘gol darn’ clutch and shifting lever (floor-mounted gearshift) on the A-Model. He never called his coupe a Model-T; it was always his T-Model. His beloved T-Model had three (3) pedals on the floor for forward and reverse motion. There was no disc clutch and no gearshift. It was light in weight and very nimble when steering. Because of its’ light weight and short coupe frame, it was not prone to getting mired down in the mud or rutted roads. The big, bulky and heavy Nash, Chrysler or Buick was helpless when the bottom went out. Not so the T-Model!

Doc was replete in dark suit, white shirt, tie, black hat, black coat, black bag of medicine and instruments…and black knee-high buckle up goulashes. The goulashes he politely removed and left on the porch before entering the kitchen. Dad brought them inside and placed them beside the cookstove, so’s to stay warm.

Dr. Packer went immediately to Mom and Dad’s bedroom, which was downstairs. The other bedroom was an unfinished upstairs area…no heat. Dad says Doc and Mom talked a long time…real soft and low like. This would be Mom’s third delivery with Dr. Packer’s assistance. She was just nineteen years of age.

At length Doc came out of the bedroom and announced, Bert, we’ve gotta have some hot water. You mean it’s time, Dad asked. No, I mean we need a cup of coffee, the usually serious doctor announced.

Dad had already perked a full, gray enameled, pot…and only poured one cup from it for his breakfast. It was probably Eight-O-Clock brand from the A&P Store. So Dad and Dr. Packer drank coffee and ate (or dunked) sorghum cookies while discussing, the damned rain, the damned depression, and this guy Franklin Roosevelt who had recently been re-elected as governor of New York State.

Shortly before noon I started my journey down the birth canal. This is usually a brief period of time … especially since I was Mom’s third time around…but things went wrong. Terribly wrong. Instead of a little round wet head appearing, it was a foot and lower half of a leg. A breech birth!!

Dr. Packer sensed a big problem as he called for Dad … while pushing and encouraging me to go back from whence I had come. Between the good Doctor, Dad, big funny looking forceps, and lots, and lots of clean rags, they turned me around inside of my Mom. After some length of time I delivered in as