My Younger Years

By Jan Griffith, Sr

This book is the has been 20 some years in the making because it covers 20 years of my childhood as well as teenage years up until I enlisted in the Army Ohio National Guard in Blanchester, Ohio. I'm sure there are many stories I have not remembered. I've enjoyed recalling these stories while putting them in print for future generations to read; I hope readers and researchers will find this book a good read as well as helpful to their studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jan Griffith, Sr
• Release date: Oct 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463009277

Jan Griffith, Sr

I am 69 years of age and I started putting my life history in print maybe 20 years ago on an 8088 computer and then i got away from it for a long time and about a year ago I learned of Smashwords.com from my granddaughters pen pal and it rekindled my need to finish my books and then I found a few more areas to write the history of and that brought me to publish my first book.I am married with two children and 9 grand children and am a retired Parts person and trying to enjoy life without having to be at a place of work everyday. My wife and I have been raising a large garden and selling some of our crops in our front yard.I have in the neighborhood of dozen books yet to be finished and published to Smashwords specs, I know I will enjoy finishing those books too! jansr..

Book preview

MY YOUNGER YEARS.

Smashwords Edition

Jan Griffith Sr.

Copyright 2018 by Jan Griffith Sr.

Thank you for downloading this e-book. This book remains the copyrighted property of Jan L. Griffith Sr. and may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed for any use commercial or non-commercial use without the permission of the author. Quotes used in reviews are the exception. No alterations of contents allowed. If you enjoy this book then encourage your friends to download their own copy of this book.

Your support and respect for the property of this author is appreciated.

Thank you for purchasing my book and I hope you enjoy reading this book. This book is for general reading.

Thank you for purchasing my book and I hope you enjoy reading this book.

I want to send many thanks to my second cousin Tonya for her careful proof reading and editing of this e-book.

In this book I will try to recap and tell the stories and events of my childhood and that being from the earliest time that I can remember up to my becoming an adult.

The purpose for writing this book is to provide my relatives in the future a little history of my life and the lives of others that my life has touched. Hopefully it will bring some reading entertainment to many and some history records to others. The information is this book will be as accurate as I can recall. It will however be a labor of love putting all this information in type on my computer.

The names in this book are real people in true stories.

Thanks to everyone that have touched my life over the 20+ years of my childhood. It has been what you might say a normal life in an average boys childhood. These stories are of a boy getting into the everyday adventures of growing up in the rural community of Farmers Station, Ohio.

They are not in 100% order as they may have happened, but close as I can recall.

Chapter one;

I was born on April 18, 1949 in Columbus, Ohio at the White Christ Hospital Columbus, Ohio. I was lucky enough to spend all of my childhood living in the same house in Farmers Station, Clinton County, Ohio and now live on home ground just south of the old home place in a house my wife, dad and I built from a Miles Homes package in 1978. I know there are a lot of children that never had the luxury of growing up in the same house; again I never had the opportunity of moving all over the country and seeing many different places and making a lot of new friends.

I want to say that I can remember back to the 1950 Thanksgiving blizzard; they tell me that was not possible; that instead I may be remembering stories told of that time. I remember standing on the bottom step of our stairway to our up stair bedrooms where I watching out the window as my older brothers and my dad were shoveling snow out the driveway so he could get the car out to go to the store. They were shoveling two paths up the drive way and I’m sure it was the blizzard of 1950 that I remember them shoveling snow. I do remember years later my mother telling about dad being scheduled to work on that Thanksgiving Day, the snow storm which they called it an extra-tropical cyclone storm that turned into a blizzard when it got to Ohio. It blanketed Ohio with from 10 to 12 of snow; with winds gusting up to 45 mph that blew up 25’ snow drifts. The storm hit Ohio overnight and when my Dad got up to go to work at 5:30 a.m. he opened the front door and he couldn’t see over the snow drift that had drifted on the front porch and my dad was 6 feet tall, he closed the door and went back to bed. So you see I don’t remember if it was this snow storm I remember them shoveling snow or another one in the next year or two. I was told they made tunnels in the snow drifts due to them being so deep, but I don’t remember that. I do remember that I had to stand on the step of the stairway going to the upstairs bedrooms to be able to see out of the bedroom window, with this I say I had to be pretty young boy because the window was only a couple feet off the floor.

My mother told me of the story of having to purchase snow chains to get home from Wilmington Thanksgiving Eve and the snow storm had already started. She said the roads were drifting shut as she was heading home, I find this hard to believe but she said she had to drive around the small bridges because they were snowed shut and that meant going down and across the creek. Today there’s no way you could go around a bridge and get across a creek with a car in a snow storm or the summer as far as that goes. My mother claimed to be the last automobile thru route 28 that evening of the blizzard.

It seems that we got a lot more snowfall in the winters of the 50s and 60s then we do presently or I was awful small and it just seemed like a lot of snowfall. I definitely remember seeing roads drift closed from blowing snow in the late 50’s. It seemed like every February was the worst month for snow and blowing snow; once February was over then it was warmer better weather.

Butch a childhood friend of my older brothers from Dayton came down one winter day driving a 57 ford convertible and he thought it would bust thru any snow drift no matter how deep, but he never figured depth and length in his thinking that he could drive thru the snow drifts on Laymon Rd from St. Rte. 28 down under the railroad bridge south to Rapid Forge Road. To make long story short he didn’t make it, and I tell about this story in more detail later on in this book. I know this was in the late 50s or early 60s due to the fact he owned a 57 ford; I wasn’t old enough to have driver’s license so that put this event before 1965.

My mother never talked much about her relatives, she did however tell us that her dad was a boot lagger in Catlettsburg, KY and one of her grandfather’s was a river boat captain; I have since discovered it was Grandpa Preston that was the river boat captain; but she never told us his last name. The only thing she told us about her mother was that she died when my mom was only 9 years old and she never went back to her mother’s grave site after she buried her mother. My mother was not very giving when it came to information about her side of the family. My wife and I have since visited my Grand mother’s grave site in Ironton, Ohio.

Mother told of her Aunt chasing boys back across the Ohio River at the mouth of the Big Sandy River; it seems that boys didnt have a stitch of clothing on.

Mother claimed to be a badass child growing up in Kentucky hate to see what she did to those Columbus, Ohio kids when she went to live there at 10 years old.

This was a few of