My Journey: From Horses and Iceboxes to Areoplanes and Refrigeration

By Edward Gehweiler

My Journey: from Horses and Iceboxes to Aero Planes and Refrigeration is the story of one man life. Edward Gehweiler tells stories of about his small town childhood in the early 1900s and the business that was owned and run by his extended family. He recounts the unexpected life that military service brought to everyday people during World War II. He chronicles his move back home and the struggle to find employment as the armed forces released an army into civilian life.
He tells stories about his work experiences, his friendships, and raising a family. In his own words, Edward tells of his journey through the twentieth century.

Edward

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 24, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453559246

Book preview

Copyright © 2010 by Edward Gehweiler.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2010912114

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4535-5923-9

ISBN:   Softcover   978-1-4535-5922-2

ISBN:   Ebook   978-1-4535-5924-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Foreword

A Brief Overview of the Author

The House at 317 East Grand Avenue

The Hill behind Our House

Our Dogs

Circuses

Beauty

Runaway

Sleigh Rides

A Brief History of the Gehweiler Family

Description of a Sand Wagon

Description of the Scrapers

Description of the Wheelers

My Memories of the Company

The Northern Wisconsin District State Fair

Military Service

Chanute Field

Classification

Preflight

Primary Flight

Basic Cadet

Advanced Flight

Randolph Field

Bryan Field Instrument Flight School

Minter Field Basic Flight Instructor

Bryan Instrument Flight Instructor

From Barksdale to Germany

Germany

Chippewa Falls

Milwaukee

Raising Children

Foreword

I related some of my experiences when I was a youngster in the horse and ice wagon to a group of my friends. After I did so several times, a couple of them said I should record them or it would all be lost.

I knew I didn’t have the talent for this type of writing, so I contacted three authors (two magazine article writers and a documentary book author). One was too busy at the time; one considered it too local interest; one had no interest. That is why my daughter and I collaborated on writing this book. I also realized my sketching skills are not what they used to be. I hope they are understandable, however, and add some vision to the text. The script may also lack continuity for which I apologize. I’m just running out of time to correct this. Please excuse any mistakes that you may find in the book.

Every one who reads this book will find some passages uninteresting, too technical or mechanical, but bear with me, please. It explains the man. After I got started, I got carried away and turned it into some kind of autobiography. However, if I hadn’t done so the book would have been quite small.

If this book turns out to be a kind of autobiography, I do not intend to be boastful, but at the time I thought that the accomplishments I made at the Brady Company were interesting or unique. They were to me.

A Brief Overview of the Author

He had a well-rounded education starting with grade school at Island Street School in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, where he had very good teachers in the first four grades—the three Rs. He got good marks including a hundred in conduct. Fifth and sixth grades were at Chestnut Grade School. Seventh to ninth grades, at what was called junior high, were at West Grand Avenue. In junior high he was introduced to science, chemistry, and shop (woodworking), all with very good dedicated teachers.

Chippewa Falls High School was an architectural beauty built of stone in a perfect setting. It was on a hill with huge stairways both inside and outside (one of the outside stairways is still there) and wide halls. There he received advanced woodworking, machine shop drafting, bookkeeping, civics, history, chemistry, English, and mathematics (algebra and geometry), and graduated in 1934. Graduating from high school in those days was considered the same as graduating from college today.

He was exposed to textiles operating a spinning machine at the Chippewa Woolen Mill, plumbing as a plumber’s helper at local plumbing shops, and machine shop and foundry work at Northwestern Motor Company.

He entered the service in the Regular Army as a private in the Air Corps, attended airplane mechanics school at Chanute Field, was retained as an instructor in the engines phase, applied for aviation cadet flight training, and passed the physical and two-year college equivalency test. He graduated with the class of 43G, a pilot, and was appointed as second lieutenant commissioned officer and gentleman by act of Congress signed by FDR.

He completed flight instructor school at Randolph Field, Texas, and instrument flight school at Bryan Field, Texas. He taught aviation cadets in the basic flight phase at Minter Field, California. He was called back to the instrument flight school at Bryan Field, Texas, where he instructed officer pilots in instrument flight. He was sent to Germany and attached to the Third Army flying the mail and PIP, personnel in the American zone.

Separated from the service as a captain in the Air Force Reserve, he taught flying and ground school. After short stints at a toy factory and plumbing shop, he joined W. H. Brady, where he worked for thirty-four years and retired at the age of seventy. He is aged ninety-two years and ten months at this writing.

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The House at 317 East Grand Avenue

The location where our house was built, which incidentally, was completed the year I was born, 1916, was 317 East Grand Avenue. At that time, the Gehweiler Teaming Contracting Company was selling sand and gravel, black dirt, and doing any kind of hauling that they could do with the horses and wagons. They had dray wagons and sand wagons.

The Gehweiler’s had hauled sand out of the bank where the house is now. The whole bank was of very good quality sand, and they used to make mortar and concrete with it. They were still hauling sand away from those banks, along behind our house, after we moved into it. The wagons would go behind our house and out past the east side of where the house is now. Of course, there was no garage back there then because they were still hauling sand out of there. I think that whole corner had been removed by the Gehweiler’s for selling sand.

The wagons used to leave ruts along behind our house, where they were loading the sand, and then to the east of our house, out to Grand Avenue and down the hill. When I was small, I used to have quite a struggle trying to cross those ruts. We would bum a ride from whoever was driving the horses. He would put us up on the seat with him and give us a ride out to Grand Avenue and let us out when we got to the foot of the hill. He would let us off the wagon and we would go back home.

Our house was one of first modern houses in Chippewa Falls. It was a modern house because it had a concealed electrical wiring, which consisted of a single lightbulb in the center of each room and a switch on the wall near the door. The dining room had a chandelier over the table. There were no outlets at the time. The plumbing was also concealed to a great extent. We had hot and cold running water. We had a bathtub in the bathroom on the second floor. It was a fairly large bathroom with a closet off to the side. The bathroom and closet were located at the top of the stairs. The hot water was supplied by a gas fired, side-arm water heater with water pipes running into the coal and wood fired part of the stove. The hot water tank stood to the left of the stove in the kitchen. If you wanted hot water and you weren’t using the stove, you lit the side-arm heater. The stove also had warming ovens on top and gas burners above the oven. We had central heating, a wood and/or coal-fired furnace in the basement.

There were three bedrooms upstairs. My mother and father had a closet in their bedroom. It was put in as an afterthought. They enclosed the area over the staircase to make the closet. The bedrooms each had a single lightbulb and a switch at the left side of the door, and the one at southwest bedroom also had a closet. When we were older, my brother, Bob, built a wardrobe, consisting of one oblong door at one side and drawers on the other side to store his clothing. I purchased one to store my own clothes.

There were no cupboards in the kitchen. The kitchen sink was on the east wall, and consisted of about a two-and-a-half-foot long basin and a splash panel on the back that went up the wall about a foot. We had a kitchen cabinet that had drawers in the bottom and top. About thirty-two inches off the floor, there was a counter area, and above that there was a space until you got to doors that opened up to shelves. There were two or three shelves, and to the left of that there was what they called a flour bin. It was made of tin and had a spout coming out of the bottom of it that was three or four inches square and about four inches high. The spout came down from the bottom of the bin and had a crank and a sifter. You put your bowl underneath the spout and turned the crank to sift the flour as it came out of there into the bowl. We didn’t get built-in cupboards until the 1930s, and we put a sink in the built-in cupboards on the south wall of the kitchen where you could look out on the backyard over the sink. We had a full-width front and back porch. The back porch was screened in.

There was a swinging door from the kitchen to the dining room and a staircase going upstairs on the east side of the dining room above the basement stairs. There was an arch with two six-inch square pillars between the dining room and the living room, one on each side. There was a room on the southwest corner of the house. I don’t know what you would call that room. It was used for a bedroom for a while when my grandfather was laid up and lived with us. He only stayed with us for about a year, though.

Later on, my father had the hot water tank moved into the basement alongside of the furnace, and they had a water jacket in the firebox of the furnace. He also had an electrician put outlets around the house in strategic places so we could put floor lamps and table lamps in various places around the rooms and in the kitchen. In the kitchen, the outlets were mostly for electric appliances.

The Hill behind Our House

When we were kids, we used to play on the sandhills behind the house. The whole hill was a sandbank, and we used to take running jumps down into the sand and, of course, it was a soft landing. We used to put up a springboard. We would dig a hole into the sand and put the springboard into the hole. It never worked very well. Over the years the sandhill grew up grass. The fire chief lived in the big house at the top of the hill behind our house. He and our dad used to get together, and they would burn the dry grass deliberately so that it wouldn’t burn accidentally when no one was around. The fire chief would bring in the fire trucks, some at the top of the hill and some of them down at our house. Then they would set a fire at the bottom of the hill and it would burn right up the hill. Over the years that gradually grew up into brush. Now, there is no sign of the sand underneath.

Sometime, about 1920, there was a water main that broke up at the corner of the embankment. We have a photograph of the piece of water main that’s broken, and it’s sticking out of the ground. It washed down the sand and it raised the grade of our lot about a foot, so the basement windows, which used to be above grade, were then down below it.

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The earliest recollection that I am able to describe is an illness that I had. I think that I pulled a table over on top of me. The people across the street were having some kind of gathering and had tables set out in the yard. I pulled one of the tables over on my chest and was laid up for a while. I can remember being at the foot of the stairs in the dining room by the big bay window. They put a crib, or little baby bed, up near the window, so I could look outside. They moved the bed out onto the porch at one time, just outside of the same window. This illness must have taken place about 1919 or 1920. I know that I was preschool.

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I’m going to try to describe what it was like to be a little boy in the 1920s. From what I can remember, we had pretty much the run of the east side of Chippewa Falls, as well as parts of Stanley Hill. We did not go over to the south side very much, but we roamed all over the east side. Much of the time, in the summer, we would go barefoot. The sandbanks behind our house were loaded with lots of sandburs and, sometimes, we would be picking up some of them on our feet, which didn’t feel very good. We went down to the river to the area we called the sawdust pile. It was a pile of shavings from the local sawmill. They had a planning mill there, and it blew a tremendously big pile of shavings. In order to get there, we had to cross the flats, the area between the railroad, and what was referred to as the Summit Spur, and the river. There were no buildings in that area until they built the Chippewa Falls’ dam and powerhouse. The river was lined on both sides with piers. These were bunkers, about ten—or twelve-feet square, built with logs and filled with boulders. Evidently, that was used to separate the logs that were supposed to continue down the river from the ones that were supposed to go to the local sawmills. The largest sawmill in the world was located on the Chippewa River, approximately where the powerhouse is now.

We would cross the flats. They were grown up with tall grass about eighteen—to twenty-inches tall and spotted with air-drying lumber that was stacked in piles to dry. The piles were about twelve-feet square and ten-feet high, or a little bit less, because the stacks that were left were the edgings that were sawed off the logs before they got to the good lumber, so they were not very good for construction. We would go past the tobacco warehouse and across the railroad tracks and onto the flats. We had paths going across the flats. We’d go running through these trails.

Once in a while, someone would take hands full of grass from each side of the path and they’d tie it together across the path, so anyone running through that winding path, who didn’t spot it, would stumble over it.

There was a road that went from the plank hill, which was the hill going up into the city. That road went all the way to the pump house. When we were first going down there, the dam had not been built, so we could swim down in the river. The beach was not more than ten—or twelve-feet wide, and we could go out about ten or twelve feet before we got over our heads. A lot of the boys jumped or dived off the railroad bridge between the shore and the first pier. The telephone wires or power lines were fastened to wood cross arms on the upriver side of the railroad bridge, and I saw Howie Wall standing in the super structure above those wires for the longest time. Then, he leaned forward, and sprung himself over those wires. He was horizontal as he went down. Just before the water, he bent head first into the water. Most of the swimmers jumped off the bridge, and they didn’t dive. None of the boys wore swimming suits, and we didn’t wear swimming suits out by the oaks near the sawdust pile.

When I was about 10 or 12 years old, the National Guard was staying in the Dutch Hall on the corner of Columbia Street and Prairie Street about two and a half blocks from our home. I was in the area when a couple of soldiers rode up with a wagon and a team of horses. One of them asked me if I could hold the horses for a few minutes. Of course, I said, Sure, and took up a position between the horses’ heads with one hand on the reins of each horse close to the bits. My hands were above my head. National Guard horses were not shod. At my age we all went barefoot in summer. After about five minutes, the horse on my right stepped on my left foot. It hurt quite a bit, but no real damage. I tried to back him off my foot, but he only turned his head, pulling my hand to the end of my reach. As I kept trying to back him off my foot, the horse on my left stepped on my right foot. Now, I was trying to back up two horses, but my arms were over my head and not long enough. After a few more minutes, both horses got off of my feet. All I got from the soldiers was a thank you.

A few weeks later, I was in the area