Home Is Where the Heart Is Even in a Chicken House

By Margaret Hoff

God Bless America, My Home Sweet Home The Lord put on my heart to write Home Is Where the Heart Is Even in a Chicken House. It goes back to the day I was born and my childhood days growing up, days with my parents and living in a chicken house while my dad built a small three-room house for us to live in. Also, the book talks about me being bullied in school. I lived with my grandparents and my aunt on their farm in California for a while when I was a teenager. My aunt is one year and nine months older than me, and this also tells of the fun we had and the mischievous things that we did. This is telling the way things were growing up in my time, now called "the old-fashioned" days-houses, cars, games, and how kids made their own fun. I got married and had my own family, and time went on to be happy times. There were also heartaches that the Lord helped me through and healing, different places where the Lord intervened and spoke to me in many ways. I moved to Texas for eleven years and, later, on a ranch in South Dakota, then later, back to Ohio. I needed to support myself, and I started hauling Amish people, and I had different experiences with them. That was another fun time in my day. The best is yet to come! In the pages of this book, I think you will laugh, cry, and most of all, be blessed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098021771

Book preview

In the Beginning

Back in 1941, the Lord chose my mom and dad, Robert and Mildred Jackson, to be my parents. I was born on Mother’s Day, May 11, 1941, in Lodi, Ohio, a little country town in northern Ohio. The hospital bill for the ten-day stay was $60. That seems unreal. That was a lot of money back in those days. My parents took me home to where they lived on State Route 3, north of Wooster, in a little house that they called the Parker House. John Parker was the owner.

Mom, Dad, Margaret and Evelyn

Two years and five months later, my little sister was born. My parents named her Evelyn Marie. This made up our family.

Mom, Dad, and baby Margaret

About 1943, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president, World War II was still going on. There were hard times during the war. My dad was called Bob, and sometimes he was called Jack, short for Jackson. My dad worked in Wadsworth, Ohio, in a factory called The Injector. My dad was getting drafted into the service, but because the injector needed him to help build parts for the military, he didn’t have to go to the service.

My dad, in his spare time at home, liked to raise tomatoes and pickles, and then he would sell them for extra money. He had a few pigs too. Our little house had only one bedroom, but we used the dining room as a bedroom too. In the living room, there was a big register on the floor. It was about three by three. We would stand on it to get warm. The warm air would blow up through our dresses, and our dresses would puff up around us, and we would laugh. We didn’t wear long pants back in those days. The little kitchen had a hand pump at the sink, and that was how we got our water. Our toilet was outside in an outhouse, just a little way from the house. There was a well-worn path from the house to the outhouse. There was a porch that went clear across the front of the house. Evelyn and I would crawl under the porch and play in the dirt. My mom and dad only paid fifteen for rent. That was a high cost for rent for them back then. Now $15 seem like nothing to pay for rent. My goodness, how things have changed over the years!

We had a little box terrier dog named Tippy. We kept him in the house. We loved him so much and enjoyed playing with him. We had him for a few years before he died.

We only had one car. Most people back in those days only had one car. The mothers always stayed home to take care of the house and raise the kids.

Margaret and Evelyn in front of Parker House

Dad and Margaret

My dad would take the car to work. If we wanted to go to town, the Greyhound bus would go by our house. We would flag it down, and for a little change, we could ride the bus to town.

Our next door neighbors had a teenager that was just sixteen years old. One night, she tragically fell down the stairs all the way from the top, and it killed her instantly. I remember crying about it because it was so upsetting. Later that year, that neighbor’s house caught fire. My dad ran over to help until the fire department got there. My dad got one of the good dining room chairs to stand on to try to put out the fire. The missus yelled at him to get off of her good chair. The fire department arrived and put out the fire. I guess the chair was more important than the house to the missus because she seemed so ungrateful for my dad’s help.

My grandparents, Herman and Louise Harmon, lived in California on a farm. The farm was so nice. We didn’t get to see them very often. They would come and visit us every now and then. My grandma was handy at everything. There was an upstairs attic at the Parker House. The attic did not have any stairs to get to it. My grandma got some boards, hammer, and nails and got busy building steps. We had so much fun on those steps.

The Parker house is where I learned to ride a bicycle. My dad would run alongside of me down the driveway and over onto the grass. I soon caught on, and then it was fun.

One Christmas, Evelyn and I got the cutest little blue-stuffed couch. It had two blond-headed dolls with pretty dresses sitting on the couch. One doll was for me, and one was for Evelyn. That was my favorite childhood Christmas. The trees back then were decorated with strings of popcorn and colorful decorated bulbs.

The winters were long and cold. We always got a lot of snow. It was so bad one time that my dad had to walk home from work in Wadsworth because the cars could not get through on the roads. That was a twenty-mile walk in the snow. It was a bad snow storm. A couple of days later, in front of our house, a car went in the ditch. My dad went out to try to get the car out of the ditch. The man’s wife came in the house to get warm, while the husband and my dad worked on getting the car out of the ditch. The woman was feeling so bad and was crying because their baby had just died that week. My mom hugged her and cried with her. My mom talked to her about the Lord. She told her that her baby was in heaven and that she could see her baby again and told her about Jesus and heaven. We never heard from them again after they left. Hopefully, she gave her heart to the Lord.

We would go to Wooster, to the Foursquare Church, as often as we could. One service, this woman got up to sing. She was an opera singer. Evelyn and I sat straight up in the pew and started laughing. We never heard anything like that before. Mom tried her best to get us to stop laughing, but we couldn’t help it because it sounded so funny and different to our little ears. We embarrassed her so much.

I loved Sunday school. John Copus Sr. was my teacher. He gave me a Bible one year. He was a great teacher. When he couldn’t be there to teach the class, his son John Jr. would take his place. He was good too.

The little Parker House had a basement, and that is where my mom had a wringer washer. Mom would run the wet clothes through two rollers to wring out the water. My mom was washing clothes one day. Mom came upstairs while the clothes were washing. Evelyn decided to go down to the basement to help Mom do the laundry when Mom wasn’t down there. Evelyn crawled up on a chair and started putting clothes through the rollers, and the rollers grabbed her little fingers and kept taking her arm up through the rollers until it couldn’t go any further, and it was just gnawing at her arm. She started screaming. Mom started running to the sounds of her screams. She followed the screams to the basement where she found Evelyn’s arm caught up in the rollers. Mom hit the release button to open up the rollers. We all were crying so hard. We took Evelyn up toward Creston, a small town not far away, to Dr. Boar. Praise God nothing was broken, but her little arm underneath was smashed. The doctor wrapped her arm up with a bandage. She ended up getting an infection in her arm. Her arm bulged out because it was full of pus, and her arm turned black. Mom took her back to the doctor. The doctor had to try to get the pus out. He jabbed her arm to make an opening, and the pus flew out and hit the wall. Her arm eventually healed. She has a big scar under her arm but has no permanent damage. We are thankful to God that she didn’t lose her arm! God is so good!

One day, a door-to-door salesman came by our house, wanting to take pictures of us. He said that if Mom was interested in getting pictures taken, he could come back in a couple of hours to give Mom a chance to get me and Evelyn cleaned up and ready for the picture. Mom wanted him to come back for the pictures. Mom washed our hair and rolled it up in rags that were cut into strips so that when our hair was dry and the rags removed, our hair would have long up and down curls, spiral curls. Things were done differently back then.

Evelyn and Margaret

I also remember another guy coming to the door with a box of Clove Salve. He said that if we would sell twelve cans of salve, that we could pick a picture of Jesus as a prize. We did sell twelve cans, and we did get a picture of Jesus. We chose a picture of Jesus standing at a door and knocking. All pictures of Jesus are not really like him; people guess what he looks like. One of these days, we will really know what Jesus looks like.

Mom did some canning and also made some grape juice from the grape vines that Dad planted. Mom put the grape juice in pop bottles. After a few months, she went to get some grape juice, and all of the grape juice had turned to wine. She took all of the bottles out and dumped them into the hog trough. Dad came home from work, and the hogs were wobbling all over the place and kept falling down. Dad wondered what in the world was wrong with the hogs. Mom told Dad about dumping the grape juice into the trough. Dad said, Why in the world did you do that? You could have saved that for me. My dad was so funny!

Every time that we went to town to the grocery store, Evelyn and I had to stay in the car. Nowadays, you couldn’t do that because it wouldn’t be safe, and also, you would get in trouble with the law. One day, we saw Mom and Dad coming toward the car pulling a little red wagon. We were so tickled with that little wagon and had so much fun with it.

I ended up going to the hospital to get my tonsils out. Back then, a person would stay in the hospital for three days when having their tonsils removed. The night before I was to have surgery, my mom noticed me turning blue. Mom ran to get the nurse. I was hardly breathing. They took my tonsils out right then. My throat was closing up from my tonsils. My doctor was Dr. Judd.

We had a bread man that would deliver bread to our house a couple of times a week. The bread man’s name was Floyd. He would always take time to talk to us. He was quite a talker. It is funny how things like that stick in my mind.

Gerogia, also known as Sam, and her husband, Alvin Scheibe, lived on the right side of us. We all stayed friends throughout our lives. In fact, their daughter ended up being my neighbor many years later after I got married. We are also close friends.

One day, Mom decided that she would take me and Evelyn to California to visit our grandpa, grandma, and other relatives. We took a train for this trip. Back then, there was a train station in Wooster. I was five years old, and Evelyn was three. It was fun riding the train. Mom had her hands full with two little kids and a suitcase. Mom took a harness with a leash on it to put around Evelyn so that she couldn’t get away from her. It was handy having the harness since she had her hands full keeping track of everything and me.

We had to change trains in Chicago. Back then, the train station in Chicago was a big place. I can’t imagine how big and confusing that would have been now. On the train, two seats would face the other two seats. The seats would lean back so people could sleep. My mom packed enough food for three days. She took us to the diner car one time to eat so that we would know what it was like. It cost a lot to eat in the diner. Mom would tell us stories on the train to keep us busy and to help the time pass by quickly. Mom was sure good at telling stories!

The train took us to Riverside, where my grandpa and grandma picked us up. The train station was fifteen miles from their farm. The farm was a half mile from the main road, a two-lane highway. It was located at 12170 Sinclair St, a little path that they called a street. It was lined with olive trees on both sides of the path. There was a cistern by the house, and that was how they got their water. There was a walnut grove by the cistern. The driveway came off of another road to get to the front of the house. The driveway circled around by the house and would go back out to the road again. There was an acre field in the center of the driveway.

My Aunt Hilda is one year and nine months older than me. She walked the half-mile path to catch the school bus. My other little cousin, Jackie, was there, visiting for the day. We knew it was about time for Aunt Hilda to get home from school. Jackie and I wanted to go meet Aunt Hilda, so we headed down the half-mile path. We got down to the main road and started walking up the road. Well, along came the school bus toward us, and Aunt Hilda saw us and hollered to the bus driver to stop the bus, That is my niece and cousin walking up the road. The driver stopped and put us on the bus to ride home with Aunt Hilda. What were we thinking? I don’t remember what Mom and Jackie’s mom did to us, but I know we got punished. We learned our lesson.

Chapter 2

Chicken Wings

Mom and Dad were friends with Billy and Ada, longtime acquaintances from New Pittsburg, Ohio, about five miles west of Wooster. They talked Dad and Mom into moving in with them. I don’t think Mom wanted to move in with them, but she agreed. Billy and Ada were older people. Dad drove to Wadsworth to work for a while, but then he quit. While living there with them, Dad planted soy beans in the field and made some money. Billy had an old model T Ford, a very interesting car! You had to go to the front of the car and crank it up to start it. Billy had a shop with all kinds of old tools. It was a very interesting place. To this day, I like old things like that.

After I grew up and got married, Billy gave me an old dry sink that was his mom’s. It was over one hundred years old when he gave it to me. I still have it after fifty-five years. At Billy’s house,