Ken Allebach Childhood Memories

Childhood Memories

A Pennsylvania Dutch town in the 1920 – 30s

By Kenneth Allebach

1919 - 2005

typed by Fred Allebach

January 2009

The Pennsylvania Dutch culture in which I grew up was provincial small town/ rural. It was largely self contained. While Mennonites were outnumbered by Lutherans and Reforms, Souderton was basically a Mennonite farming center. Many of its people were more comfortable speaking PA Dutch than English and most English was heavily larded with PA Dutch (German) accents. My mother, Jennie, was always called “Chen” by her parents and siblings, Kenneth became “Kennis”. (Which illustrates that this may have been a dumb name to give to an Allebach.)

These were people of the soil and the soil requires work. The kind of hard physical labor that leaves little time for abstract thought or for much introspection beyond tomorrow’s weather. The harvest was the fruit of their labor.

Even little kids had their chores and at an early age became part of the family workforce.

The coming of the railroad in the mid 19^th century brought major changes. Out-of-town investors, aware of the PA Dutch work ethic, began building a series of non-descript, three story brick factory buildings, first for cigar making (all cigars were hand made then; Jennie’s first job at age 14, was in a cigar factory), later for shoes, textiles and men’s clothing. So, by the time I came along, the local economy was a mixed bag, but factories were a major source of employment.

Still Souderton retained its basic character as a PA Dutch town and remained so, in the main, till some years after WW2. Today the town is built out, there are no more building lots left; it is now a predominantly residential suburban town and its PA Dutch roots are becoming more and more shallow as the shadow of Philadelphia lengthens.

The PA Dutch were not scholarly, with just a handful of exceptions. Books on child rearing or children’s books would have been an extravagant luxury. In my house, I can remember only two books; The Autobiography of Ben Franklin, which I doubt was ever read and a monster Bible, full of illustrations that I never tired of examining in great detail: great bearded men in togas, Noah boarding his ark, Christ driving the money changers from the temple, Moses parting the Red Sea, little David and big Goliath; all scenes seared into Christian minds for a thousand years.

We lived in one half of a small twin house, which eventually became hugely overpopulated, by modern standards, on both sides- eight people on our side and 12 or 13 on the other, I’ve lost count. Still it was an amiable arrangement. I never felt crowded and tensions, if there were any, were short-lived and minimal. For the most part, the house was for eating and sleeping; the kids lived outside, playing and exploring. There was plenty of open space just out the door; fields, woods, dirt alleys, maple trees along the street, and the only sidewalk on the street in front of our house, where we could play hop scotch, ride a scooter (homemade or otherwise) and roller skate (clamp-on).

I calculate that I was three or four when we moved there, so it would have been 1922/23. It was our family home until Jennie died in 1962.

Rooms in most houses were papered then, never painted, except windows and doors frames and baseboards but I don’t remember ever seeing such painting done. I do remember spending endless minutes following the fascinating patterns on the wallpaper. Clearly, I didn’t follow my bliss and become a wallpaper hanger, of which there were many, with long folding tables, paste buckets and a variety of odd shaped brushes.

My earliest recollection as a little kid was in Leidy’s church down at the end of Cherry Lane (insert: This was a so-called Union Church, Reformed one Sunday and Lutheran the next. Its old cemetery reportedly had Indian graves and Revolutionary War dead. It was called Leidy’s, after the family who, I assume, donated the land or sold it cheap. The old Leidy homestead up the street (Cherry Lane) still is occupied by a Leidy and their widely sold pork products, including scrapple, are processed on that property.)  where they had an organ powered by hand, i.e. there was a wood pump like handle sticking out the bottom side of the organ that had to be constantly pumped while the organ was played: it provided air power, I presume, on the same principle as a bag pipe or accordion. My father did the pumping sitting on a low stool. I must have thought it pretty neat, to now recall this scene, after 80 some years, to see my father carrying out such stupendous responsibilities before the entire congregation; yet it did not inspire me to eventually become an organ grinder with a monkey on my shoulder. Brother Charlie must have been there too, as a babe in arms. We walked to church, we walked everywhere in fact; never did have a car.

My mother belonged to that church all her life and is buried in its graveyard, alongside my dad and one of their infant sons.

Our house had two rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs and a finished attic sometimes called “the garret”. Initially the house had no running water (water was pumped from a well that served both families in the house). It had one light hanging from the center of the ceiling downstairs, none upstairs that I remember and no baseboard outlets. Light switches on the wall were push button. There was a dirt floor in the cellar with rough-hewn beams and one post, a rough-hewn tree trunk in the middle. (insert: There were tin roofs over both a front and back porch. Doors were never locked.) The only heat was by an iron cooking range,  (coal for fuel), in the corner of the back room; there was a small register in the ceiling for heat to leak up to the second floor. This (range) was a versatile piece of equipment on which you could fry, boil or bake, heat water, keep food warm. It had four round iron plates on top with a special handle to pick them up, a crank to sift down the ashes and a coal bucket with a little shovel to feed the fire.    Ashes were thrown into the adjacent side alley to fill in the car tire ruts, and garbage in the adjoining field, which fertilized a small grove of lush weeds. We all did our business in “chamber” pots, which mother dutifully emptied in the field every morning. There were two one-hole privies out back (none of those two-holers in our elite society) side by side, which I think were seldom used in mid-winter. Privies were favorite targets on Mischief Night and few were still standing the day after, which was no big deal. They were not permanently set and had to be pushed down to empty the pit. In time the borough brought a water line and we had cold running water with a spigot in the cellar and in the new kitchen, which was the converted back porch.

As the family multiplied (a new one every 18 months to two years), the house became crowded. Nothing was insulated and there was no foundation, so that the kitchen was cold and drafty till the stove was fired up. In the early to mid 20s the cellar floor was concreted and a pipeless heater installed with a coal bin built inside around the back cellar window, where the coal men placed a metal chute (it had 3-4 inch lips on each side) in which to empty their bags of coal (into the bin).

The cooking range went into the new kitchen and the pipeless heater register (3’ or 4’ square), which could be walked across and stood on (which it frequently was on cold days and evenings to keep warm) and out of which came direct heat from the furnace. This register was placed in the doorway between the front room and the back room (now the dining room).

The last chore before going to bed was to bank the fire so it wouldn’t burn out during the night and could quickly be brought to full heat production in then morning. (This could be done with coal; during the war (WW2), in England, we had a little potbelly stove to heat our huts; fuel was coke and it would not burn through the night. We felt we were in heaven when we could steal some coal from the more privileged and keep a fire all night.) It was a good thing our house had plenty of air leaks, (in spite of storm windows), because coal gas was produced aplenty and that can be deadly. Fortunately the drafts blew the gas out.

There was a child born, (I believe between Peg and Flo) with an open spine (spina bifida) who lived only a couple of days. I remember a little white coffin in the dining room and very sad-appearing parents. No one but we kids there. Today, as I understand it, this condition can be detected and repaired in the womb. In olden days, it must have been a shocking experience to carry a child to birth only to find it doomed. We kids must have been spared the burial since I don’t have any memory of it. He was named Edward.  I had one other brother named Merrill, who died in the great flu epidemic in the early 20s when I was not much more than an infant.  (Dad’s note: John O’Hara, a native of the PA coal region, adjacent to the PA Dutch cities of Reading and Allentown, was a popular and gifted writer, especially of short stories. In one short story titled “The Doctor’s Son”, he refers to the flu epidemic” “…where the last of five children was being strangled by influenza”. Even miners who survived chronic asthma from their work “never had a chance against the mysterious new disease”…”the Commonwealth of PA closed down the schools and churches and forbade all congregating. If you wanted an ice cream soda you had to have it put in a cardboard container, you couldn’t have it at the fountain in a glass”. This was a terror of an epidemic.) One of my aunts implied many years later that he (Merrill) may not have had all his marbles, “wasn’t quite right” was her language. Could it be that that made him more susceptible to flu bugs and unable to combat them successfully?

I also remember my grandfather Allebach’s funeral at the Mennonite Church on Chestnut Street in Souderton. I was eleven (ca 1930). The funeral was conducted in German, a practice that prevailed among the Mennonites from early colonial days (say the late 1690s) to perhaps as late as WW2. One of the preachers used a phrase that must have meant ‘thanks be to God’, which sounded suspiciously like the PA Dutch phrase we knew as ‘Goddam’ and one of my cousins and I almost blew a gut trying not to laugh. Both of these (Allebach) grandparents are buried in the cemetery behind that church. 

All the floors in our house were of rough, unfinished pine. They were covered with around an 8 x 10 patterned congoleum, a cheap, linoleum-like covering, with fake wood congoleum runners to finish off the edges to the walls.

Jennie, as we called our mother in later years (“mother” before that), cut up worn-out clothing into 1 – 1 ½” strips, sewed the strips together (on her Singer), then rolled these strips into balls somewhat smaller than a soccer ball. After accumulating enough balls she got out her wood hooking needle maybe 6” – 8” long and hooked a round rag rug, which were crude affairs with no design but warmer to step on than that darn congoleum. Every Saturday morning these rag rugs would be rolled up, taken to the front porch, shaken, and swept. At the same time the furniture would be dusted and the floors dry mopped. Each kid had his assigned chore.

All the kids except Charlie (Charley = spelling for dad) and me were born at that house. When my parents were married, they lived in a fine big old stone farmhouse on Green Street in Souderton with my dad’s parents. That house still stands and is a stately, well-maintained dwelling. Doris is proud to point out that I was born there; brother Charlie says he was too but I’m not so sure. So all the girls and Bud were born on what was then Price Avenue but has long since been renamed S. 5^th Street.  We were all born at home as were virtually all small town and country kids in those days. We had kind of a nurse/ housekeeper in during the day to take care of things for a few days till Jennie recovered. She was kind of bitchy and bossy, as I remember, and tried to slap us with a wet dishrag if we didn’t jump on command.

By about the mid 30s the family was complete; three boys and three girls plus two in the graveyard. Flo was the baby and the apple of Jennie’s eye. She sang little ditties in tune almost as soon as she talked. Jennie loved to make long finger curls which stayed intact so that little Flo was a virtual Shirley Temple, a popular child movie star who danced and sang and captured the nation’s heart. Flo’s father, Charley Sr. loved to teach her songs and she was generally pampered by all. It’s remarkable she didn’t become some kind of bitch, or very spoiled.

At the table, Flo sat next to mother and me in her high chair and was the very paragon of a good little girl. (Completely unlike her future nephew, Fred, who hardly ate and enjoyed throwing his food on the floor!) Hardly beyond babyhood she came down with whooping cough and, during the meal, would hack away uncontrollably till her face became almost purple and she was gasping for air. I guess we all feared she might expire in the throes of such calamitous coughing.

Meals were generally only for eating; not much talking; no effort at educational or creative (conversation) family togetherness. If the parents had anything to say it would be ‘finish your food’. Total time” 10 – 15 minutes, I would guess. Occasionally, if the parents had a private message, it would be in PA Dutch, at which they were equally at ease as with English, though there was never an effort to encourage the kids to learn Dutch.

The table was round but elongated with two halves; a parent sat at each end, mother nearest the kitchen, Sis and Peg on one side with Bud in the middle, Charlie and me on the other. All the food was in bowls in the center of the table, one of which invariably had pared boiled whole potatoes- never had potatoes cooked in their skins- never heard of rice. The potatoes were always mashed with the fork. There was at least one other vegetable, probably two. One piece of meat each- never seconds. We frequently had a piece of marble cake for dessert; Jennie never made pies, only cake, starting from scratch, no store bought mixes. Always a slice of bread with butter. Nothing fancy except when company came to eat.

All food was either boiled or fried. All frying was done in lard; fried potatoes were either “raw fried” i.e. sliced up on a four-sided slicer/ shredder and fried or left over boiled potatoes sliced and fried. Fried potatoes of any variety were topped off with a couple of fresh eggs stirred into the pan of cooking potatoes and I was always pleased to get an extra hunk of egg with my helping. There was also a table dish from the yard: tender young dandelion leaves (had to be before the flowers bloomed, maybe even before the bud appeared). With it, Jennie made a special white sauce with bits of bacon. Very tasty but this was discontinued after endive came along, with its more cultivated taste. My recollection is that I preferred dandelion and I haven’t got much more cultivated. Roasts, including fowl, were only for special holidays or special company. Fresh pork roast, i.e., the uncured ham, was a very special treat.

Other typical dishes: scrapple, a PA Dutch concoction of pork scraps, seasonings and some kind of binder shaped into loaves in pans ca 4” deep and wide and 8 – 10” long, sliced about ½” thick and fried till brown and crispy. I topped these with ketchup and a little horseradish. In PA Dutch it was called panhaas and pronounced something like “pan-hoss”.  There was also mush, somewhat the same, but made from cornmeal and not particularly tasty; fortunately mush was not served very often. Sausage, stuffed into pig’s intestines, and cut into 4” or 5” slices, was more or less a staple; all fried dark and crisp. We had potpie, which is the nearest to pasta, for PA Dutch cooking: 3” – 4” squares of dough rolled out and boiled in some liquid I can’t remember. There were potato cakes made from leftovers, with a flour binder and fried golden brown; but much better were fish cakes with leftover fish mixed with potatoes. We had pea soup and bean soup made with peas and beans dried by Jennie on the stove with a special dryer (as I remember it was a tin pan ca 3” high with a built-in tray on top where the stuff to be dried was spread in one layer, with an opening to put water in the bottom part. I don’t know how it worked.) The soup was the meal. We also had oyster soup, considered to better and more substantial than peas or bean. I seem to remember that sometimes oysters were put into the turkey stuffing (filling, we called it) which was a special treat, but this was an exception: fillings usually contained the vital organs cut up into small pieces plus broken up stale crusts of bread. Jennie’s dish that Doris liked best, is what we called meat pie. My impression is that we ate more pork than beef. We never had lamb, nor do I remember any veal; it could be that these were too costly or perhaps too fancy for our simple taste. One of my favorite taste recollections is turnips mashed up on the plate with my fork and soaked in hot pork drippings. We also had our good share of jelly bread from jellies Jennie made, much of which was from wild fruit we collected.

There were two sets of dishes and implements: Everyday and for-company. I think every everyday dish was cracked or chipped-= a collection of odds and ends brought together over the years. The company stuff was something else: It must have been a wedding present. All these dishes bowls and platters matched, knives, forks and spoons had ivory handles. Nothing was dull, cracked or chipped. Jennie even had a bunch of large, white linen napkins, which she ironed in a special way so there was a square on a bias on the top. She loved to use this stuff and show off her finery. We had dinner guests, company at least once a year, maybe twice, all of which was duly reported under Town Topics in the Souderton Independent, e.g. “Mr. and Mrs. Charles Allebach of Fifth St. in town entertained Mr. and Mrs. George Althouse and sons Roy and George, of Valley Stream, Long Island, last Saturday and Sunday. A good time was had by all.”

Jennie had two girlhood friends who visited with her all her life: Elsie Nace, who lived in Allentown, PA, A PA Dutch city 20/30 miles north of Souderton. She had two kids, boy and girl both older than I so I never really knew them. For some unaccountable reason, I was invited to visit with them for several days one summer. I would guess in my teens or maybe younger. I have only the vaguest memory of that experience. Their house was on the side of a hill; they had a crab apple tree; there was some kind of park at the bottom of the hill. Elsie was plenty Dutchy, with the modest patina of a city woman. There was a trolley that stopped in Souderton on what was known as the Liberty Bell Line; it ran around 60 miles between 69^th St. in Philadelphia to Allentown. Trolleys could go up and down hills and around tight curves, unlike trains. During the Revolutionary War, the Liberty Bell was taken from Philadelphia to Allentown for safekeeping and thus, the Liberty Bell Line.

Jennie’s other friend was Chris (Christine) Althouse who lived in Valley Stream, Long Island, just across the New York City line. Her husband George worked at Tiffany’s in NY; we all figured he must have been a top guy since they had a big new Chrysler and both sported an exaggerated NYC accent. They had two boys who grew like weeds and every summer they would come fro a weekend bringing a pile of clothes their boys grew out of. What a windfall! When they came, mom and pop gave Chris and George their bed and they slept on a pullout studio couch in the dining room.  One summer they took me and Charlie back to Valley Stream with them. What a time! Every day to Jones Beach, maybe the most fabulous in the nation they had just recently completed. I remember how flabbergasted I was whenever Chris got me alone she would bitch about her husband. Why to me? Just a kid. I figured later that she really wanted to be back in the country and that old George may have been something like chief shipping clerk.

Saturday night was bath night. The kitchen was the bathroom. Water was heated on a three-burner kerosene stove, which had replaced the bigger cast iron range (which I suppose was too hot in that small room in summer and was consequently removed) in a copper kettle which Jennie’s grandson Fred now has. The little kids sat in a few inches of water in a galvanized tub otherwise used for washing clothes in the cellar. The tub was set on a wood chest (which Peg has now and has refinished) built to hold firewood. Bigger kids used a washrag and basin in the sink. Much attention was given to ears; none to genitals [I never learned how to clean my uncircumcised pisser (as it was called in the straight forward PA Dutch vernacular. The work ‘prick’ later took over, maybe because it sounded more worldly. I’m not sure I even knew there was a word ‘penis’, these parts were never discussed with elders. I’m not sure what girl’s parts were called.), till I saw how the other guys did it in college.] On bath night there was no question of modesty; we were all naked, or mostly so and tended to this business at hand. Speaking of modesty, we were all toilet trained on the pot. I seldom heard the word ‘pottie’. I remember Jennie plunking little Flo on the pot and urging her to ‘make it rattle’, i.e., to tinkle.

When the time came (age 15 – 16?) I shaved at the mirror on the wall next to the kitchen sink with what we called a “safety razor”, double edged and prone to knick the face. Starting to shave was a Big Deal for all teenage boys. After shaving, when available, I would splash on some after shave lotion and must have smelled like a two-bit whore. There was a family towel hung on a nail on the other side of the sink; it was made from feedbags, (sewn together on Jennie’s trusty Singer. Not till I got to college did I experience sleep between proper sheets.) which were not particularly absorbent.

There was also a family comb in this location, my hair was seldom combed dry, it was generally wetted and parted in the middle up to high school, when the part moved over to the side. Hair was washed with hand soap, I don’t remember ever even seeing shampoo as a kid, consequently, hair was always pretty stiff; not till I went into the military service did I realize that my hair had a natural wave. Jennie usually combed the little girl’s hair. Tangled hair, of which was much on active kid’s heads had to be combed very carefully, she called tangles “rats in the hair”, obviously a throwback to her own childhood.

While on my head, I may as well also describe an improvised headgear I, ands many other kids, made to satisfy our little egos. These were called “beanies”, a kind of oversized, decorated skullcap. Somehow, I would get a worn-out man’s felt hat, remove the lining, cut off the brim, and corrugate the bottom of the remaining part of the hat with a series of “Vs”, an inch or so (deep) all around the bottom. This designed part would then be folded back a couple of inches for a close fitting headgear. A hole might be cut out of the very top, or a series of holes, either to provide ventilation and/or to express individualism. I would search out every fancy button, political pin or any kind of advertising pin to go around the entire rim of the beanie, slap it on and parade around town proud as a peacock.

The kitchen was an (early version of the family room) all-purpose room.  Everything was performed there that could not conveniently be done elsewhere. In addition to personal care, it was the cooking place; it’s where we ate breakfast and dinner (which the noon meal was called), washed dishes and stored pots, pans, everyday dishes and a mixed bag of eating utensils. During the summer months there was also hanging from the ceiling over the table a flypaper, usually with many flies stuck on it. These came in little cardboard rolls ca 2” long and ¾ to 1” in diameter. The fly paper was very sticky and I presume, sweet to attract flies, when fully pulled out it would be maybe 12” to 18” long with a tab on the end to thumb tack it to the ceiling. When it was determined that enough flies were caught, it was thrown out and a new one tacked up.

Six kids generated plenty of wash. Monday was wash day and wash was always hung on two heavy wire wash lines (always wiped clean with a wet rag before hanging) in the back yard stretching from the house to a little tool and storage shed the old man built on the back end of the lot next to the privy. (There was a third line on the side.) If it was raining or snowing, the whole entire weeks work schedule was shot to hell. Though I’m not sure, I don’t remember wash drying in the house, though it must have in extended severe weather. It had to be hung outside to get the air. A line full of wet wash hung pretty low and had to be jacked up with a fairly sturdy long wash pole with a V cut into the top to catch and hold the line. In winter, I remember many times the wash froze stiff; Jennie never wore gloves. She had one large (willow?) woven oval basket (no plastic then), which lasted forever. Wash was folded right off the line, which I’ve noticed Peg still does.

There was a two burner kerosene stove in the cellar on which wash water was heated in aforesaid copper kettle- I have a vague recollection of a really old fashioned washing machine (all wood) that had a hand turning wringer attached. Maybe also the washer itself had to be hand turned, no electric, with a scrub board. This must have occurred when I was a pretty little kid since my memory is very vague on this. I suspect that the clothes had to be scrubbed pretty much by hand; however, early on (mid 20s?) Jennie got an electric Maytag, which, like the wash basket, lasted at least through WW2.

I do remember, with some clarity, homemade soap that mother made, although I have no idea how. It was cut up into thick brown cakes, looking something like a strong commercial soap called Fels Naptha. It was stored in the “koopie hole” in the attic on some kind of metal tray. I’ve no idea of the spelling, meaning or derivation of this world “koopie” but suspect it has some PA Dutch background that relates to a dark, tight space under a roof. It was three or four feet deep and ca 4’/5’ high to where the room wall slants up following the roofline. The roof continues its downward slant inside the koopie hole and becomes its ceiling; it was a dark, mysterious space that you had to crawl in, where stuff infrequently used was stored. I believe there was a light inside above the little entrance door. It was called a “hole”, I suppose, for want of a better word.

While we are on the third floor (the attic), this room needs further definition: It was the boy’s bedroom. Charlie and I shared one bed and Bud had his own. There was one bureau for the three of us. In winter we slept in our long johns under flannel p.j.s and piles of miscellaneous blankets on top of which Charlie and I had a big feather bed. Somehow I acquired a collection of pictures of movie stars, maybe 25 or more, and tacked them on the walls, which were not papered, in neat straight lines. Perhaps I got them at the Broad Theater in town, where I ushered for no pay for a couple of years and got to see all the movies free. As a younger kid, I got 15 cents a week spending money, ten of which was for the Saturday matinee, consisting of a feature pix, a shorter cowboy flick and a newsreel and a stage show featuring Frankie Slueth, a comedian. My favorite seat was in the front row, where I imagined that Frankie was looking directly at me.

When the house was built, the cellar floor was pitched down from front to back and a pipe laid out to an underground pit in the back yard from the inside back corner of the cellar. Dirty wash water would be drained out here and I took many a piss there on cold winter days. There was no bathroom till WW2.

On the front wall of the cellar, (all walls and ceiling were whitewashed), my dad built a bunch of wooden shelves deep enough to hold the typical quart Mason jars which, at harvest time, Jennie had filled with canned veggies and jellies. During Prohibition (roughly 1920 to 1932), Charley made beer, elderberry wine from a nest of bushes in the adjacent field and dandelion wine from the flowers in our yard. I have no memory at all of wine making but of beer I do: There was a big brown earthenware crock in the cellar in which the beer was brewed (water, hops, yeast). It had to set for a week or two before bottling. When ready a long white rubber tube (3/8” in diameter?) was put into the crock, sucked on to start the flow, then stuck into each bottle to fill. Then the bottles had to be capped with a fairly simple hand operated contraption, (set the bottle directly under the capper, place the loose cap on top of the bottle, pull down a handle and presto, the bottle is sealed). Consequently, there was more drinking stuff in the house during Prohibition than any time after it became legal again. Prohibition was a striking example of failed social legislation. The ultra-conservative blue noses were determined to stop drinking by prohibiting its manufacture or use. Many newspaper pics of Feds smashing bottles of booze. Result: Many wealthy bootleggers, private “speakeasies” where you could get anything you wanted, home breweries, crime galore until FDR came to the White House (1932) and Congress repealed the Prohibition Act, after which people continued to get drunk, but legally. (FDR was famed for his martinis and was known as a fastidious mixer: exactly 3 parts gin and one part dry vermouth, or was it 2 to 1?)

Before the milkman came to our house, I used to haul a gallon tin jug with a fit-in tin top and a sturdy wire carrying handle down to Hackman’s farm (the place where Jennie was born, just the other side of the Y where you cross the Bethlehem Pike at the ridge of a hill and can’t see any oncoming traffic- you made that move with some trepidation and foot on the floor (last time we went up there) to pick up some raw milk- the milk farmer did not have pasteurizing equipment then and was glad top sell his extra milk. Probably did not cost more than 10 or 15 cents a gallon. When milk was finally delivered I believe it was raw milk as we used to call it before pasteurization. I remember the bottles on the front porch, on cold winter days; the cream would freeze and pop up out of the top.

Hackman’s was a working farm for more than a century. Now the meadow, where I used to trap for muskrats and skunks, is home to a frigging housing development. (I caught one muskie and one skunk in 2 or 3 years, skinned them and put the skins on stretchers, inside out, but couldn’t sell them.) The father of one of my schoolmates butchered in the lower part of the barn. I watched a couple of time but didn’t much like what I saw: he clobbered the steer at about eye level with a mighty sledge hammer; the animal collapsed and the butcher pulled its head back and with a huge knife severed the head, throat side first, let all the blood run into a drain, skinned it and hung the carcass on a chain, slit open the belly, saved the usable innards that could be sold: brains, tongue, liver, heart and small intestines (which were used to stuff with sausage), maybe even more; who the hell knows what went into sausage but we ate plenty of it- also tongue and heart, which Jennie generally pickled as I remember. Calves tongue was considered a delicacy. Brains were breaded and cooked in deep hot lard.

It never occurred to me that I might become a butcher. Play was more important. Or trapping. Anyway, we did a lot of playing in the hay mow (pronounced mau, as in bough), leaping off of rafters into the bottomless hay, digging into it to hide, wrestling in it and generally assuring that cows and horses would get a well worked over meal.

I would not say that I spent a lot of time on farms but I did grow up in small town that was essentially a farmers center (mostly Mennonite) and I jumped around in many a hay mow, tramped through many a barnyard heaped with sometimes steaming piles of manure, walked around many animal stables, scraped out some pissy hay under the animals, even helped unload some hay in the barn (or at least watched), saw many a field being plowed by horse and man power, tackled many a corn shock, picked many a row of vegetables, dug up many potatoes, pulled many turnips and bunches of carrots and shucked many an ear of corn. Pretty near a farm boy but not quite. There were still several working farms in Souderton when I grew up.

My maternal grandfather, Nari (an obscure Biblical name from the Old Testament) Hunsicker (A good PA Dutch family, most of whom are descended from immigrant Valentine Hunsicker, who came to Philadelphia in 1717, had many boys, acquired some 200 acres of land and died ca 1760: His youngest son became a Mennonite bishop and other descendents opened a seminary that ultimately became Ursinus College.) was a farmer and butcher all his working life. For several summers he plowed, harrowed and cut rows for planting in the field across the street from our house, which my parents planted, tended, and harvested mucho vegetables. That was in addition to the back yard garden. This must have been a pretty poor field for farming, too rocky and weedy and I don’t think it was planted more than two or three years. But I do remember cutting up red potatoes, making sure there were at least one or two “eyes” on each cut up section since it was these “eyes” that sprouted new potato plants, each of which produced clumps of new potatoes under ground, which I thought (since there was not much else to think about) was something of a miracle.

One year my dad acquired a piglet which was penned up in the back yard and raised to some level of maturity. I believe that Grandpop Hunsicker finally butchered the poor sucker but I don’t recall any great increase in our consumption of pork products after the killing.

Monday evening Jennie laid out each piece of wash and stuff that needed ironing and sprinkled it with a bottle of water with a tin top which fanned out with a bunch of little holes and a corked bottom to seal it into the bottle. No such thing as a steam iron but sprinkling made the ironing easier. All shirt collars and cuffs were starched before ironing. As I remember, starched parts ironed very smoothly and looked very fresh and neat, if not a little stiff to the feel. Preceding the electric iron, Jennie and all other housewives, used heavy dry irons from which the handles could be removed by the flip of a locking hoop. She had at least two irons and one handle. Both irons were set on top of the range until hot, when one was ready, she inserted the handle and ironed till it was just warm, put it back on the stove and picked up the second iron and so on till the ironing was finished. My memory of this chore is vague and probably distorted. I still have one of these irons. She rolled up the sprinkled wash neatly and put it back in the wash basket for Tuesday morning, which was ironing day. Everything was ironed except socks, which were rolled up, toes first and the outside top folded over the roll. Boys for some years wore underwear called  “union suits”, one-piece affairs reaching half way down to the knees that buttoned up the front and had a button-up flap on the rear end to carry out that essential business. Union suits were ironed, as were under shorts and shirts when they came into style (early 30s?). Shorts were help up by 3 buttons on front top, no elastic.

There was always an undeclared competition between Jennie and Mamie Trumbor next door to see who would get their wash out first and each took a certain measure of private contentment when they won fair and square. This was serious business and they were up at the crack of dawn to get underway. As kids we didn’t look to get out of work around the house; to work was built into the culture. I believe the other kids felt the same but am not entirely sure about all. Anyway, I often did a stint at ironing flat stuff like handkerchiefs and towels. Handkerchiefs; there was no such thing as Kleenex then, or if there was we would not have spent money on such stuff. I can remember my snot rags so wet with snot that there was hardly room for more. During head cold season, the pile of hankies got plenty high. Jennie even taught me how to iron shirts (It took her 7 minutes to iron a shirt she said.), which I still do with a certain level of skill.  Most pants (trousers, all of which were buttoned at the fly, no zipper or other modern fasteners) those days, as I recall, were not washable but those that were had to be ironed, which Jennie did under a damp cloth, which produced a better crease and prevented the material from getting all shiny as they would inevitably get ironed without a cloth.

Wednesday was, I believe, mending day, which for six kids and two adults was no little job. The life of clothes had to be extended to the maximum possible limit, for the sake of economy. (9) No daily changing of underwear or socks, maybe once a week. We wore “knickers” to school till high school; they were buttoned below the knees and had button flies; no zippers until WW2. Missing buttons were replaced, (There were lose and missing buttons aplenty for a family of eight with six growing kids. (P.11, word?___): at least 2 jars of buttons, one for whites and one for colored. All the buttons on worn out clothes were cut off and saved for future use. When otherwise bored I would pour them out and separate them for size and color.) elbows, knees, and rear ends patched and tears mended, and most time consuming of all, stockings darned, darned at the toes, darned at the heels till there was more darn than original material. Another sewing chore you’ll never hear about is turning shirt collars: After a year or two, shirt collars would become so frayed at the neck that today, they would be thrown in the rag bag. Not so then; then Jennie would carefully detach the collar and sew it back on with the frayed side underneath and, voila, a neat new collar and shirt life extended another couple of years. I should note here that such sewing was not done by hand; she first had a pedal powered machine and, early in the 30s got an electric Singer machine, which was her pride and joy. 

Thursday and Friday must also have had special work projects but I can’t remember what they were. Saturday the floors were dry mopped and all the furniture dusted; the house had to be clean for Sunday.

We had everyday clothes and Sunday clothes and Sunday clothes were never worn during the week unless there was some big deal going on at church or school. It was traditional that the kids got new clothes for Easter and that must have resulted in a big hit on the old family pocketbook but, in those days, a boys suit probably did not cost more than 3 – 4 bucks and shoes @ $2.50. My Easter outfit was suit (with vest, one Easter it was a white flannel), shirt, tie, socks and shoes- the works. And this occurred every Easter through high school. Easter was, of course, a major religious holiday and change of season. All life, in those days revolved around school, church, and home: No trips, no vacations, no weekends at the shore, no professional plays or concerts. We never had a car.

While Jennie may have taken fifteen in the rocking chair in the dining room, she was usually busy at one job or another. At the same time, she may have been the most passive personality I’ve ever known. A daughter of the soil, brought up on a working farm, dominated by a stern, tradition-bound father, she seldom had to make personal decisions. It was said that when she went to work, at 14, in a local cigar factory (no cigarettes then) she brought her pay envelope home, gave it to him and he returned any change it might have contained. The bills were his. I’m sure it never occurred to her that this was pretty lop-sided; that was the way it was and, as Jennie frequently said, “It went without saying.”

Consequently, she seldom initiated anything. She went with the flow in what was essentially a man’s world; in our house that included meal planning, since The Man (as she phrased it), was into provision, he brought home the meat and whatever else he thought necessary and Jennie fixed it. (He was a pretty good cook himself, as his son Bud turned out to be, and tended to be more creative than Jen (pronounced “Chen” in the Dutch vernacular) in the kitchen, like boiled mackerel in hot milk for breakfast with special guests.)

Jennie’s universe was limited, mostly, I’m sure, because of little exposure to any mid-stretching experiences. I would observe her sitting on our front porch with one of her girlhood friends who came to visit and there would be long moments of complete silence. Who the hell knows what might have been going on in their minds?

For her, life was work: cleaning, cooking, washing, ironing, mending. And bearing kids, with all the work they required. She also helped bring in moola: A local towel factory would sent out a large crate of dish rags right off the loom so they were full of fuzz and ends on the corners. Her job was to shake them clean (which I pitched in to help), to trim off the hanging ends, stack them in neat piles and return them to the delivery box. Another job, with vise provided, was to wrap leaders onto fishhooks, which had to be performed with some skill and precision.

I don’t know much about girls clothing at that time. From pictures, they weren’t very sexy. Through most of the 20s, I believe that girls wore “bloomers”, and not till about Flo’s time did more skimpy stuff become fashionable. Bloomers came down darn near to the knees and had elastic bands at the bottom. Not much hanky panky with that kind of protection! Likewise, they wore wool stockings in winter (“anklets” in summer) that came above the knee and were held in place by some kind of elastic band (garter?) a few inches above the knee. I remember Grandmom Roth (Jennie’s maternal grandmother), with the faint hint of a smile, when Jennie would take us visiting, ask little Flo in PA Dutch to show her her pants (“hussa”, from hose, I guess). That whole scene was too shocking for her narrow universe.

At age seven I started school, (no such thing as pre-school or kindergarten and no such thing as parents walking us to school on the first day), I went to the same school as my father; it was demolished sometime during brother Charlie’s reign as mayor but I do have a picture of my father’s class in front of the school door. There was what we considered a big dirt playground in the back where we got rid of excess energy at recess playing tag, cracking the whip (six or eight kids in a line holding hands, running like hell, the leader stopped suddenly and spinning the line in a circle around him causing the last person to run even faster till he tumbled), and playing marbles “for keeps” (keeping the marbles you won.) We had maybe five or six marbles in our pockets and the good players usually collected a good haul (in this game you drew a circle, 4 or 5 feet, in the dirt- choosing a well-tamped corner and each player put a marble in the middle. Each player had a carefully selected shooter, chosen as to size and knicks, knicks so it wouldn’t slip between thumb and forefinger. You shot at the marbles in the middle from the line of the circle and, ideally, with such skill that the spin on the shooter made it stop on hitting the targeted marble, which had to be shot out of the circle to win it. If you shot a marble out of the circle, it was yours; if your shooter stayed in the ring after you shot one out, you could keep on shooting. The real sharp shooters could clean out the ring in one turn; if your shooter stayed in the ring after a failed shot, you were a fair target and another player could knock you out of the game by hitting your shooter out of the circle. Great fun. While hopscotch was chiefly a girls game, sometimes the boys did it: Hop in 3 squares with one foot then two side by side with 2 feet, once on original foot, then two again, hop 360 degrees on (the) last two squares and back to the beginning; start all over on the other foot. Touch a line and your out. Oh yes, we generally had to find a flat stone and toss it into the next square and hop over that square. You may have lost your turn if you missed the square, I’m not sure.

At home playtime was mostly after school and after supper and we played “out front” till bedtime. There was a street light in front of the house (which reflected fascinating colors on the attic wall from the small colored glass squares in the front window), which made it easy to play hide and seek and tag, to drain off our fading energy.

Every summer evening at about twilight, great flocks of blackbirds and starlings would circle around prior to roosting for the night in the trees of Thompson’s woods behind our house. (The Thompsons were said to be a pair of well-heeled spinster sisters apparently from the Philadelphia area, who had a big house and fancy barn on the other side of the woods and who spent their summers, together with their driver/ general handyman, at this place. I never saw these women and the driver only once or twice; they appeared to be reclusive or exclusive, or both. I never even heard of any locals who saw or met them. Their woods was well posted with “No Trespassing” signs, which we diligently respected, fearing arrest and imprisonment, I suppose.) For maybe 15 – 20 minutes after the birds landed, there was a steady chorus of chirping from the trees.

Also especially in summertime, all day long, what we called either turkey buzzards or chicken hawks (who the hell knows what they really were?) would be gliding above the surrounding fields on the lookout for prey or a free meal.

There was a massive mulberry tree in the neighbor’s back yard, which seemed to be a favorite hangout for wrens. Hardly ever, since then, have I ever seen any descendents of these little fellas. There were no chickadees or mockingbirds; maybe a jay or two. The biggest bird was the pheasant, who roamed at his peril during hunting season. I was never interested in guns or hunting but brother Charlie evidently borrowed or acquired a .22 and once gunned down a pheasant cock bird in the neighboring field from our attic window. Somehow, the police chief got wind of this chicanery, confiscated the evidence (and probably cooked it) and read Charlie a stern lecture and closed the book on that criminal case. It pays to have some drag with the cops.

Occasionally, with gloves and a ball from the Trumbores next door, we would pitch ball. At one point, we patched together a little ball diamond in the field behind the house but that never amounted to much. A bunch of guys in my general age group used a ball diamond down on Noble St., maybe a three or four minute walk away across the fields, put together a team named the Noble Street Athletics, after the Philadelphia major league team of the same name. I was on first base and at bat, swung right just once and sent the ball out of the field. Not bad for a snot-nosed physically underdeveloped kid. (I never matured physically until I was exposed to the more vigorous, disciplined life in the military.)

In the late 1920s, Souderton built a swimming pool up on the other side of town, a good 25 – 30 minute walk from our house. Season tickets were around two bucks and I was up there most every sunny day. One of my classmates, a doctor’s son, took formal swimming lessons; after each lesson, he’d teach us what he learned and that was the extent of my swimming instruction.

Don’t know if this falls under the heading of games but I did have one overnight camping experience in the woods at a place called Black Rock. One of the guys had a tent and about four of us decided to camp out not far from a relative of one of the guys. Someone drove us to the place, we pitched the tent, built a fire and cooked some hot dogs and roasted some marshmallows when the frigging rain came. The frigging tent leaked, it was dark and we were a little afraid of wild animals so we hiked over to the friend’s relative who somehow put us up for the night. Next morning we were packed up and that was the extent of my brush with raw nature.

Before starting school, by law, we had to be inoculated against smallpox: Boys on the upper left arm; girls on the upper thigh so as not to scar their frequently exposed pretty little arms. This was a generally unpleasant experience since it amounted to a mild case of the pox. The vaccination spot, in my time, was covered by, was protected by a small rounded glass cover with tiny holes in the top for ventilation, its general purpose to prevent infection till a scab anywhere from ½” to 1” in diameter formed and eventually fell off. These enforced vaccinations eventually eliminated small pox across the world.

There was another frequent pox among what were then referred to as contagious “childhood diseases”. They were generally expected during early elementary school days and consequently most kids got them: chicken pox, measles, mumps and whopping cough. I had them all and missed a lot of early school on their account. Wherever they occurred a 6” x 8” paper warning was placed on the front door to keep uninfected people out. Mumps, as you probably know, is extremely painful if caught by grown men.

Elementary school brought no unusual awakening. I usually sat in the front of the class only because my name began with A.  We had roving music and art teachers who came in once a week. In third grade in music we learned the lines ands spaces, sharps and flats and time. We enjoyed singing. Art was nada: I learned to draw straight lines with a ruler; never had much interest in drawing or any other creative stuff, being a child of the soil. My spelling always sucked but arithmetic was fair to middling.

Since time immemorial children have been fascinated by the night sky. I was no different and would sometimes lay back in the grass and ponder the mystery of the heavens. And where did that little bit of contemplation get me? Nowhere; it was all too much for a country boy to comprehend. Little did I dream that not too many years later and half a continent away, I would be studying celestial navigation, distinguishing then planets from stars and not caring how they all got there or why. Because the pages are well laced with complex lines meeting in a little triangle that identified my location, I’ve carried that bulky workbook with me through every move. I got a 3.8 out of a possible 4!

My fifth grade teacher was a female bully; she pulled hair and cracked bad kids on the knuckles with a ruler to beat them into line. I went through the first seven grades in that building and many of us went through graduation as a group. I guess that as many as quarter of our class dropped out at sixth or seventh grade, only because their families had no tradition of education; some parents were actively opposed to any more education than was minimally required- their kids were supposed to get out and work and bring money home soon as they were old enough, then around age 14.

From 1^st grade through 12^th I walked to school on paths through a couple of fields to sidewalks. The paths were well worn but narrow and winding and had to be traveled single file like Indians. The paths that wound across a couple of fields essentially formed the hypotenuse of a right triangle- a genuine short cut- and were used by kids and adults alike. Then part of the field immediately below us had more than passing interest: It contained a small spring-fed running brooklet that in some millions of years would have become a raging river. It started in a 2’ – 3’ deep open spring behind a neighbors house (Bergeys) in which we would occasionally nab a frog. Somehow it ran under Price Ave. and surfaced behind Frederick’s house, where it crossed our path requiring that we lay a sturdy board across the 15” – 18” ditch. (We may have just jumped across; my memory is foggy on this.) The little streamlet continued on into a little woods behind Front St., where the Noble Street gang, of which I was a member, dammed it up one summer and created a little pond which became the centerpiece of a “camp” we established and held our rapt attention for a week or so. I now wonder if that spring is still active underground or whether there may have been a bunch of them. After the war that entire area was built up with streets and houses, one of which belonged to cousin Bob Raudenbush and dam if he didn’t have a nice little fresh spring in his basement. There went my raging torrent.

Even when we got into the built-up part of town, we found alleys and other short cuts, probably to the annoyance of some who couldn’t bring themselves to chase kids away. The walk to elementary school took ca 15 minutes. We walked home for lunch and back again after, which helped to establish a life-long pleasure in walking. Lunch menus were not memorable and as I recollect, frequently consisted of a slice of bologna and a slice of cheese between two slices of white bread (never any whole wheat or rye, which may account, in part, for somewhat stunted or delayed growth) and a glass of milk. I frequently stuck a handful of oyster crackers in my pocket to crunch on the way back to school. I was always pleased when the weather clearly would prevent us from coming home at noon and Jennie packed a lunch, a ubiquitous bologna and cheese sandwich, an apple and, glory of glories, a pair of store bought chocolate cupcakes, which we ate at our desks. Lunch at school was a Great Occasion. One of the short cuts to school took us past a fireplace outside of a candy company (which my grandfather Allebach once owned). There they buried their trash, including discarded and wormy chocolates where we’d stir around for yet edible pieces of chocolate. Roasted worms inside hot chocolate were a tasty morsel.

I went to school through 7^th grade at Chestnut Street. From 8^th through 12^th, it was at a newly built school much nearer home. There, somewhat more light shown on me but not enough to provide any particular direction. Classes were more focused and after-school activities exploded. I was in plays, operettas, choruses, football, basketball, an orchestra and God knows what else. There were no mind-stretching clubs to provide a glimpse into worlds otherwise unknown to culturally deprived small town kids; on reflection, I sense that the unspoken world was that most of these kids would never go to college or even do much out-of-the-ordinary reading, so why spend a lot of time teasing their minds with snippets of substance. My favorite reading as a young teenager was Horatio Alger, a Yale man who probably made a fortune writing short novels of idealized poor boys who made it big by virtue of hard work, helping old women, strict honesty and high Christian values with titles like: Work and Win, Strive and Succeed, Jed the Poorhouse Boy, etc. There were also Tom Swift books, the boy inventor, a mind titillating series and the Bobsey twins, which may have been more for girls. I ate that shit up till I started smoking, drinking beer and jerking off around the end of my junior year.

In athletics, I had more energy than skill; played guard in both football and basketball at about 5’ 10” and max of 145 pounds. Subbed enough to get a letter (the big S to sew on a sweater- still have two) in football in my junior year. Had one big game against East Greeville in which I was unconscious and made dam near all the tackles, most in the E. G. backfield. “They let him in”, said the jealous guy I subbed for. As the only returning letter man in my senior year, I was duly elected captain of the team: We lost every game, in fact, didn’t score a point. Apparently I was not the only boy deficient in talent. Basketball was another story: never even got a letter. Games were low scoring (20 – 30 points?), stars may have scored 6 or 8. All shots were banked off the backboard, never a swisher. By that time, it became pretty clear that I had no chance to make a fortune as a professional athlete. Unlikely in any event since baseball ruled the roost and even major-leaguers had to go back to work after quitting the game. Alfie (my father-in-law) and I went fishing down on the Delaware Bay, where Goose Goslin, star shortstop of the so-called Gas House Gang (from one St. Louis team), had a tumbledown shack selling bait and renting little boats.

Singing was another matter. At around age 16, when my voice settled, I joined the choir as a bass at the Reformed Church in Souderton where I did a yeoman job every Sunday till I went to college and even then when I came home on holidays and in summers. At one time Sis, Peg and I all sang in the choir together. Flo developed into a sweet soprano and in her teens also joined the church choir which, for a while, had three Allebach girls. Far as I know neither Charlie or Bud ever did. [Bud was a hell raiser during his last year at school, when all healthy guys knew they would be drafted after graduation. He tells how he and other guys locked C. V. Lawyer, the shop teacher, in the cage where the expensive tools were stored. The poor guy was a hairlip and apparently screamed in their distinctive way to the outrageous laughter of his tormentors. Bud has long since been very contrite about (that) unhappy deed. Charlie eventually became something of what we used to call a “whiskey tenor”, i.e., he could hit the notes but with questionable quality. After the war, Bud became seriously interested in singing, took vocal lessons for a period of time and had a better than average, finely tuned voice: after several years he apparently became an exeprt needle man in a local men’s clothing factory but felt largely unfulfilled. Though he was never much of a student and showed little bent for stuff academic, I persuaded him to go to West Chester State (PA) teacher’s College, which had a special program for music education, not far from Souderton. He did (and ultimately got a Master’s degree), became a music teacher for the rest of his working life, married a classmate, Nancy Leatherman, and sired four boys (David, Jamie, John and Ward), I don’t know that any of them sing but Ward tooted a mean trumpet. I don’t know if any of Peg’s boys sing except Joe, who used to sing tenor in a small group that did professional work as a sideline. Likewise, I don’t know about Flo’s boys. After the war, Sis, Flo and Peg learned several (A, B, C, D etc) closely harmonized women’s trios and can still belt them out when we get together.] 

We christened the organist, Mike Alderfer, “eighty Eight Keys” because he seemed to use them all. In high school we had a chorus so good we entered an intra-state choral contest and made it to the finals, held in Altoona (about in the middle of PA and, at that time, the farthest I had journeyed from home) and came in second. We sang “Sleepers Awake” by a, I believe, Norwegian American named Christianson. A hefty singing experience for a provincial teenager in 1936. Otherwise, I sang the part of Koko, the Lord High Executioner, in a simplified arrangement of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado”, an English operetta.  (An enjoyable version) sung by the famous (D. Oil Carte Company sp?)

Our singing and general love of music is from an Allebach gene (I never heard Jennie sing and wondered if she could even carry a tune.) Our dad loved to sing and had a range of at least two octaves. When driving around town delivering groceries, his singing was widely enjoyed. He wasn’t showing-off, just a happy guy expressing himself the only way he knew how. My cousin Bob Raudenbush, whose parents owned the grocery store where Charley Sr. worked during all the years we kids were growing up, says that people didn’t need a radio, Charley could entertain them. I sense that he had innate musical ability but limited exposure. He taught himself to play the harmonica (“mouth organ” in our idiom) and the Jew’s harp. (Jew’s harp: “a small simple musical instrument consisting of a lyre shaped metal frame (ca 3” long) containing metal tongue, which is plucked while the frame is held in the teeth, the vibration causing the twanging tones.”) He also got a player piano and we had a bunch of special paper rolls we hooked into the player (they were two, two and one half inches in diameter and maybe 10”/ 12” wide. The rolls were punched full of seemingly haphazard holes which, I guess activated certain keys. The rolls were turned and air was generated against the unrolling paper escaping  through the holes and producing the music by foot pumping two pedals on the floor. Words were painted vertically on the right side of the roll corresponding to the notes being played. The roll space, at eye level, could be closed up with sliding doors and the pump pedals folded into the floor level and also had a sliding door. There were a bunch of levers hidden under a hinged cover just below the keys with functions I can’t remember: On/ off, loud/ soft, and others? When closed up, it was a regular piano; on its top were a few favorite family photos. At some time after the war, I decided, in my wisdom that, since the player rolls had disappeared, the piano might sound better (an altogether dumb conclusion) if I removed the player parts. That was a fun job for, as you know, I am expert at taking things apart. In this case, I suspect that all that was achieved was to make it more convenient for the piano tuner.

Probably in the 8^th or 9^th grade, I somehow got to take violin lessons. Some city slicker came to town and offered a free violin to anyone who took lessons from him for one year at 25 cents an hour. Eager to encourage his budding musician son, the old man bought the deal. At the end of a year, the slicker tried to give me a beat-up used instrument, which was contrary to my pop’s understanding. I finally wound up with a new violin, bow and fake leather case; a fancy engraved label in the f holes indicated it was a Stradivarius by the famed 19^th century Italian violinmaker. I took lessons another year from a local guy, also at 25 cents a pop, after which I was called on to play in the Sunday School orchestra and the high school orchestra. Today I cringe when I think about all the squawking I must have produced during that fruitless period. A more primitive musical instrument consisted of a piece of tissue paper folded over the teeth of a comb on which we could produce a buzzing tune by humming smartly on the comb.

Music postscript: At college, before the war, I became seriously interested in classical music and as a cadet in the air corps bought a portable phonograph (on which we played a half dozen great short pieces for the guests at our wedding at the Woodstown (Friends) Meeting) and started collecting records, which became a lifetime hobby. On my 70^th birthday, when Doris had all my siblings at the house, I was more than satisfied to hear them all express their pleasure that I had introduced them to good music. Eventually, even my own son came to discover that Handel and Vivaldi could at least compete with the Grateful Dead.

In high school, we could choose between three programs (called courses) of study: Academic, which allegedly prepared us for college with Latin and French (of which I managed one year each: veni, vedi, vici), algebra and trigonometry, chemistry and physics, more advanced English and civics. The Commercial course that majored in bookkeeping and typing for those who might go on to business school or go directly into some local office and the General Course, which I assume was a mixed bag of generally easy stuff for the kids expecting to take any job they could get.

For reasons I don’t recall, I went into the academic Course having no interest of ever getting to college but perhaps thinking that this program would be more challenging and interesting than learning to type and such other stuff. Obviously there was no such talk at home: the unstated expectation was that I would graduate from high school, get a job and start bringing money home. This was pretty much inbred into the general culture; only the very brightest kids, with more or less successful fathers, were destined for college. I believe only 4 or 5 in my class of 60 plus went right on to college and even fewer, like me, eventually made it.

Now I was, by no means, an exceptional student, but I must have displayed a broader than typical range of interest,  some more than average desire to learn, a certain creditable talent for leadership and above all, a good kid- a Horatio Alger kid, that at least one benighted adult might have suggested that even a poor, directionless kid might be able to go on with his schooling. There was none of that; not at home, not at school. Not at church, not anywhere. It is not that I was ever conscious of any such failing on the part of my elders, that’s just the way people, were in the depth of the Depression. It might be that people would unconsciously not dare to ever seem to encourage a boy of working-age not to contribute to a tight family budget.

One other rite of growing up came in either my junior or senior year in high school; joining church. I was baptized in the (Zwingli) Reformed Church as an infant (contrary to the Mennonite tradition of my ancestors: they did not believe in infant baptism, believing that only when adults are people able to understand the importance of such an act). As an older teen, we usually officially joined the church, which was preceded by a few months of catechetical (Katty Kettle Kul) classes conducted by the minister. These were instructions as to the principles of the church and maybe some Bible study; not really very inspiring or revealing. I have a photo of my class, which includes four or five first cousins. This is a big deal for the church: more members means more money. At the end of the classes, which everyone always passes without tests, there was a special service making us full-fledged members of the church. For the first time in our young lives and contrary to any tradition, we all got down on our knees at the church fence before the alter, listened to same mumbo-jumbo from the minister and tried to establish contact with God, understanding that he was welcoming us into his fold and thoroughly approved of our good work on his behalf. Diligently I tried, contact was not made but I did walk away with what must have been a beautiful look, which no doubt pleased the minister, the grown-ups in the pew, and maybe even God.

As to financial contribution, at the beginning of each year (or maybe half year) we were given a box of two-pouch envelopes in which we were expected to put coins (at my level, nickels and dimes), in one pouch for the church and the other for foreign missions. These envelopes were dropped into the collection plate. I suppose the purpose of using the envelopes was to prevent people next to you from seeing how much you gave. In those days you never saw bills in the collection plate and hardly ever quarters. I foxed ‘em. Plates were not passed to the choir and I now guess the reason I wasn’t kicked out of church for lack of financial support was that they needed my voice in the choir. I doubt that they ever got much money from me. No church could long survive on such meager fare. I suspect, therefore, that there must have been a sugar daddy or two who covered the shortfall, and there were always those, like my brother Charlie, who tithe, i.e., give 10% of their income to the church- in anticipation of special treatment on entering the Pearly Gates.

Life in a little country town (population ca. 4,000), you can see, revolved exclusively around home, school, and church.

At home, there were few special days beyond Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, with a few sparklers and one-inch firecrackers on July 4^th. The three big days brought turkey, occasionally a goose to the table when we all “ fessed”, (PA Dutch for eating too much: clearly from the German or PA Dutch word for eat, “esse”, add an f in front and the meaning becomes “overeating”)). Goose fat was saved and when we had deep chest coughs, Jennie made a plaster with this as the main ingredient, spread the stuff on a cloth and somehow attached it to our chest overnight. I have an idea it was pretty strong stuff and produced an unpleasant or stinky odor. There were no birthday parties and no presents, the sole acknowledgement of the fateful day being “Happy Birthday” from Jennie on entering the kitchen for breakfast.

As little kids, like all little kids, we hoped for, but never really expected a windfall of toys at Christmas. On Xmas morning, all the kids sat at the top of the stairs in their nighties waiting for the OK to come down. (The tree was trimmed the night before after we were bedded down; it had green, red and blue balls of different sizes, a few interesting old balls, lots of silver tinsel, and a couple strings of blinking lights- a thing of beauty to our young eyes. Presents consisted mainly of needed clothing: underwear, hankies, socks and the like, maybe a pair of gloves or a necktie; not much in the way of toys. It was not uncommon to exchange visits with friends or relatives to show off our stuff: I can remember vague pangs of envy when I saw other guys with their Erector sets and Lionel trains tooting around the tracks.

We improvised playing things. I remember three, all of which required a good deal of running: one required an iron hoop or some kind of lightweight wheel (ca 1’ in diameter), and a stick to beat on it to keep it rolling; the idea was to run with it and to keep its speed under control. Simple, but a great way to burn off energy. Another was to take a narrow board, two/ three inches wide and 3’ long and tack on the bottom a half round reinforcing strip from a broken vegetable basket; get a discarded wheel from a baby carriage (maybe 8” in diameter), roll the wheel down the handle and guide it with the bottom strip. We got to be pretty good at keeping these wheels and hoops in control and played with them five/ten minutes till we ran out of steam or got utterly bored. A more complicated scooter-like toy was a 4/5” wide board, maybe 4’ long on the bottom of which we installed old roller skate wheels, front and back. On the front we nailed a wood box ca. 3’ high and 18” wide and deep onto the wheel board, open end facing back. On top of the box we fastened a piece of a broom handle, which became a handle bar and, voila, we had a truly clumsy, bulky scooter on which we rolled up and down the sidewalk in front of the house. (At one point in my young life, the borough decreed that property owners on our side of the street had to install sidewalks. Turned out that we and our adjacent neighbor were the only people to do it and for years we had the only short stretch of sidewalk on the street, A non-running game was a pea shooter, which we made, I believe, from elderberry bush stems, which had a soft, pithy core that we pushed out with a straightened coat hanger which created a hollow tube big enough to blow small dried peas through. With a mouthful of peas, favorite targets were the backs of head of unsuspecting victims and windows at night. Fun?? Peas were bought, I seem to remember, at the local feed store- all you need for a nickel.

Raising six kids on the income of a grocery store clerk could not have been a piece of cake. (Actually our dad, -we always called him Daddy, like down south, but I find it impossible to say that word now, however easy and natural it seems to southerners- was not just a clerk: he could cut up a side of beef or pork with some measure of skill, he delivered groceries around town in their little truck, picked up vegetables from local farms, collected bills, and any other chores that were necessary. Since his sister and her man owned the store, there was nothing like a boss/ worker relationship; he was an integral cog in the operation.) While we seldom had more than the essentials, I never felt deprived, though I never had a bike, nor a baseball glove, ball or bat, nor roller skates. There were more kids in the same position than not. It was a working class town and very few fathers were out of work in spite of the great Depression that ruined the national economy in 1929, when the stock market crashed. Not many people in Souderton owned stocks.

These people worked long hours, did any work available and were totally reliable. At his job, our dad started work at seven and quit at six, every day except Friday and Saturday nights they were open till nine at night to accommodate outlying farmers who couldn’t leave the farm any other time. Old Main St. was popping on Saturday night: All the stores open and everyone shopping and visiting; everybody knew everybody also so it was a good social time. There were not even a handful of holidays during the year and nothing like vacations.

Horses and buggies passed our house going back and forth into town, were not an unusual sight. Some of the outlying roads were unpaved and a sea of mud during and after rain and more negotiable by horse than by car. Model T Fords, Henry Ford’s mass-produced production-line car for Everyman, (from 1909 to 1927) were more common; there were also Buicks and Dodges that I remember. The electric starter activated by pressing the starter on the floor next to the brake pedal. Before that, cars were with a hand crank inserted just below the radiator, which was often a two-man job: the cranker and the driver, who had to set the choke and other levers to get the right gas mixture. Cranks sometimes kicked back and injured careless crankers. 

Cousin Bob Raudenbush’s dad, Uncle Bush, had an Essex, a popular low end of the Hudson Company. (Alfy, my father-in-law, was a proud Hudson owner for many years till it was replaced by the Rambler, which we eventually inherited). Grandpop Allebach also had an Essex. One Sunday long ago Uncle Bush took Bob, Charley Sr. and Jr. and me for a ride up to Mauch Chunk, (since renamed Jim Thorpe, a famous native Indian and maybe the greatest athlete alive during his time- went to Carlisle College in PA; which I believe was founded especially for Indians) up in the PA coal region to ride the narrow gauge switchback railroad car up a steep mountain and down again. That was a memorable experience for all of us. I doubt that the Essex ever went much over forty, so it was a long day, too.

We never had a car and I never heard the old man wish it were otherwise. The town was small geographically and you could walk from one end to the other in any direction within a half hour. Most people in town walked; only one of my high school classmates had a car: a Model A Ford (successor to the Model T), four door with canvas top, button down curtain for the sides in rainy weather.

All that walking, while healthy and good for the legs, was hard on the shoes, which we wore till they were fully worn out: full of cracks and scuffs and soles breaking away from the uppers. When the soles got too thin, we’d cut out a piece of cardboard to insert inside and keep our feet a little warmer or dryer, When holes finally appeared, we’d get a pair of rubber replacement soles for a dime, scratch up the old leather soles, apply a special glue that came with the new ones and, presto, shoes lasted another few months. (19) To save wear and tear on the heels, we’d hammer on steel cleats. Didn’t take much to please the dumb kid. We had, of course, a pair of everyday shoes and Sunday shoes; the latter also used for special occasions but otherwise never mixed. When Sunday shoes were well worn and the everyday shoes worn out, we got new ones and the old Sunday shoes became everyday. The few times the uppers held out and needed resoling, we took the shoes up the alley to “Uncle” Charlie Roth (in our vernacular, pronounced “Road”) who did some shoe repairing in his house: half soles and heels for 25 cents. He lived with grandma Road, (Jennie’s maternal grandmother) who was a sour old bat who never smiled and couldn’t speak English, only PA Dutch. She lived to be 100. There was another son there named Harry, who was allegedly gassed half of the time. It was said that when at a marriageable age he brought home the girl he wanted to marry and that his mother objected to her, upon which he allegedly transferred his love to the bottle.

A favorite pastime for men during warm weather was pitching quoits (pronounced “kwaites” up there). Up the dirt alley (long since paved and posted as Garfield Ave) Uncle Harry Roth, Uncle Harry Hunsicker (Jennie’s brother who lived down the street from us), Henny Brey, the town drunk, and one other guy (sometimes my pop) would play doubles. (I’m sure they didn’t call it that), i.e. one man for each side at each stake or hub, an iron rod sticking out ca 3”. They got to be pretty damn good and pitched “ringers” many times during a game. Was the game the first to get to 21 points? A ringer counted for 3, a hubber (when the quoit leaned on the stake, for 2 and the nearest to the stake for 1.

Let the record show that our house had more than a Maytag washing machine and Singer sewing machine. We also had a Majestic radio, not your garden-variety table model but a proud piece of furniture that stood on four legs and was regularly polished and dusted. Actually, I suppose it was a modified table model made into a piece of furniture. (When its days as a radio were over, I took the top off and attached it to the base, and voila, we had an end table).

To turn it on and off, there was a small metal switch on the right lower side of the base. These sets had vacuum tubes that needed a minute to warm up before you got any reception. If a tube needed replacement, you took off the back and replaced the one that wasn’t glowing; no need to call in a repairman. There might have been as many as a half dozen stations, mostly from Philadelphia, a couple from New York. Lowell Thomas was the most popular news program at 6:45, Amos and Andy, the most popular family program at 7 (these guys were black-faced white guys and that show is now considered by the touchy to have been denigrating to the blacks but, in my opinion, was also a parody of white culture). Andy was a self-styled big shot, who referred to his wife as the Old Battleaxe, always answered the phone pretending to be counting money: “one million, two million…hello.” Radio was the only source of mass entertainment funneled directly into the home. There was a Philadelphia station near the top of the dial that specialized in hot jazz. And, in high school, at home for lunch, Johnnie Bergstresser, who lived down on Noble Street, one long block away. Our favorite was a piece for full jazz orchestra called “White Heat”. We both would go ballistic when it played and Jennie must have wondered what kind of monster she had brought into the world. Believe it or not, I once heard a jazz recording on the radio that sounded familiar and exciting. It was White Heat!

We also had a telephone, which may have been installed around 1932, at which time most good Democrats were certain that times would improve and a phone would be affordable with the election of the charismatic Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency. “Happy Days Are Here Again” was the mantra-song of the FDR administration. Our number was 2069. All phones were black and stood on a rounded base with a tubular handhold about 10” high; the ear piece hung on a hook at the top of the hook and the phone was activated when the ear piece was unhooked; the mouthpiece projected out at the top of the tube. As I remember, there was a box on the wall, wired to the phone, that had a little crank on its side, which had to be turned a couple revolutions to get the operator who then got you the number you were calling. (Sister Flo became a telephone operator when she finished high school.) We had, I believe, a three-party line, which were, of course, much cheaper than a private line. The parties had one, two, or three rings, according to the assignment. You naturally did not pick up the phone when it rang the other party’s assigned number of rings, although this was frequently done (“listening in”, it was called) by nosey people or smart alecks. Generally you could tell if another party lifted their ear piece and if they did not hang up immediately, you could carry on a lot of dirty talk, upon which the offender would hang up promptly. Protocol and good manners dictated that you get off the line if another party is using it.

One of our next-door teenage daughters was a bona fide sexpot and an equally certified beauty, diligently pursued by a pack of young studs. She may have given our phone number to a couple of them and they would unfailingly call while we were at the supper table. Someone had to get up and call her from her table and our entire family had to listen to her side of the conversation, which in all fairness, never lasted long. He was calling for a date, no doubt. This kind of imposition on our facilities did not go over big with our father, though he never put a stop to it. It became clear that this girl had flaming hot pants: she had an illegitimate kid soon after high school and yet another before she finally married. This kind of behavior was taken in stride by family, friends and neighbors: she continued to sing in the church choir, eventually became a Jehovah’s Witness with her mother and virtually all her sisters and one brother (which scandalized their good Lutheran brethren more than illegitimate kids). I was told that at 65, or maybe more, she was still a dazzling beauty, proving, however some may take it, that sex is good for the skin.

To close out this phone chapter, this modern convenience was particularly good for Jennie, it put a little more variety into an otherwise humdrum existence: She could talk to her sisters, friends, and especially her mother, although Grandmom Hunsicker (Marcella) was a little leery of these new fangled contraption: how could a voice travel over a wire? Grandmom never did learn any telephone etiquette; when she was finished talking, she just hung up. (I became fond of Jennie’s parents in my late teens and early 20s and enjoyed visiting with them. They had a good, solid relationship and a gentle, affectionate way of teasing each other about their various afflictions and shortcomings. They were both bred to the soil, had a big family, which, in turn, produced a herd of grandchildren. They unfailingly appreciated visits from their grandkids and old Nari would boom out in his deep voice trained to yell at his horse in the fields: “Is it Kennis?” when I arrived. Grandmom lived into her late 80s and Grandpop till 92.)

The Hunsickers were a close-knit though undemonstrative family. There were twelve kids, eight girls and four boys, (Vina, Sallie, Pearl, Lizzie, Jennie, Katie, Leora, Mabel, Charles, Lester, Harry, Paul) four of them had many kids, two of them had one, and none had none. When I was a little kid, not long out of diapers, they began a tradition of family gatherings every summer. At the peak of these productions, there musty have been fifty/ sixty family members there, mostly kids, which was a source of great pleasure for Nari and Marcella. Next to the soil and eating, farmers loved lots of kids.

For many years, these celebrations were held back in a woods Nari once owned. Boards were set on trestles for tables and lots of chairs were brought out. Each family brought their own food. It was a great time for playing and visiting with favorite cousins. Charley and Harvey were the big cut-ups and Harvey would scandalize the town kids by dunking his cake in a glass of water and top it off with the cake-crumb water. The big boys and young men picked up a game of baseball, older men pitched quoits, women kept the place tidy, tended the little kids, sat and gossiped. The rest of us just played. This tradition is carried on to this day by the grand children, who come from scattered locations but the close family ties are loosening; the first two generations are all gone.

Our house was built, I estimate, probably around the end of WW1. We may have been its first occupants; if not, the first could have had it only a short time. It was an attractive clapboard house with working wood shutters throughout, which were sometimes closed during violent lightning storms. It was painted a light cream color with maroon trim. The parlor window was ceiling to floor outside of which was a two-seater wood swing hung from the porch ceiling on chains; careless swinging by the kids shattered the window a couple times. The front porch also had geometric woodwork connecting each post at the top, which must have been a challenge to paint. The foundation was squared off PA fieldstone.

The appearance of the house took a nose-dive (in my opinion today) when asbestos shingles were put on over the clapboard and the shutters removed. I think old Charley was sold some kind of deal; no more painting, better insulation and maybe an illusory discount. Nevertheless, it stayed that way until the 70s or 80s when the then owners covered the shingles with stucco and also replaced the original slate roof wit composition shingles.

Charley and Jennie had to wait till WW2, after he got a job in a local factory and presumably started making some kind of real money, till they got a bathroom and hot running water.

When Charley died, some six months after I returned to civilian life, improvements to the house began in earnest: Henny Trumbore, next-door neighbor and handyman deluxe, installed a new oil fired furnace, hooked up to radiators in each room and for the first time the house was evenly heated (registers in each room). Henny must have inspired me since I undertook the job of building closets in both bedrooms and attic, complete with sliding doors. I even laid a prefinished oak floor in the parlor and did a creditable job. Later I got Jennie a thoroughly modern kitchen sink and cabinets. Even later, my bride, ever conscious of needs in the laundry, got Jennie a pair of proper washtubs for the basement. Thus, Jennie, who loved most of her life here, under relatively primitive conditions, was able to close out her days in reasonable comfort and contentment.

The house

Our house was close by the southern edge of town. The street was then known as Price Ave., after the owner of much of the land; our street number was 258, which I believe still is. There were only four other houses on the entire street, including a fine, well-kept farmhouse set well back from the street, just below us built in 1830. At some point in the late 2os, Price Ave. was permanently renamed S. 5^th St.

At move in time, ours was essentially a five-room house:  two each on the first and second floors and a finished (i.e., plastered walls) attic (sometimes called a garret). There was also a walk-in clothes room (there were no closets) on the second floor and a dirt floor cellar. There was both a front and an enclosed back porch with tin roofs. There was a cold water spigot in the cellar and one to the back porch over a shallow, undersized sink. I’m not clear as to the layout here: Old photos show that this room was enclosed. Maybe as a kind of summer kitchen? I do know that it was not excavated underneath (and consequently was very drafty) and that it had no foundation. After not too long it became our permanent kitchen. I have a hazy recollection of the town extending a water line to our house while we lived there so that an outside well was probably the only source of water for some time. Most of us remember that well and the pump in back of the house that served both families.

We had no bathroom, only a pair of one-hole privies, one for each family, at the back end of the lot. Privies were favorite targets on Mischief Night and few were still standing the day after, which was no big deal. They were not permanently set and had to be pushed down to empty the pit. In winter we took care of our business inside on what were euphemistically called “chamber” buckets or pots.

Toys- playthings

The only toys that I remember were maybe two dozen wood building blocks- educational, with numbers on one side, the alphabet in upper case and lower case on two others, and animals. Learning the alphabet (the “A, B, Cs”) and counting to ten, at age three as I did was considered to be a sign of high intelligence. Any block building I did was confined to stacking them up, one on top of another, till the pile toppled, very creative.

Charley and Jennie

The marriage of Jennie and Charley was not a match made in heaven. More likely it came as a result of a lot of heavy breathing in the haystack or under some cozy, friendly bush. This was what we called a “shotgun” wedding: my older brother, Merrill, was born some five or six months later. (This was not uncommon then. Passions raged as since time immemorial. My Uncle Paul Allebach admitted to me that he got caught that way.) Aunt Vina, Jennie’s older sister, would not give me any information on her dates of marriage or kids births. (Said she “didn’t believe in genealogies” Turned out that her oldest child was born three months after her wedding.) But why shouldn’t they do it? Jennie was a most attractive young girl and Charley a prancing stud. It was a local practice that the brides’ parents would have a nice dinner for the newlyweds et al but it turned out that this family had two daughters planning to get married in the same month. No way, said Grandmom Hunsicker, would she do two such dinners, make it a double wedding, Jennie and Charley, Mabel and Harvey Eisenhower. And so it was. Mabel was not pregnant.

I’m sure they were a happy young couple but tensions inevitably developed as the place became more crowded with kids and the pocketbook shrank. I never heard any talk of money nor, for that matter, ever observed them in any lengthy serious discussion. If, at the table, a subject came up not to be brought to the attention of the kids, they reverted to PA Dutch, but only briefly. We never heard them argue, Jennie was far too passive for that. He never left the house for work without kissing her (on the mouth, none of this current cheek stuff). Charley was demonstrative; Jennie was not.

It is apparently natural for a mother to bond with her girls as they grow older. And so, my sisters have some different memories of Jennie and her thinking than I have. At some point, Jennie became more or less obsessive about Charley’s drinking and it colored her feelings towards him in a negative way. She hardly ever touched the stuff, maybe a sip of beer or wine but never the hard stuff; there was strong streak of temperance throughout the land, which, of course, precipitated the Prohibition Act. For my part, I never saw my father drunk or even wobbly. George Kulp, town police chief, would frequently drive him home on Saturday night and they’d sit around the table for a couple of beers or shooters; they never got loud or even on a mild high and by the time I finished high school, I would be invited to join them in a game of pinochle. I’m not suggesting that the old man didn’t like the stuff: he never failed to take a nip from his little gin bottle in the cellar at lunch or even on an afternoon truck delivery trip so he must have had a gin breath, which, I suspect, Jennie hated: if she smelled it, everyone else could and this reflected badly on her and their kids. I recall him taking me to visit his mother when she was sick in bed. He was on his knees at her bedside holding her hand and she said “Charley, you’ve been drinking.” He was stone cold sober but he could have waited till after that visit to take a nip, proving that breath can readily exaggerate the smeller’s reaction. After the war, when he was dying of cancer and had recovered from a massive operation, I frequently took him to one of the local drinking clubs where he enjoyed playing the “one-arm bandits” (slots), which were popular at that time. He never had more than a few beers but slept well in the same bed with Jennie, where he died at age 49. We never achieved any significant close relationship during this period: he was totally absorbed with pain and impending death. All of Jennie’s kids drank beer and the hard stuff and often had hilarious parties at home, with no stated objection by Jennie. (All of this drinking talk perhaps reflects the comment of Tacitus, famous Roman historian, who wrote in 98 A.D. in his book “Germania”, said of the Germans: “Drinking bouts lasting all day and all night are not considered in anyway disgraceful.” Tacitus also said, perhaps more appropriate to me: “The Germans are not cunning or sophisticated enough to refrain from blurting out their inmost thoughts.” Hitler, it is said, favored Tacitus, not for the quote above, but because Tacitus spoke of the purity of the German race, with their blue eyes and blond hair. The ironic conclusion to this little epic is that in her closing widow years, Jennie developed a taste for martinis and often sipped on one or two before bedtime.

A final fiction that Jennie perpetuated among one or more of the girls is that I got all the beating for all the kids. I don’t remember any beatings but might have been slapped on my little ass a few times for being bad. There was always a leather strap hung on the mirror next to the sink in the kitchen (an old belt sans buckle) to remind us of the potential consequences of being bad. Once or twice when it was taken in hand in preparation for deserved punishment, the intended victim was long gone across the field. Charley had a short temper but it never lasted long and I don’t know that that strap ever struck anyone. One time he got mad at me outdoors, for some dumb infraction and came after me without success. I was too fast. “Come back here”, he yelled. “You think I’m crazy”, I yelled back. By suppertime it was all forgotten. I remember too, that when one or the other of us did something unacceptable in the house, we’d get chased (mom or pop?) around the dining room table, pulling out chairs to stall their progress till we could get out of the house without a blow being struck. All good fun. That strap was a warning, not a weapon. Seems to me I saw similar straps in other places around town. It was a time when people accepted the wisdom of the ancient adage: “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

Raising children was mainly a process of feeding and clothing. Kids just grew up and they were either good or bad according to how they behaved; “Behave yourself” was the most common admonition. Any other instruction was the responsibility of the school and church. Parents had to work hard enough to achieve what they did and couldn’t take on reading, writing and arithmetic, much less any suggestion of creative thinking.

Thomas Wolfe, in his novel “Of Time and the River”, may have described this situation most succinctly: “Their minds seemed to have grown from a stony and fruitless soil…consequently, life reflected a curious indirection”. I’ve changed his word “lives” to “minds” to better support my meaning. We were no different than most families in this regard. Whatever the kids became was mostly a result of their own effort and capacity, which, more often than not came later than it might have if the soil had been cultivated more diligently in our early years.

Charley was the more creative parent, perhaps the more thoughtful (During the war he wrote to his four kids in uniform regularly, long and interesting letters; his handwriting was always clear, clean and flowing, bespeaking one who improves himself instinctively; his letters were reasonably well punctuated and there were no egregious misspellings. At the store he became noted for adding up large numbers (bills) rapidly and accurately) and perhaps more inwardly frustrated for want of better direction. His native talents are most visible in his kids. He was up-to-date, opinionated and knowledgeable on national politics, read the Philadelphia paper carefully and listened to the national news on the radio: Lowell Thomas and Floyd Gibbons, a fast talker who squeezed maximum content into minimum time. He would not miss any of FDR’s famous “Fireside Chats”. His political interests bore fruit in Charlie Jr., who has been a progressive and productive mayor of Souderton for more than 30 years.

Charley Sr. was well known and well liked in town. He had many friends and an outgoing, happy personality. With fewer kids, he might have achieved more but what is the good of such talk. They had six kids who all did well and, as one local parent said of his large family with apparent satisfaction, “they all stayed out of jail”- except me who spent one night in the pokey for drunk driving but I was 25 then and this is supposed to be a story of my childhood, though I suppose I have not necessarily ever entirely left my childhood behind, due to a certain elementary stunted growth pattern.

Charley was pretty much a jack-of-all-trades, having been brought up on a farm where usually only very skilled work was hired out: the farmer and his family did virtually all upkeep and repairs. At our house, one of Jennie’s brothers built a chimney up the outside sidewalk, which became necessary with the installation of the new heater. Likewise, he had to hire someone to install the asbestos shingles over the original clapboard siding, which made the house a bit tighter and eliminated the need for whole-house painting. (Subsequent owners have since put stucco over the shingles and built a big family room with fireplace behind the kitchen.)

As a kid I was always impressed with Charley’s garden digging. He would turn over the earth with a shovel in neat, well-defined rows, leaving a depression behind each dug-up row in which to throw the following (shovel-full) of earth. His spading seemed to me to be straight as an arrow. Each spade full would be broken up with the shovel and, at the end of the digging, the whole garden would be raked out smooth and level- a perfect, clean rectangle with squared edges. For stuff to be planted in rows, like carrots and peas, the rows would be put in with an iron hoe. Many a meal came from these little gardens, which Jennie tended and weeded all summer long. By the end of the second summer it was well fertilized and there might have been one or two little stones left in that soil but nary a weed. It has occurred to me that both of my parents were close to the soil and knew how to tend it properly. If there had not been a WW1, after which America began its conversion from a rural to an urban economy, Jennie and Charley may well have become farmers and would likely have been very good at it. As their ancestors were. It was their children who were the generational changelings in the established PA Dutch culture. As it turned out, their children’ children became even more separated from their roots, which has resulted in the substantial demise of a culture nearly three centuries old and the most stable and long-lived culture ever established in the early American colonies.

Jennie also had her flowers, not in beds but in a row along the side yard: there were lilies, of which she was particularly proud (they were indeed the proud and beautiful white Easter lily variety - she gave us bulbs which prospered and multiplied in our houses in White Plains and Philadelphia.) She had flax and gladiola all big strong stuff, no violets or fancy-dancy little ones.

Left over food and perishables such as milk and butter were kept in an ice box (Sister Peg still has ours, which she refinished), which was well insulated. The ice man came every day or two and put a block of ice in the top, designed for that purpose. There was a drain pan on the floor underneath to catch the melting ice water.

This chapter cannot close without reference to tramps, of which there were more than a few during the Depression. They quickly learned where they could get a handout and there was apparently honor-among-tramps since they didn’t abuse their privilege. One or two of them got to know that Jennie was a soft touch and came to the back door asking for food. Jennie never turned them away and they always left after a decent meal on our back step. As Tacitus said in his “Germania” about the natives: “It is accounted a sin to turn any man away from your door”, a tradition that carried over for more than 19 centuries.

We also had our woman-tramp named Alice Reinhart, who was alleged to be an ogress and bad kids were frequently threatened to be given to Alice if they didn’t behave.  She never begged for food at our house and she apparently always had a man-tramp companion. Somewhere in my files I have the story of her life; as I recall she came from a reasonably good family in a nearby town with whom she had a serious falling out, resulting in her walking out to join the ranks of the tramps.

Jennie and Charley were both tough old birds; I never knew either one of them to spend a day in bed sick or to miss a day’s work on account of sickness. Neither off them ever wore gloves in winter and their kids used them sparingly, if they had any. As a consequcnce, chapped hands were common throughout winter; we must have had some kind of folk treatment for this problem but I can’t remember what it was.

Altogether, considering his many native talents, I now expect that Charley would have been a ripe candidate for at least a high school education but that was not part of the culture in that time- kids went to work on obtaining “working papers” at the innocent age of 14. Only one of his five brothers and four sisters finished high school: the youngest girl, only some 7 or 8 years older than me. His dad Jake, did, however, what he thought best. I have a recently published diary of a member of the Souderton School Board; entered on August 3, 1904, which states: J.K. (Jacob Kooker) Allebach came over to see about sending his children to school. He agreed to pay $72.00 for the five. This is below the regular rate but it was reduced on account of the number.” Now I don’t know whether that means that Jake chewed him down, or whether Will Hemsing, the Board member and cousin of Jake’s wife, felt that the regular cost for five kids was too big a hit on Jake’s pocketbook and consequently gave him a break.  I’ve figured out who those five kids must have been but that would be of no interest here.