We arrived at Pelican Lake where we stayed in a hotel overnight. We had breakfast in the dining room where we saw and tasted our first grapefruit. I thought the lake looked as big as an ocean. We took the train to the P & L Siding, the first of May and the ditches were covered with ice that looked like sidewalks. How long we stayed with the Chaney’s, I don’t remember. The dogs arrived shortly after we did. My father rented the Ben Foster farm. (The Ben Foster farm was located on long “S” between Waggoner and Kirker Rd.) Some of the hams were stolen while they were left with someone else while we were getting settled.
At Chaney’s, for the first time in our lives, we had all the fish we could eat, and we were dreadfully sick that night. The four of us never cared for fish after that. The fish, suckers, had been dynamited and we had a gunny sack full. My mother loved fish.
My father bought a buckskin horse named Bill that came with a fancy cowboy saddle, a red Jersey cow we called Florence, and some chickens. That summer, while helping the Day boys (Claude, Hobert, Delton,), dig a well on the next farm to us, the windlass slipped and my father’s jaw was broken in three places. The doctor wired it together; he ate crackers and milk a lot. He also got five new teeth at the age of 35, as white as snow. The rest were stained with tobacco juice from chewing tobacco.
They ordered furniture from Spiegels catalog, including a stroller baby buggy for Hazel. We had a big kitchen stove, it probably went with the house. Ted chased a porcupine over the stove. The dogs never learned to leave porcupines alone. The quills had to be pulled out of their faces and necks with pliers. I sat on many a dog while my father pulled out the quills and the dogs moaned. They knew it had to be done.
Armistice was signed November 11, 1918. Snowden and Claude Williams lived in a cabin near the Chaney’s on Wolf River. They all got the flue and Claude died. His body, in its coffin, was driven to Crandon to ship by train back to Kentucky. Claude had a blind eye. He was struck by lightening when he was young, so he couldn’t go to war. I thought he was a beautiful young man.
We moved to Jameson’s lumber camp in the winter of 1918-1919 (Located on Old North Rd. on the Peshtigo River). A man called Tommy had smallpox and the camp was quarantined.
We moved to Cliff Day’s place before the breakup (Cliff Day’s farm was located across the road from the current Andy Okrasinki residence). We lived there from the spring of 1919 to the spring of 1920. Jack was born March 13, 1920, shortly after I broke my collar bone playing crack the whip at school. One of the Kegley girls fell on me (our second winter in Wisconsin).
In the spring of 1920, we moved to the white schoolhouse on Wolf River. We had a wonderful summer. We found where the snapping turtles laid their eggs in a giant sawdust pile by the old dam. We bashed in some of their shells, brought them up to the school house and buried them. We thought they were dead, but next morning all the graves were empty. No one ever told us about cruelty to animals. We didn’t know any better.
Old Bill got blood poison in his leg, he stood by the back fence and my mother doctored him. It required a lot of hot water and poultices. They were afraid he might die, but she cured him.
In the summer, August, the blueberries were so thick in the swamp on the corduroy going to Monico, we went in wagons with picnic lunches, and we picked washtubs full. The tubs must have held 30 or 40 gallons. The swamp was blue with berries. The berries were canned for winter.
We moved from the white school house to Doyle’s Camp (The late Hank McMillion residence on the Wolf River). We walked to Siding 2 school from there (June Houle residence today). It was a long ways for little kids.
From there we moved to the black school house near Waite’s log house. They had a fancy barn, all rock bottom, big hay loft and a silo, the only one I ever saw in our part of Forest County. The summer of 1921 was a busy summer. They cleared the garden, built a three room log house, put in the garden, raised 30 bushels of potatoes, built a small barn against the bank of a hill with a flat roof. It had room for Snowden’s team of horses, Old Bill, Florence the cow, and a few chickens, Plymouth rocks and Rhode Island Reds. I can’t remember where the feed came from for the animals that winter of ’21 and ’22.
They grew a field of potatoes on halves with the owner of the farm, Mrs. Waite. We had potato bugs we picked off the vines by hand or dusted with arsenic of lead or Paris Green, a poison that killed bugs. We used the corners of a good gunny sack as a (continued next month)
