Page 12

Random Thoughts
As previously mentioned 1948 was a year of big changes. Ma is no longer working and Pa is home from the Veterans Rehab Hospital. That means Ma has more time to worry about where I am and what I am doing. After so many years of freedom I find it very annoying to have full time parents hanging around. There is a feeling of big changes in the air. The new cars are starting to roll of the assembly lines and the neighborhood is full of shiny new cars. The baby boom is off to a roaring start. Women can be seen everywhere pushing baby buggies. The flood of weddings after the GI’s came home is paying off. My uncle Sonny bought a console TV. I remember the first time I saw it in operation. Wow! What a revelation. Everyone wore suits and ties and lived in big houses with beautiful furniture. Watching TV for the first time is when I started realizing I was poor. Uncle Sonny paid $850 for a B&W TV in 1948. That would be just about $10,000 in today’s money. Pa bought a used 1947 Hudson late that summer. I can still see it parked across the street. At the time I knew Pa was blind and Ma couldn’t drive so it never occurred to me to wonder what they were going to do with the car. All that summer there was a feeling of something going on but I didn’t have a clue as to what it was. I found out in October of 1948. One day a swarm of relatives with cars and 2 wheel trailers showed up. What little furniture and possessions we had were packed up and the caravan set out. I had no idea where we were going or why. All I was told is we were moving to the country. The country was a 77 acre farm in central Wisconsin about 10 miles outside of Westfield Wisconsin. It’s only a little over 3 ½ hours from Chicago to Westfield so the caravan  people unloaded everything and headed back to Chicago late that afternoon. I remember vividly my first evening on the farm. I asked where the bathroom was and I was directed to a little wooden shed out in the back yard. The farm we moved to was much closer to 1890 than it was to 1948. It had a 3 hole outhouse, water came from a hand pump outside and was brought into the house in a bucket. The kitchen had a gigantic cast iron combination stove with an oven and a reservoir to put water in. If you wanted hot water you had to build a fire and use a teakettle or dip out some warm water from the reservoir. My bed was set up in an unfinished attic upstairs. The house had a tin roof and I could see the metal between the boards as there was no insulation or sheet rock on the ceiling. Later on I found out it was wonderful when it rained. To this day I would love to go to sleep under a tin roof during a rain. I turned 9 that October and being a city boy I had no idea what living in the wilderness was like so I am sure my imagination fired up. I remember that very first night when it got dark. We had no electric so ma fired up a kerosene lamp. I told pa I had to go to the bathroom to pee so he told me to go outside and go around the corner of the house and pee on the ground. As I went out the front door there was a gentle breeze blowing.. About 50 feet straight out there was a gasoline barrel on a wooden stand. Behind the stand was a bush. My mind went into overdrive and I was sure that bush moving in the dark was a bear. I turned around and ran back in the house terrified. Ma got a flashlight out and she showed me it was just a bush moving in the breeze. Living miles back in the woods in an 1890 farmhouse was a whole new experience. There was a window with a screen in it upstairs and deep in the woods all manner of strange sounds wafted in. I heard my first Whippoorwill that night. I still love the sound of a whippoorwill at night. I asked Pa about it the next day and he told me that was how the male and female whippoorwills found each other. First one would call then the other would answer. He told me to listen carefully and I could hear then getting closer and closer together until they went silent when they found each other. I have no idea if that is true but it sounds great and sure enough I could detect them getting closer and closer together until they went silent. Not all the time but quite often. Sometime just one would call out all evening with no reply. I always found that sad. So much for day one of my new life. The coming days and weeks were full of activity.