Dear Family,

Well, all of you are reading these maunderings, or so you say, so "Dear Family." Your Mother has even offered to edit this stuff - no way, right now it's fun and I'm not going to turn it into work. To Janine and Bruce I'll say that I have sent copies of the previous installments to Paul and Leslie, also that I am enclosing a recent newspaper article which is sort of relevant to the "Where We Lived" bit.

As I have noted, my boyhood home was in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, on the south side of East Washington Street, fourth lot east of Main Street about half-way between the business district and the school grounds, directly across from the Chevrolet agency, and diagonally across from our movie theater. I guess that ruins the image of a barefoot country boy. Besides, we didn't go barefoot much - folks paved their driveways with cinders and those were hard on the feet. We lived there in a square, white-painted, two-story, wooden house of Italinate design. "We" included my widowed maternal grandmother, Mrs. Mary Annah Burnett McFarland, her only child and my mother, Mrs. Annette Arathusa McFarland Foster, known all her life as "Nettie," my dad, Homer Adelbert Foster; my brother, Austin Homer Foster, five years older than I; and me. I have among some old papers a deed transferring the property to Mary A. McFarland in 1896 for the sum of $1900.00 so presumably that was when my grandparents McFarland sold the old McFarland homestead in Bainbridge and moved into town. The lot on which the house sat extended south to the next street, called May Court, which was an L-shaped street that ran east from South Main Street and turned south to dead-end at the flats where we played ball in the summer and skated in the winter. Behind the house was red-painted wood barn just big enough to stable a couple of horses, with a hayloft above, and a buggy shed on the north side where we garaged our car. A driveway, just two wheeltracks with a thin coat of to cinders, ran south from Washington Street along the east side of the house, angled southwest, passed the west side of the barn, and exited onto May Court. It made a handy shortcut, especially for kids from the south end of town heading for school.

The house was originally of Italianate design - carved window frames, carved brackets under the eaves, mansard roof - but someone had added a large covered porch clear across the front and half-way down the east side which spoiled the aesthetic appeal, and provided one of the more enjoyable living areas. In warm weather the porch held a half-dozen rocking chairs of widely varying design, a perfect place to sit in the late afternoon and evening and watch the people going by or entertain visitors. For boys it was a refuge on wet days; we even roller skated on it. Some summers there would be a family of skunks living under the porch. Along about dusk we would sit very still and watch the momma lead four or five miniature copies of herself out across the lawn, tails stiffly erect and all in perfect single file. We didn't bother them and they didn't bother us.

Coming up the front walk, you found yourself on the west end of the porch facing double doors. Strangers thought that those were our front door; they weren't, the front door was at the other end of the porch on the east side of the house opening into our living room. Inside the double doors there was on the right a staircase ascending to the second floor, directly ahead a hallway leading to my parents room. The front room held a piano, a wind-up phonograph in a handsome wooden cabinet, a horsehair sofa, two rocking chairs, a marble-topped table, and two glass-fronted bookcases. Through an archway on the south side was the living room. In the living room was a couch, a table, three easy cigars, and large upright desk. An archway in the west will led to my parents bedroom, and a door in the south wall led into the dining room. Dining room furnishings included an oval dining table that could be opened up with leaves to seat maybe twelve people, half-a-dozen straight chairs, a sideboard, a hanging coatrack on the wall for outdoor jackets, hats, etc. and underneath it a toy chest. The kitchen was to the right and two doors, one at each end of the wall, connected the two rooms. In the south wall, a door opened into the woodshed. Upstairs were three bedrooms and our bathroom. The stairwell bathroom was a late addition and located in what had been the upper stairwell of the back stairs. There was an attic over the kitchen and dining room, and another above the bedroom ceilings accessed through a trap door that you reached with an extension ladder brought up from the barn. The rooms were not large; a ten-by-twelve floor rug covered most of the floor area in each, except for the dining room and bathroom which were floored with linoleum and the kitchen where the wide board flooring was not covered.

The woodshed was maybe twenty feet square extending the full width of the dining room and kitchen. In the east wall was a personnel door and also a double door large enough to admit a wagon full of wood. The eastern half was floored with rough wooden planks, and the western half was open dirt floor except for the cistern with a three-foot wide surround of cut stone. The cistern originally stored rainwater for household use but after city water came along it was relegated to a repository for broken glass and old razor blades and things like that we didn't want laying around. I fell into it once. I wasn't hurt and I didn't fall very far, but I was stuck and more than a little apprehensive. When the rescuers, summoned from the garage across the street peered down at me and I saw the heavy ropes and steel grappling hooks they were holding, I was scared. However, I was extricated without being impaled on the grapples or damaged in any way, and Dad promptly built a sturdier, more tightly fitting cover. In the woodshed we stored some of the garden tools like hoes, baseball bats, baseballs, hockey sticks, and boots. Fishing poles and hunting coats hung on the walls, as did lanterns, crosscut saws, and axes. On the north wall against the house were hung laundry tubs and the sturdy wooden stools they sat on, and our copper wash boiler. Our icebox sat next to the door into the dining room and next to it was our EAZY electric washing machine. I don't know what we would have done without that woodshed. And it was a marvelous place for boys to build things, fix things, tear things apart to see what was inside. We even stored wood in there. About once a year, Dad would arrange for delivery of a load of scrap lumber from the Rose & Giles Lumber Yard. It was dumped in the side yard and we boys got to carry it in and stack it neatly for use as kindling to start fire in the cookstove and the furnace.

The kitchen was rather small. Along the west or outside walk was a sink, and on one side of it was a wide hinged shelf that could be let down out of the way, while on the other side was a drop leaf table. On the opposite wall was a large cast-iron cookstove and on one side of that was a hot water tank with pipes that ran into and out of the cookstove firebox, and on the other side was a two burner oil (kerosene) stove. Floor to ceiling cabinets lined both ends of the kitchen. On washdays, the drop leaf table was moved to the woodshed to make room for the washing machine and the two laundry tubs. The copper wash boiler sat on the cookstove. Like I said, it wasn't very big, but it fed five people three meals a day so it must have been big enough.

There was a cellar under the front room, living room, and parents bedroom reached by a stairway going down from the kitchen. The cellar was divided by stone wall with a sturdy doorway set in it. The south or near part held our furnace, the coal bin, and a workbench. I one time set up a photographic darkroom under the stairs with film developing tanks and an enlarger made from an old camera. The north or far half was our cold cellar where we stored food and flower bulbs and seed potatoes and such. There were tracks and shelves along the walls, and one small window at ground level that was never closed except in the very coldest weather. It did, however have a sturdy steel mesh nailed across it.

The barn was another favorite place. We nailed a steel barrel hoop to the siding and shot baskets, we pitched baseballs against it, we even tried jumping out of the hayloft door with an umbrella for a parachute. We managed to avoid injury but it was kind of hard on the umbrella. Inside there was a large poultry pen for the birds we brought home from shooting matches. I built some rabbit pens one time and went into the rabbit raising business. The only lumber I had was some well-seasoned oak salvaged from an old house and I still recall the blisters I raised trying to cut and nail that stuff. I never had more than six or seven rabbits at a time, but I did a fairly steady business raising them, killing and dressing them, and selling them to folks in town that savored rabbit for dinner. When I tell that story now, people wince and cringe and ask: "How could you kill those cute little bunnies or chickens or ducks or turkeys?" My answer is that we never gave our animals human traits or made pets of them. We believed that the Good Lord put them on earth to sustain us; we used them and thanked Him for His bounty. The barn was also used to store most of the garden equipment, the lawn mover, and whatever else we didn't have room for in the woodshed. From time to time my brother or I would come into possession of a hound dog, usually the "free-to-a-good-home" kind, and would kennel him/her in the box stall in the barn, until we decided that he wasn't going to earn his keep hunting and passed him on to someone else.

On three sides of the barn were our vegetable garden and flower beds, extending almost to the house. Around the house was a lawn, of sorts, about half grass and half weeds, but it served its purpose in covering the bare dirt. We played baseball on it, pitched horseshoes, and once even sunk some flower pots and had us a golf course. When the grass (and weeds) grew high, we pushed the mover over it, and maybe during a really dry spell we would water it down with the hose, but that was all the attention we gave it. Most of the lawns in town were like that.

Another piece of real estate that was part of "home" was the "Little Farm." This was a thirty-acre tract on the west side of Chillicothe Road (State Route 306) about a half-mile north of the old McFarland homestead. It was the last chunk of Daniel McFarland Jr.'s 2000 acres remaining in the McFarland family. Roughly square in shape, the front third was mostly open with a spring-fed pond, a young apple orchard that I think my dad planted, and a meadow where cousin Dick Burnett raised clover for several years. The back two-thirds was wooded and a small creek wandered across near the rear line. Just in the edge of the woods near the north line there was a small cottage built, as I recall, by Dad and Mr. Lee Robens in the 1920s. Mr. Robens was a carpenter and house builder, and one of Dad's hunting cronies. He was, through the McFarlands, my mother's second cousin. His only child was Mary Elizabeth Robens whom my dad married in 1944. The cottage consisted of one room and a loft, and a wide porch. The privy was down at the end of the path. The one room was furnished with two double beds, with cornshuck mattresses, a cot, a table, two or three chairs and small kerosene cookstove. Out in the front was a low fireplace of bricks. Up in the loft were two cots. Cornshuck mattresses were a farmers' "make do with what you have" - a bag of cotton ticking stuffed with dry corn husks, reasonably comfortable but awful noisy. Next door on the north was Lowe's Greenhouse & Nursery owned and operated by a good friend, Mr. Carleton Lowe, and directly across the road from Lowe's was the farm of Uncle Charley Burnett.

We usually stayed in the cottage on the Little Farm for a week in the summer, a sort of vacation, and frequently spent Sunday afternoons there. We tried putting in a garden but really couldn't give it proper attention. Most of our time was devoted to beating back the grass, weeds, and underbrush that constantly encroached on the driveway, the lane, the garden, and orchard. Dad was adept with a scythe, my brother was passably able, but I couldn't get the knack of it. Nevertheless, we picked berries, gathered nuts, and sometime during the summer held a picnic for the Brewster & Church Co. employees. We hunted there in the fall and in the winter we cut wood to be hauled to town and burned in the furnace along with coal. Dad often talked of drilling a water well on the place but that never came to pass. Water had to be hauled in five-gallon milk cans from home or from the neighbors. I think that Mother and Dad dreamed of building a home of their own there, but their dream never materialized. Later on, my brother and I had the same dream but that didn't work out either.

Two inventions came along while I was growing up that significantly affected our lives; one was radio and the other was the airplane. Our first radio was an Atwater-Kent. It sat on a table in the living room and was powered by an automobile battery in the basement. An aerial (antenna) stretched from the peak of the barn roof to the top of the house chimney and a lead-in wire descended through the attic and the living room ceiling to connect with the set. It didn't have a speaker, you listened with a pair of earphones and listening was strictly rationed. When you listened, you gave it your full and undivided attention. Late in the evening, Dad would turn the radio on and sit patiently twisting the dials seeking to hear stations from as far away as Pittsburgh or even St. Louis or Chicago. Each one was carefully identified and the call letters and frequency logged on a printed form. These logs were a popular conversation subject and bragging rights went to the one who had picked up the most remote station. Later, we had radio with a speaker and and we could all sit around it and listen. Grandma McFarland remained totally awestruck at the whole idea. When the coronation of England's King George VI was broadcast live, in 1936 I think it was, she sat mesmerized to think that she could sit in her own house and hear the king of England. Meantime I had poured through copies of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics at our branch of the county library to see what I could do about a radio of my own, and ultimately came up with the plans and parts for a crystal set, with the generous help of Mr. George Riddell. Mr. Riddell was another of Dad's shooting and hunting companions, and the owner of the first radio shop in Chagrin Falls. He was a genial man who never lost patience with boys and their questions. A crystal set is simple; just a piece of galena crystal in a holder, a wire cat whisker to tickle the crystal, a coil of wire wound around a cardboard tube, a condenser, and a pair of earphones. Of course you needed an aerial and I ran mine around the walls of my room. Then I could listen to the local stations whenever I wanted, and it didn't use any electricity. Radio brought a new dimension in entertainment, not unlike the way television affected your lives. Our musical horizons expanded beyond our phonograph records and piano scores, with bands like Paul Whiteman. We listened to live broadcasts of sporting events like the Cleveland Indians games. Shows such as Amos and Andy were a whole new form of entertainment. Having only sound in no way reduced the enjoyment. Even in my college days we would gather around and all listen to Inner Sanctum or Fibber McGee and Molly.

Aviation mushroomed after the impetus of World War I. The first airplanes we saw were those of the barnstormers. They were gypsy pilots with a two-place, fabric-covered biplane, maybe a surplus Curtis Jenny who landed unannounced in some farmer's meadow, offered the owner a free ride for the use of his land and sold five minute hops - "See your home from the air, only five dollars." When an aircraft was heard flying over, we all rushed outside to see it. When Charles Lindbergh returned from his historic flight to Paris he made a series of flights over most of the country, and when he flew over Chagrin Falls and even circled, everyone was out waving whatever they could find to wave. We had an airport from 1932 on, actually part of Mr. Albert Warren's meadow at the intersection of Chillocothe Road and Bell Road. There was a small hanger and several men in our town learned to fly and acquired airplanes. One was our dentist Mr. Donald Stem, another was Mr. Francis Rowe, partner in Rowe & Giles Lumber Co. Mr. Rowe's older son, George, was in my class all the way through school and a particularly close friend. He flew B-24s in World War II and came missing in action over Germany. He was never found.

The early 1930s also brought those wonderful National Air Races to the Cleveland airport. They were held on the western part of the field about where NASA Lewis Research Center is now, where they wouldn't interfere with the commercial air traffic such as it was. We made the long drive from home, parked in a dusty field, sat on wooden bleachers and we saw them all: Jimmy Doolittle in his red and white Gee Bee racer (just a big engine on a stick). Eddie Rickenbacker, our top ace in World War I, Ernst Udet, German ace second only to von Richtofen in number of victories; Charles Lindbergh; Amelia Earhart; Wiley Post; blind in one eye, who soloed around the world in record time; Roscoe Turner who arrived with his pet lion riding in the second cockpit (he left the lion on the ground when he raced and usually won). Military place were present in force, and there were parachutists, stunt fliers, wing walkers - everyone in aviation. About fifteen miles south in Akron was the huge Goodyear hanger where they built dirigibles, and we drove down there to see the Shenandoah, the Macon, and the Los Angeles (all were later destroyed). Back home, I read and studied about airplanes, and reveled in World War I flying movies like "Wings" and "Dawn Patrol." I built scale models - with real working controls. They were flying models with rubber band motors, but I didn't fly them much. Hung them from the ceiling of my bedroom instead, where they had many an imaginery dogfight. Early on I knew there was only one thing I wanted to do, indeed was going to do, fly airplanes. But how was I going to qualify?

I searched out all the ways I could find and decided my best chance was in the Army Air Corps, forerunner to the Air Force, but the Army Air Corps required at least two years of college and there wasn't any money for that. My school grades were pretty good, when I felt like studying, and my teachers suggested that I might take the state scholarship test. I did, and in the results stood fourth highest in the state in English. That brought the offer of a full scholarship to Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, and I figured my future was set. There came a rude shock, however, when Dad suddenly, unexpectedly, and uncharacteristically, sternly objected to the whole idea. I never knew him, before or after, to show such intense feeling about anything. Nor did he, then or later, share with me the reasons for his feelings. He offered to buy me the finest target rifle available and all the accessories if I would give up the thought of flying. Then he offered to send me instead to Case School of Applied Science, located in Cleveland and at that time one of the prestigious engineering schools. Said he would borrow the money and I wouldn't need to pay it back. To temporize, I reluctantly submitted an application to Case (secretly hoping they would turn it down) and with Dad at my elbow arranged to work ten hours a week for part of the tuition. Then came a letter from Miami University withdrawing their offer of a scholarship, said my high school principal had informed them that I was going to Case. The principal admitted that he had done that, but his reasons when I asked him, were vague and evasive. So I went to Case.

During my junior year, the federal government came up with a fully subsidized pilot training program at a local flying school for selected students. A number of my classmates including several fraternity brothers enrolled, and I tried to, but written parental permission was required and that I could not obtain. The spring of 1941, when I graduated, was a hectic time with the country gearing for war and young engineers had multiple opportunities. I opted for a commission in the Navy with the designator "Aviation Specialist." At least it was a foot in the door, and that's as far inside the door as I got. Oh I applied several times for flight training, and every time ran into some "Catch 22." The fact was that it was much easier for the Navy to obtain pilots than to obtain engineers. I thought of taking one more shot at it after the war but the country was full of experienced pilots digging and scratching for a living. So, I never got to fly and stayed an engineer. Regrets? Not really. If I had gone to piloting, I might never have known all you people and that would have been sad indeed.

Again, I've wandered on and led you down paths that I didn't plan to take, if indeed you have stayed the course (and I won't blame you if you didn't). I meant to tell about when Grandad Foster stayed with us for awhile, and when everybody moved out except Mother and I, and how we had all these kinfolk living close by and dropping in every day, but they will have to be part of another story.

Love,

Pater

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